Utilities and Useful Classes
Joomla! includes a number of useful utilities and classes that are used to perform
specific tasks. In this chapter, we will discuss the use of the most commonly used
utilities and classes.
Joomla! extensions that require date and time handling can use the JDate class to
handle date and time parsing, formatting, and time zones. In this chapter, we discuss
how to use JDate to handle all of these aspects of date and time values.
Many extensions use the file system to store important data. In addition to the PHP
file-system handling functions, we can use the joomla.filesystem library. This
library has a number of advantages over the PHP functions, including the use of
FTP, where appropriate, to overcome file-system permission problems.
We use arrays constantly in PHP, and Joomla! is no exception. The static
JArrayHelper class includes a number of very useful methods that we can use to
process arrays.
PHP only provides us with a few data structures. Joomla! adds the tree data
structure to this list.
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