Karma's Nucleus DevBlog

NAJAX is a PHP Ajax framework. Not only does it look easy to use, it also appears to have well-written and well-documented code.

One of the examples is a PHP Exam. I managed to score only 7 out of 12. A list of my errors in in the extended section of this article.

After discovering about the debug_backtrace function (PHP >= 4.3.0); I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to attach a customized error handler to Nucleus when running in debug mode. This handler could output a stacktrace, which would be much more helpful than a message a la "Tried to call a method on a non-object at code.php line x" when this line of code is buried deep into the code.

Unfortunately -- as I discovered the hard way -- the error handler function that is passed to set_error_handler is never called for fatal errors. This behavior is listed in the manual, but I only bothered to read it carefully once things didn't quite work as expected. The reason why these fatal errors cannot be trapped is that the engine might not be in a stable state. Bummer. An extra class of errors (fatal unless trapped) would certainly be welcome.

In this article, I'm re-creating the example from the Friendly Forms post using HTML_QuickForm (a PEAR package) and the Smarty template engine. I'm also looking into how to easily distribute PEAR with your application.