Opinions and Statistics
Keynote Speakers for ZendCon 2006 Announced
Zend has announced the keynote speakers for their upcoming conference. The Zend/PHP Conference and Expo is scheduled to take place from October 30th to November 2nd in San Jose, California. The topic to be covered at the conference is 'Creating Modern Web Applications with PHP'. Chris Anderson, author of 'The Long Tail' and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, will keynote the second annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo October 30-November 2, 2006. He will discuss how the theories in his book apply to software development and to the growth of PHP in particular.
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PHP Statistics for August 2006
Nexen.net has published the August statistics for PHP. Damien Seguy summed it up best when he said:
- PHP 5 breaks the 10% barrier, with a record adoption this month PHP
- 4.4 is about to outrank PHP 4.3
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CouchDb: Document Oriented Persistence
Harry Fuecks wrote that Damien Katz’s CouchDb project is at the point of a working prototype; the server is implemented in Erlang and a demonstration client application (a simple forum) in PHP. According to Harry, starting the CouchDb server on Windows is simple. You need to follow the README. PHP-wise, you need the new 'http extension', which is easily done on Win32 by using the most recent PHP 5 release (5.1.6) and the corresponding collection of PECL modules. Alternatively the most recent XAMPP packs the extension.
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PHP Webthumb API Wrapper
"If you want an easy way to generate web page thumbnails right from your PHP applications now you have one", Joshua Eichorn wrote. Over the weekend Hansin wrote a PHP Webthumb API wrapper and released it under open source. Webthumb seems to be handling the load well, its already generated 2600+ thumbnails, said Joshua.
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Cache PHP Scripts with APC Module
You can extract the maximum performance from your web server by using using PHP's APC module, which caches
php opcode instead of forcing PHP to reinterpret every script every time it is executed, said Vincent Danen Vincent provided an example with code and explains that the important options to note, besides enabling APC, are the apc.ttl and apc.user_ttl options, which define the time for a script to remain in the cache, in seconds. This is really important for a server that serves a lot of files, since it prevents the cache from filling up with stale entries that could prevent newer entries from being cached. You could also tweak the pc.num_files_hint, which gives APC an approximation of the number of distinct PHP source files that will be requested or included on your system. The default here is 1000, but if you serve many more files than that, increase the number to a best-guess estimate. Likewise, if you have a lot less files than that, reduce the number accordingly, Vincent wrote.[READ ON]
Jacob Santos’ PHP 7 Wish List
Jacob Santos has compiled a list of features he would like to see in PHP 7. Most of the items on Jacob’s list are for developmental consistency between projects. For instance, he feels it would be neater, using the SPL Hookable object, as it would allow learning a hookable API and 'plugging' in multiple objects of similar functionality.
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PHP Ranks Fifth in Popularity Contest in September
PHP stands at fifth place in the September 2006 edition of the TIOBE Programming Community index. Its position remains the same as last month, while Java continues to hold the top spot. Java held the top position in September 2005 as well, recording a decrease of 0.91%. PHP continues in the fifth position with a rating of 9.128%. C, on the other hand, has recorded a –0.41% decrease in usage. The last entrant in the list is Pascal with a percentage of 0.516. Pascal has moved up two notches from the twentieth position to the eighteenth in a year’s time.
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Announcements
ANN: August Issue (08.2006) of International PHP Magazine Released
The August issue of the International PHP Magazine is now available on virtual newsstands. The Web is now evolving at a rapid pace. So far, most of the advances in web development have been restricted to improving the robustness and establishing easier communication between the back-end systems. The front end of applications hadn't seen much progress so far. The situation is now changing with creative technologies such as Ajax that are enabling easier communication with the server without reloading the page. In the Cover Story, Jaisen Mathai looks at several of these creative solutions, such as JSON and Ajax, putting them together with PHP to build a flexible and accessible API that is easily implemented.This month, Mitch Pirtle tested the completeness and accuracy of the book, ‘MySQL in a Nutshell’, from the O'Reilly stable. Read his verdict in the Book Review corner. Time management and managing multiple projects with different priorities is always a challenging task. In this installment of the Freelancer’s Corner, Elizabeth Naramore helps you sort everything out and shows you how to get everything done that needs to be done.
While no framework can entirely solve software development problems, it can help you cut down the time spent on solving problems repetitively, and more time producing valuable software. David Berube says that CakePHP can make some web development tasks much easier. In the Beginners track, he details the making of a 'to-do-list' application to demonstrate how CakePHP makes PHP web application development much more enjoyable, productive, and elegant.
In the previous issue, Nathan Good introduced the RSS 2.0 specification, and demonstrated how to put together a set of classes that build RSS feeds. In this issue, he refactors some of those classes using features in PHP 5 that allow extending the base classes. He also details how to use PEAR's VersionControl_SVN module to get the log from a Subversion repository and expose the entries with the improved RSS classes as an RSS feed. Read the article in the Development track.
In the Databases track, Morgan Tocker provides five tips for MySQL optimisation, with advice from choosing your storage engine to choosing the correct types for your data.
Read the Detailed Table of Contents
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Program for International PHP Conference 2006 Available
The program for the annual International PHP Conference, scheduled to take place in Frankfurt, Germany from November 5 to 8, is now available. The conference is divided into 'Power Workshop Days', 'Management Day' and two main conference days replete with technical sessions that will equip you with information on technology that you will need for your daily work.
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IPM Poll Question: Which is Truest?
The International PHP Magazine is running a new poll this week. Cast your votes regarding the truest option regarding PHP. The options provided are:
- PHP is built from the ground up with database functionality built in
- PHP code gets embedded into HTML pages
- PHP is secure
- PHP is easy to learn
- PHP takes less 'overhead' than other languages
- PHP code tends to be more consistent and modular than other languages
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Tutorials
Article: Creating a Login Script for a PHP Invoicing System
In the first part of a series on 'Building an Invoicing System', Leidago walked you through invoice management. If you are a freelance web developer, invoicing your clients for your paycheck at the end of each month,this application will help you manage your client details as well as your invoices, Leidago wrote.
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Build Your RSS Client with PHP
Over at Builder.au is a new article that read, like any good programming language, PHP supports reading and creating RSS feeds, via the PEAR XML_RSS package. The package is a pre-built code library that allows you to dynamically retrieve and parse one or more RSS feeds. It's particularly useful if you need to extract information from an RSS feed and convert it into another format (for example, a MySQL database or a text file), or if you plan to create a customized web page that aggregates information from multiple RSS sources.
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Article: PHP 5 Class Basics, Part 1
In the first part of a new article series on PHP 5 classes and objects, Dennis Pallett introduced you to the basic concepts of using classes, the constructor and destructor methods and class inheritance. According to Dennis, with version 5 of PHP, objects have started to play a larger role, although PHP4 had adequate support for objects.
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New Releases
osCommerce 3.0 to Deliver New Features
For the first time, an alpha version of osCommerce 3.0, an e-commerce application written in PHP, was released to the public for testing wrote Bryan in a new post. While this third alpha was made available to the general public, the first two alpha releases were made only available to osCommerce's community sponsors, he explained.
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PHP 5.2.0 RC3 Released
Ilia Alshanetsky writes about the availability of the third release candidate of PHP 5.2.0.The number of changes are fairly small, which is always good when nearing the final release, but there were two important fixes that needed attention, Ilia wrote. According to Ilia, one is the fix for a memory corruption in the new memory manager, something that could have caused random, hard to reproduce crashes. The second is a fix in the session extension's shutdown order, which caused problems when native objects created by other PHP extensions were stored inside.
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PEAR Releases of the Week
The PEAR project saw many stable releases this week, including a class for multilingual applications management, a package that decodes and encodes data in Bittorrent format, a PostGreSQL MDB2 driver, a library to create MP3 playlists on the fly, several formats supported including XML, RSS and XHTML, a client for the del.icio.us web service and such.
Here is a complete list:
Translation2 2.0.0beta11File_Bittorrent 1.0.2MDB2_Driver_pgsql 1.2.2MDB2_Driver_oci8 1.0.2MDB2_Driver_mysqli 1.2.2MDB2_Driver_mysql 1.2.2MDB2 2.2.2MP3_Playlist 0.5.1alpha1Services_Delicious 0.5.0PHP_CompatInfo 1.3.1
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PECL Releases of the Week
The PECL releases of the week include an alternative PHP Cache, an extension for IBM DB2 Universal Database, IBM Cloudscape, and Apache Derbyand, and an extension for safely dealing with input parameters. The releases of the week are:
Other Headlines
- Article: Working with MySQL Result Sets and the Decorator Pattern in PHP
- PHP Extension for Cairo Graphics Library
- XJConf for PHP
- PHP Deployment Model