PHP5 Abstraction for the Rest of US

Millions of web developers, from those just starting out with sparkling ampersands in their eyes to hardened veterans with ‘< ?php’ burned to the back of their retinas, have found a love for PHP and its possibilities but still talk in hushed whispers about the mystery and intrigue of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in PHP.

This tutorial aims to remove some of the curly-brace-filled haze that often surrounds OOP and by the end of this lesson you will have created a class, instantiated an object, given inheritance to some children and come to understand why OOP is such a powerful tool to have at your disposal. If you have no idea what any of the above means but are shaking with a desire to find out, read on as we look at Abstraction for the rest of us.

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Just a quick entry here to advise an improvement made to my Blog Promotion Tool.

I realised, as I was placing examples of the dynamic images all over the place, that server load may increase with all this image manipulation work being carried out by PHP. The image_factory now caches all files it creates and simply loads the cached image if all parameters and content are the same. When the content for the feed that you get your dynamic comes from changes, all cached images will be deleted so that you aren’t clogging up storage space.

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As I was laying the foundations for my JavaScript Cat I found myself in a little quandary, (excuse the oximoron as quandaries are not usually little) and a quandary is not a very nice place to be. I realised that I was creating this cat for the amusement of myself and others but without a way of getting the word out there, no one will know when I’ve added further developments to my scripted feline.

I decided to play around with something I haven’t used as often as I would like and use PHP, the GD Module and XML/RSS to create a dynamic billboard that I could deploy quickly and easily. Of course it would have to be a one-time only deployment because I am notoriously lazy; the rest should be done for me.
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