Torchlight Released! A Nice RPG Snack?

Torchlight Background
The team is made up of industry veterans including Max and Erich Schaefer, two of the co-founders of Blizzard North, developers of Diablo and Diablo II, Travis Baldree, the project director for Mythos and creator of FATE, and many other talented individuals.

source: Curse Article
http://www.curse.com/articles/torchlight/596692.aspx

Official Torchlight Site
http://torchlight.perfectworld.com

Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) Launched The I WILL Website

Go to the I WILL website!!

It’s a bit like Twitter.

Beetje YAML …

It’s the technical version of the Dutch expression “Beetje jammer …” !

Lets say we had some issues with the PHP Doctrine ORM framework which led to this expression.

The “Friday Afternoon” Post of this Week

GOD-OBJECT : Blog about Zend and PHP Development

There’s already a fantastic article about running Selenium tests in Zend Studio and on the MAC.
Which could be deployed in a testing framework like PHP Under Control.
http://www.god-object.com/2009/10/16/user-interface-testing-on-mac-os-10-6-snow-leopard/

and I expect there will me more great articles which will follow! Check it out!

GOD-OBJECT

NICE! Themes in Google Chrome

First time I actually spotted the browser themes in Google Chromes, nicely done!

HTC Hero with Android

My collegue bought a HTC Hero, I’m so jealous ;-D

Doctrine_Connection_Exception : PDO Connection Error: SQLSTATE[] (solved!)

Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Doctrine_Connection_Exception’ with message ‘PDO Connection Error: SQLSTATE[]: pdo_oci_handle_factory: OCI_INVALID_HANDLE (/patched-php-src-5.2.10/php-5.2.10/ext/pdo_oci/oci_driver.c:579)’

It’s driving me mad, unable to solve this one, read several assumed “fixes” to this problem but without success.

It’s open for discussion, if you might know a working solution to this issue, please comment!!!

Note: the problem is not a 100% fail but a random occurence, unable to spot the “random” cause, maybe memory leak? connection pool fail?

—

It is however is risky to use Doctrine for Oracle because the Oracle PHP PDO implementation is experimental and Doctrine seems to require PDO (it however does not!!):

Oracle Functions (PDO_OCI)
http://php.morva.net/manual/en/ref.pdo-oci.php

Thus I would highly advise to NOT use Doctrine with Oracle PDO in professional environments (which requires the PHP PDO extension to be enabled and the driver name to be “oci”).

Note: the Zend_DB (non-PDO) implemetation has no issues, which seems weird, they both use the same internals and environment settings.

Remark: I like Doctrine, it’s extremely handy to create a database independent schema and good for the stable PDO implementations (like MySQL) and is more mature and feature rich than Zend_DB at the moment (my collegue snapped at me that I somehow disapproved Doctrine in general ^_^, which is not the case).

Further reseach showed:

About the Doctrine and PHP PDO:

In Doctrine_Connection on line 472 (Connection.php) there seems to be a strong preference to using the PDO drivers if available:

[line 472]
if (extension_loaded(’pdo’)) {
if (in_array($e[0], self::getAvailableDrivers())) {
…

Which also means if the PDO extension is NOT loaded it falls back to it’s “normal” Oracle adapter, which is not experimental, see line 486 of the same file:

[line 486]
if ( ! $found) {
$class = ‘Doctrine_Adapter_’ . ucwords($e[0]);
…

This said, because the PDO for Oracle is experimental, disabling this PDO extension on the server will result into the use of the stable oci library. There is another option!!

Option 2:

Use “oracle” as a driver name instead of “oci”, they seems to point to the same Doctrine adapter in the Doctrine_Manager class (Manager.php):

[line 263]
‘oci’      => ‘Doctrine_Connection_Oracle’,
‘oci8′     => ‘Doctrine_Connection_Oracle’,
‘oracle’   => ‘Doctrine_Connection_Oracle’,

but only the ‘oci’ one is recognized as being a PDO adapter!!

see also: http://trac.doctrine-project.org/ticket/631

Setting the Character Set to UTF8 in Zend_DB for Oracle.

—– code snippet —–

$options = array(

‘host’ => ‘host.org’ ,
‘username’ => ‘uname’ ,
‘password’ => ‘upass’ ,
‘dbname’ => ‘name/SID’ , // (servicename requires NLS lookup entry!)
‘charset’ => ‘AL32UTF8′

);

$db = Zend_Db::factory(’Oracle’, $options);

see also:

Thread: ORACLE UTF Chacter with PHP
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1930036

and

—– code snippet from ZendServer\share\ZendFramework\library\Zend\Db\Oracle.php —–
…
$connectionFuncName = ($this->_config['persistent'] == true) ? ‘oci_pconnect’ : ‘oci_connect’;

$this->_connection = @$connectionFuncName(
$this->_config['username'],
$this->_config['password'],
$this->_config['dbname'],
$this->_config['charset']);

// check the connection
…