The slides from my presentation at PHP-GTA about the Hidden Features of PHP is now available online and can be downloaded here: http://ilia.ws/files/php-toronto_hidden_features.pdf. Hopefully everyone in attendance learned something new about PHP and many thanks to all the people who had asked questions helped make the discussion that much more interesting.

For our database connections we PDO at work and we've extended the class with PHP to offer some other convenience functionality and wrappers. One of the things I wanted to do recently is allow the constructor of the PDO class to fail-over to our backup database connection pool in the event the primary was not available. The idea was to do something along the lines of: [php] class DB extends PDO { public function __construct($dsn, $login, $pass, $backup_dsn) { try { parent::construct($dsn, $login, $pass); } catch (Exception $e) { parent::construct($backup_dsn, $login, $pass); } } } [/php] Essentially the code would call the PDO's own constructor, if it would fail, an exception would be raised, which would then be caught by the exception handler that will attempt to connect to the backup database connection pool. Unfortunately this simple solution does not work, the reason being, is that when PDO's constructor fails to connect, it destroys the object. Which means any attempts to use or access the objec...