Opinions and Statistics

SQL2RSS Script Converts Databases to RSS Feeds

NotePage has released SQL2RSS, a new PHP script that allows users to convert MySQL databases to RSS feeds. RSS is a format for syndicating information on the Internet. This new SQL2RSS script allows users to convert information that is stored in a database into an RSS feed, for syndication and distribution. According to the NotePage team, when using SQL2RSS the publisher has complete control over the content in the resulting RSS feed. Administrators and publishers control the database query, which allows them the flexibility to determine what data, is inserted into the RSS feeds from the database.

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Sebastian Bergmann on PHPUnit 3

Sebastian Bergmann talked about PHPUnit 3 and how it allows you to test PHP applications, in a new post on his blog. He said that PHPUnit 3 has two hallmark features, Mock Objects and improved reporting of Code Coverage. While the first helps with writing simpler tests for complex situations, the latter helps with analyzing the result of the tests and the test results.

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Another Take on the PHP Sisters

It’s been a little over a week now since Ligaya Turmelle and Elizabeth Naramore originally sent out the request for the women of the PHP world to unite. In that week, they had many people step up to donate their time and server space. Carl Evans was gracious enough to donate space, Laura Thomson generously donated a mailing list, and Ligaya installed a forum (which has been so active Elizabeth can barely keep up!).

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Install, Configure and Integrate PHP and MySQL on Windows

"PHP and MySQL are a good combination when it comes to providing dynamic content to your user base", Scott Lowe wrote over at Builder.au. Over the years, these two products have grown well beyond their initial niche and now power some of the busiest sites. While both products are open source and initially ran on UNIX/Linux, for some time, both have been available for the Windows platform, he wrote.

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ZendCon: Best Practices Session

The Zend/PHP Conference and Expo is scheduled to take place on October 30th and November 2nd in San Jose, California. The topic to be covered at the conference is 'Creating Modern Web Applications with PHP'. The official schedule of events for the conference, giving times and dates for each of the talks is available. You can also take the PHP 5 Certification Exam instead of attending one of the sessions after the first day.

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How To Teach PHP

While at PHP Appalachia, Ben Ramsey had the pleasure of meeting David Rasch, the founder of Triangle PHP, which meets in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region of North Carolina. David and Ben launched into a discussion about how newbies learn PHP from current books on the market.

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At A Glance: ASP.net vs. PHP

In the world of web development, the choice of which development language to use commonly comes down to two popular choices. Web applications, specifically those relying on back end databases, are typically being created using either Microsoft's ASP.Net language, or the Open Source alternative language of PHP, wrote Ian Wilson.

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Announcements

ANN: September Issue (09.2006) of International PHP Magazine Released

Volume 09 of the International PHP Magazine is now available on virtual newsstands. The key theme of this issue is 'meeting new business demands'. Traditional web-based graphical user interfaces are generally unable to meet demanding performance levels that involve a high level of user interactivity and frequent screen updates. To achieve this type of application need, most enterprises still rely on fat-client or rich-client applications using Java-Swing, Delphi, Visual Basic, C++ and other languages. But using Ajax technology is one way to achieve Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). However, although much has been said about the popularity of Ajax in relation to developing enterprise-wide web applications, it is still sometimes regarded as technology hype. As organizations continue to explore ways to implement Ajax, they need to know that it is not about adopting the latest technology or following the latest IT fad, but about using technology to respond to specific business and IT needs. As a first step towards this end, the Cover Story by Bjoern Mueller attempts to clear some of the cobwebs surrounding Ajax technology and the practical functionality it has over older and outdated languages.

More often than not, freelance coders get so caught up in the code, they forget about the fact that they actually need to make some money to pay the bills, or their business will fail. In the Freelancer’s Corner, Elizabeth Naramore outlines some financial management software packages, as well as current best practices for managing money.

A Senior Project Manager at Warner Music Group in New York City, Marc Isikoff feels that needs-based learning will not generate the next greatest PHP program. It will simply allow casual programmers with solutions where the need arises. In such a scenario, he estimates that such casual PHP programmers may not be encouraged to create solutions that better currently available tools, such as phpBB or phpMyAdmin. This only makes the case stronger for a for-profit company to acquire PHP and better it. In the Spotlight section, he examines why PHP should be taught at the University level (professionally taught, that is) as opposed to simply learning it from the Internet (needs-based learning).

In the Beginners track, Stoyan Stefanov introduces ‘Scripting in a Box’, a piece of software that allows quick and painless installation of a number of scripting tools – Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and Eclipse - on a Windows box. You can use the tool for your development needs, or quickly try out other scripting languages such as Ruby or Python. In the Databases track, Jon Stephens explains how the introduction of disk data storage makes MySQL Cluster more flexible, scalable, and cheaper to run than a MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 Cluster. The article also details how to create disk-based Cluster tables, and some Disk Data do's and dont's, and providing much needed insights into some other improvements to clustering that is being made to MySQL 5.1.

In the early days of its introduction, XML helped separate the presentation aspects from the actual content and provided a way for storing Web content. It quickly became the lingua franca for businesses exchanging information electronically. Its simplicity, broad support, and low cost of implementation drove the rapid adoption of XML. Today, many technologies built on XML are becoming pervasive in the industry. The challenge to leveraging the power of XML is finding the best solution for transparent, inexpensive generation and management of business-critical XML data without writing a lot of custom code. In the XML track, author Horace Chow highlights the importance of managing XML data (storage, index, query, and transformation) at the database level.

Read the Detailed Table of Contents

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International PHP Conference 2006

For the sixth consecutive year running, PHP Magazine and PHP Magazin proudly present the Fall edition of the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. Backed by a rich tradition, spanning five years, the International PHP Conference has evolved into one of the most significant and widely awaited PHP events. Year after year, the conference serves as a meeting point for PHP language professionals, evangelists, enthusiasts, movers and shakers from the FOSS community, and key decision-makers.

***********************************************
INTERNATIONAL PHP CONFERENCE 2006
Venue: NH Hotel, Frankfurt-Moerfelden

Main Conference: November 7 and 8, 2006
Power Workshops: November 5 and 6, 2006
Management Day : November 6, 2006
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This year the conference focuses on 'PHP security', featuring an exclusive choice of sessions that will endeavour to provide you with tips and tricks on how to develop PHP applications more safely and securely. We have also integrated new topics into the conference program, such as Ajax and Web 2.0 for PHP. The Power Workshops and sessions at the conference will provide focused knowledge on current PHP topics such as security, databases, business processes, web service strategies and other general topics of interest. As usual, you can look forward to first-class technical information, delivered by renowned speakers from within the PHP community.

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Poll Question: The Biggest Advantage of PHP 5 is?

The International PHP Magazine conducting a new poll this week, asking for your opinion regarding the biggest advantage of PHP 5. The options provided are:

• Performance
• Easy to work with
• Being web-like
• Varied choice of tools
• It has good community back up
• None

Tutorials

Using Ajax with PHP to Create an Interactive Web Page

Over at PHPBuilder, Eli White and Jonathan Eisenhamer demonstrated how Ajax can call a PHP script, pass it data, and display the results back to the user. According to Eli and Jonathan, Ajax in its purest form uses XML as the basis of communication. The requested file on the server will respond as an XML document that the JavaScript can parse. Many web sites in use today return text or raw HTML as their Ajax responses because it can be more convenient. Because the base form of Ajax is using XML, however, to start the example, they created a service that provides information in XML.

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Article: Developing a Form Director Class

Alejandro Gervasio’s new article, the last of a three-part series, 'How to use builder objects in PHP 5', lead you through the application of the builder pattern in PHP, and showed you how to use it with hands-on examples. Gervasio demonstrated how to develop a form directory class, refreshing some core concepts along the way. He also illustrated how to form a builder class and define a form director class.

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Article: Building your CMS Using PHP and MySQL

Over at Maximum Power Computing, is an article that showed you how to create your own Content Management System (CMS) using PHP and MySQL. The tutorial assumed that you possess some basic knowledge of both PHP and MySQL and makes use of some third party (but free) libraries to simplify the development process, providing all links and references.

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New Releases

PHP 5.2.0RC6 is Out

Ilia Alshanetsky has unveiled PHP 5.2.0RC6. Ilia said the delays were not entirely unproductive and every time more bugs were fixed, the language was made better, so it is not all bad. The release snapshots are available here and Edin will make win32 binaries available shortly.

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UWC Releases kForums Bulletin Board

The Free Software Innovation Unit at the University of the Western Cape and the African Virtual Open Initiative and Resources project (AVOIR) have released version 1.1.0 of their kForums community bulletin board and discussion forum tool. Based on the PHP-based KINKY application framework, kForums is free software and licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). kForums and all KINKY applications run on any platform that supports PHP4, including GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS-X, Solaris and such. PHP 5 versions will be released at the end of the year.

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Double-Barreled PHP Releases

Dan Scott has released the official PEAR release for linked list fans, and another revision of the File_MARC proposal. The PEAR release for link list is at 0.1.0-alpha, but Dan is happy with the code at this stage and unless something drastic happens the only significant change he foresees between now and 1.0-stable is the addition of some user-oriented documentation. The code got a severe workout at the Access 2006 Hackfest, where he ran headlong into some limitations in parsing huge files, Dan wrote.

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PEAR Releases of the Week

The PEAR project saw many stable releases this week, including a package that creates an authentication system, a PHP Client for Selenium RC, a renderer driver using Smarty, a sorting form renderer for Structures_DataGrid and a tabular structure that contains a record set of data for paging and sorting purposes.

Here is the complete list:

• Auth 1.4.0
• Testing_Selenium 0.2.0
• Structures_DataGrid_Rende rer_Smarty 0.1.1
• Structures_DataGrid_Rende rer_HTMLSortForm 0.1.1
• Structures_DataGrid 0.7.2

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PECL Releases of the Week

The PECL release of the week includes an extension that is a drop-in replacement for the builtin timezone database that comes with PHP. You should only install this extension in case you need to get a later version of the timezone database, the one that ships with PHP.

• timezonedb 2006.14

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Other Headlines

• Optimizing PHP for Intel based Mac
• Top Ten PHP MVC Frameworks
• MySQL Enterprise Adds to DBA Power
• Article: Creating the Admin Script for a PHP/MySQL Blogging System
• Consuming Webthumbs's API In PHP
• Poll Question: Which one is your Favorite PHP Category?
• Top Five PHP Tools
• Hardened-PHP: PHP unserialize() Array Creation Integer Overflow
• Vancouver PHP Conference 2007