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PHP author(s) doesn't understand functional programming

PHP try to emulate functional programming by providing the functions like array_reduce. But what they lack is the knowledge of principals of functional programming.

I had a problem where there are multiple arrays and need to be merged. array_merge function works only on 2 arrays. Merging multiple arrays need a for loop OR use array_reduce function [I thought]. But it turns out that array_reduce function is not functional as I imagined. Even though the documentation say that the last parameter to this function is the initial value for the array fold function, actually it is not.

If the initial parameter is not an integer, PHP will default to zero. For the above problem I tried the following

array_reduce($my_arrays, "array_merge", array());

What I expected it is to work as

$initial = array();
foreach ( $my_arrays as $m ) { $initial = array_merge($initial, $m); }

What I got was
PHP Warning: array_merge(): Argument #1 is not an array in Command line code on line 1
PHP Warning: array_merge(): Argument #1 is not an array in Command line code on line 1

These kind of behavior will lead to serious problem in the system and is hard to debug.

State of the Interview process

I have attended several interviews and also have interviewed several people. I have seen the difference between the people I interviewed with and the way I do interview.

In the interviews I have given for several job positions at companies I don't want to mention here, most of the time I felt that the person who is interviewing me is not at all achieving his goal of the interview. What that person is trying to do is to prove to me that he/she is smarter than me in all respect.

For me interview is a combination of 2 words "inter" and "view". That means exchanging views among people involved in the process. Thus what I expect is to have a debate on the subject in question. But mostly what happens is not a debate.

In one interview, I was given a problem to solve. Instead of listening to my solution and to have a debate on my solution, the Interviewer was playing some game on this iPhone. I was explaning the solution to him and that person was not even listening to me. Instead he was trying to be an smart ass, saying your solution is wrong. My question is how can a solution be wrong if it can solve the problem. The solution may be not efficient enough. Nevertheless solution is never wrong. Other person may have different solution in mind (which may or may not be the efficient one), but still the purpose of the interview is not achieved.

What I like to do when I am conducting an interview is not to prove that I am smarter than the interviewee (which I am :-)). What I am trying to gauge is the knowledge and the potential of the person opposite to me. I am a believer a person willing to learn and push his/her limit can do wonders. No one is born smart. Smartness is achieved by hard work and will to gain more knowledge. I always try to find a person who can fit into my immediate job description and is smart/hard working enough to achieve more in the near future.

At least in the technology field, what I find is that interview is a lost cause. Most people are I interviewed with are trying to prove that they are smarter than me or they are the smartest people in the world. They are not even try to find if I can fit into the current job and can do more in the future.

Another thing I try to achieve in the interview is the personality of the person I am interviewing. No matter how smart one is unless that person has the right attitude and the personality, he/she cannot fit into the team. It takes only one bad apple to disintegrate the whole basket of good apples. It is all about team work.

Without a good team dynamics, it is not possible to achieve the long term goals. I takes ne person with wrong attitude in the a big team to lead the project to failure. What happens is that this person will demotivate others in the team. It is the responsibility of the manager solve this problem and also the responsibility of the team members to raise the issue. Again it is the responsibility of the manager to see the signs and take actions at the early stage.

Having the social skills is equally important as the knowledge of the current field he/she is working in. Social skills refers to personality, how comfortable one can make others, how good of a team player one can be etc. etc.

Content vs Ads

Looking at several websites known to provide content, I am wondering what is important for these websites.. Content or Ads.

There was a time when I used to get ads within the content, but now a days I am searching for content within ads. Page is full of ads and somewhere hidden is a small pre-text of content. I have to click on several ads (or real links) to figure out what is the actual content. Most of the time I end up clicking on ads which look like content (thanks to Google adsense ads buried in the content). Google makes it easy for publishers to format the ads so that it looks like the content. "ads by Google" is like a fine-print in the terms of service notice. It is barely visible.

Apart from them, even big names like CNN is also doing it but in a different way. They are displaying big banner ads at the top of the page which pushes the content below the first fold of the page. They make sure that you view the ads. Whether or not you click on the ads is not important, they are banner ads mostly used for brand awareness anyways.

Look at this page from CNN. Big BMW ad at the top of the page covering approximately 80% of the page.

Only title of the article is viewable on the first fold of the content. Hello... I know the title of the article from the website (in this case Yahoo! Finance). I am here to read the content of the article. You are already making money by the content distribution. Please stop throwing the ads at my face...

Spelling checker in Craigslist

In-spite of being a market leader in listing business, I don't think craigslist understand anything about search. People do mistake while typing search term. So now a days it is absolutely necessary to have a spelling checker and correction service along with the search. It is missing in Craigslist. I found out today when I was searching for car. I typed "toyta car". Instead of giving no results and suggesting corrected spelling, it is threw just a no result page at my face.

Now a days it is not hard to build spelling correction in the system. It is not required to build you own spelling correction system. There are lot of APIs available. BOSS API is one of the prominent one which does provide spelling correction API.

http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/spelling/v1/toyta+car?appid=

HTML Message Ajax Design Pattern

Having more and more browsers supporting XMLHTTPRequest object to send the data to server and get the response from server without reloading the page, it is possible to refresh only a part of the page. There are various techniques to do this. One such technique is that the server send the XML back to the browser and the Javascript on the browser will convert the XML into HTML by creating the DOM nodes on the fly. This is useful but has some limitations.

* If the Javascript is turned off, there is no graceful degradation of application
* Since the Javascript is running on the browser (client side), changing the structure of the generated HTML is hard
* This is not feasible when HTML generated is complex

One can overcome these limitations by sending the HTML snippet in the response. Instead of sending the XML back to browser, generate the HTML on the server side itself. On the browser side, replace the content of the DOM node with the response HTML response from the server.

If the Javascript is turned off on the browser, user will see at least the content of the HTML on the browser instead of just the XML content. So there is a graceful degradation of service on the client side

If HTML generated need to be changed, application is not dependent on changing the Javascript and hoping that the client will reload the page and will get new Javascript. Even if the Javascript is changed, some web proxies may not pull the new Javascript, resulting in the browsers (clients) behind the proxies will continue to get the old Javascript and old HTML will get rendered.

There are various frameworks like Symfony, Django make it possible to generate the complex HTML possible with least effort. In case the request is not made via XMLHTTPRequest, it is possible to send the whole page (with header, footer etc.) in the response. If the request is made via XMLHTTPRequest object, send the response without the layout decoration (just the HTML snippet). Javascript running on client side will replace the content of the DOM node as required.

Take for example, there is an application where the page loaded has many graphics and only a part of the page changes when user take some action like filling a form for sending the email. It is absolutely unnecessary to generate the whole page again just for a simple action of sending an email. I will make an attempt to explain with the example of sending the feedback via a form embedded in the page. I will try to explain this with PHP Symfony framework and Javascript (AJAX).

The URL for the page is /new-page. This page has a feedback form in it. The action of this form is handled by /feedback. Server side code for /feedback expect a form having a text content, sends an email to the product manager and send same page as new-page but replacing the form with thank you note.

Below is a code for the new-page action.


Code for new-page response.


Now is the magic of jQuery Javascript library to submit the content to /feedback url and use the response content to replace the HTML form.



Server side code for handling the post from the browser to /feedback



HTML response from /feedback


In Symfony framework it is possible disable/enable the layout during run-time via setLayout() method of sfAction instance. Setting the parameter to false will disable the layout and send only the content of the action template back to the caller.

There you go.. A simple way to improve the usability of the site even without Javascript support.

Execute action within another action

In the current project I am working on (using Symfony framework), I came across a situation where I had to call one action within another action and capture the content of 2nd action. This content is included within the result from 1st action. After doing some research found that it it possible to do so by calling getPresentationFor method of the controller object.

Within the action's execute method,

$content = $this->getController()->getPresentationFor($module, 'my2ndAction');
$this->content = $content;