Opinions and Statistics
A Take on CakePHP
Today there are many frameworks available for the PHP programming language, and especially a lot of Rapid Application Development (RAD) frameworks which aim to make web development faster, less tedious and more organized, wrote Harry in a new post over his blog. According to Harry, CakePHP was one of the first frameworks to port the RAD philosophy, which became popular after Ruby on Rails. It is a rapid development framework for PHP, which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. It provides a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to develop web applications, without any loss to flexibility.
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PHP and Database Connection Pooling
Andi Gutmans talked about connection pooling in PHP and some of the recent results IBM published in a recent article. As is apparent from the likes of Yahoo!, Facebook and other large Web 2.0 companies who have billions of page views per month, PHP can indeed be deployed in a way which scales well. Naturally with any technology that has to scale to huge volumes of traffic using large clusters of servers, there are always scalability issues that need resolving. Common issues that IT personnel deal with are monitoring and management of their clusters, application deployment, file system scalability, network topology, high availability and database scalability, Andi explained.
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PHP Conference Brazil
Pierre Alain Joye’s friend Marcelo Araujo told him about an upcoming PHP conference in Brazil, the first one ever. It is now officially announced, it will be in São Paul on December 1-2, 2006. The PHP Conference Brazil is an event in Brazil to strengthen the Brazilian community, and encourage relationships among the professionals that use the language.
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Why Is Solaris a Good Choice for PHP Developers?
Timothy William Bray will be at ZendCon this year participating in a panel discussion titled 'How Do The Stacks Stack Up?' Carl Evans talked with Tim to find out why PHP developers should consider Solaris as a development and deployment environment. According to Tim, there are three main points that make Solaris a good platform for PHP developers to work on. The first one is 'observability'. Any successful web facing application will eventually hit some performance bottlenecks. The 'dtrace' technology in Solaris seems to set a new standard for being able to instrument a running application to get a good understanding of what is going on in there.
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Announcements
ANN: October Issue (10.2006) of International PHP Magazine Released
Volume 10 of the International PHP Magazine is now available on virtual newsstands. The key theme of this issue is ' PHP 5 Object Orientation and SPL in Practice'. The Cover Story by Tobias Schlitt and Kore Nordmann attempts to talk about how with PHP 5 the often-mocked object orientation features of PHP4 have been widely improved. A real scope model for attributes and methods, automatic dereferencing, interfaces and many more typical OO features have been introduced. But in actual PHP versions, there is even more. PHP offers some quite unique and very handy features to help you create convenient APIs. The article throws the spotlight on the cutting edge technologies introduced in PHP 5.
In the Freelancer’s Corner, Elizabeth Naramore outlines how it can be a daunting task to be ‘in the know’ on every PHP web development topic out there. There are new projects, frameworks, software releases, security alerts and other developments being unleashed every day. As a freelancer, your time is precious, but you're also expected to keep track of what's new, because you're the expert. Working it all can be a tricky proposition, but Elizabeth is here to help you cut to the chase and separate the wheat from the chaff.
In the Beginners track, Stefan Priebsch teaches you how to 'Build Automation with Phing'. According to him, if you have developed software in compiled languages, you will probably have used a build tool that helped you in transforming your source code to an executable file. With a build tool, one can also automate various other tasks while developing software. But why should we use a build tool when we develop in an interpreted language like PHP? questions Stefan.
The Development section has an article by Stoyan Stefano, that shows you how to integrate SAP with PHP. Are you building a web site or intranet for a company that has SAP installed and you want to integrate the data this system has? Or you are a PHP developer and you want to expand your knowledge of what you can, then this is the article to read.
Microsoft Office on a Windows operating system is the most popular office productivity tool on personal computers. However, it is not the only option available in the current Open Source environment. Linux is fast becoming a fierce competitor to Windows and Open Office is turning into a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. This article in the Business section examines the strategy to adopt Open Office whether on Linux or Windows operating systems, covering the analysis and migration phase in great detail.
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DOWNLOAD CENTER
International PHP Magazine's download center is a repository that houses all volumes of the magazine till date.
WRITE FOR INTERNATIONAL PHP MAGAZINE
At PHP Magazine, we aim to help the community with as much quality information on PHP and web development as possible. Towards this end, we'd like you to send us that PHP article/tutorial that you've always wanted to write and share with the larger community. Send us your ideas using the form here.
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.
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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: Which is the Most Common Design Pattern?
The International PHP Magazine is conducting a new poll this week, asking for your opinion regarding the most common design pattern. The options provided are:
- Factory Pattern
- Singleton Pattern
- Observer Pattern
- Decorator Pattern
- Others
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Tutorials
Create Dynamic URLs With Mod_Rewrite and PHP Functions
Over at the Shadow Fox Network, there's a new tutorial that showed you how to combine the Apache
mod_rewrite functionality with PHP functions to make passing variables over your rewritten URL easy. The article began with a reminder of the contents of the previous article and moves to the simple rewrite example that makes it possible. The author demonstrates how to add dynamic pages and dynamic variables for dynamic URLs.[READ ON]
RSS Aggregation with PHP and AJAX
An RSS aggregator is the perfect application to build with a standard AJAX engine, but cross-domain AJAX requests to RSS feeds are not possible. In the article, Kris Hadlock showed you how to leverage a PHP function to bridge the gap between the AJAX engine and RSS content. According to Kris, RSS aggregators are not very hard to come by these days, but finding a good one can be quite difficult. On the other hand, creating a custom aggregator isn’t very difficult and can provide you with an interface of your own choosing.
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PHP Email
In the first of a four-part series, Leidago showed you how to build an e-mail client with PHP. He tried to implement a full e-mail client with all the functionality that you would expect from an e-mail client, which includes a trash folder, sent items folder and a draft folder. He also demonstrated how to deal with attachments. Leidago searched the Internet for examples of how to find attachments in a mail message and could not find any. So he decided to work it out himself and integrate it into the e-mail client.
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Setting up the Foundation for an Extensible Web site Engine with PHP 5
In the first article of a two-part series, Alejandro Gervasio showed you how to develop a web site engine that can generate pages on the fly from a simple database structure. He began the article by setting up the foundation for an extensible web site engine with PHP 5. Gervasio defined the core structure of a simple yet dynamic web site, he also defined the database schema with MySQL. He concluded by showing you how to create a simple template file and such. The article has ample code to facilitate better understanding.
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New Releases
PhpDocumentor 1.3.1 is Released
Greg Beaver has announced that the PhpDocumentor 1.3.1 has been released at both pear.php.net and sourceforge.net. This release addresses a problem with the sourceforge release, as well as a few other minor bugs, Greg wrote.
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PEAR Releases of the Week
The PEAR project saw many stable releases this week, including a package that checks if a given host or URL is listed on an DNS-based Blackhole List (DNSBL, Real-time Blackhole List or RBL) or Spam URI Realtime Blocklist (SURBL), a validation class for Finland, a Music Player Daemon interaction API, a resolver library used to communicate with a DNS server and a package that provides an easy way to perform HTTP requests.
Here is the complete list:
PECL Releases of the Week
The PECL release of the week is a zip management extension. The lead maintainer for the package is Pierre Alain Joye, and the package is licensed under the PHP license. Pierre writes that all development was done on a volunteer basis.
Here is the release:
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