PHP Developers, Keep me Sane

Posted on August 30th, 2008 by Greg Allard in Uncategorized |

There has been one thing that has driven me crazy since the begining days of my php programming. I understand that using @ to suppress errors can be useful. But what I don’t understand is why php would ever want to suppress a fatal error. Normally if @function() causes a fatal error, the error will still be displayed. However, if you do @include(’file’) and there is a fatal error in that file, you get a blank page.

So if you develop in php, please try to never suppress errors from an included file. There are other ways of catching warnings and displaying your own messages, but I need those fatal errors to help me to continue developing with your software.

I use webfaction to host a lot of my django projects. It has an easy setup that will get you developing quickly and a great community of talented programmers. There is also a quick setup for rails, wordpress, and a lot more.

Keep Friends Posted While on the Road Going on an amazing road trip used to mean that you couldn’t update your stay-at-home friends about the stupid things...

Tim Rosenblatt

"But Greg, that's not what I learned from XtremePHPCodingIn24Hours.com"

Baz L

Yeah, PHP is funny that way.

I open use it to suppress errors from file manipulations (delete, etc). Whatever happened to the good old days of coding when stuff returned 0 on success? Exceptions have their purpose, but I think sometimes that PHP's gone exception crazy.

Greg Allard

I've been using python a lot recently and I like they way they work with their errors. Instead of suppressing it, you are catching it and then you have a chance to do some logic in that case. I guess php implemented a way of doing it that way also, but no one uses it.

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About the Author

For the last six years, Greg Allard has been a web developer for UCF. Over the years, Greg has developed many applications with PHP/MySQL, but just recently, he fell in love with Python and Django. On nights and weekends he works on his startup, IvyLees, a social media newsroom builder.

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