Opinions and Statistics
Script GUI for PHP
One of the problems with writing PHP scripts on the Windows operating system is that you can't easily execute them in order to do testing, wrote Lee Underwood in a new post over his blog. You could download XAMPP or some another package to run Apache and PHP on your Windows machine, but for some people that's overkill. They just want to write PHP code, plain and simple, he wrote.
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Introduction to Adobe Flex Builder for PHP Developers
Mike potter demonstrated how you could get started with Flex Builder and PHP. He explained the entire procedure in six steps to facilitate better understanding. According to Mike, the following are the steps to be followed.
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Zend and IBM: News from ZendCon
"Deploying PHP on system i was so easy, it took less time to install than it did to download the code", commented Ed Kietlinkski, Senior Solution Consultant with Zend. "We entered into this relationship with Zend to bring the System i and PHP communities together, enabling our customers to adapt to new challenges and opportunities while leveraging their current investments and assets", said Jim Herring, IBM director of System i products and business operations.
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Zend Hails PHP for Microsoft, IBM
Zend both participates in development of PHP and offers products around the server-side development platform, as per a statement issued by the company. Andi Gutmans, a cofounder of the company and its vice president of technology, spoke with Paul Krill at the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo in San Jose, California, about PHP, the company's deal with Microsoft, and other happenings.
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Forms Validation with CakePHP
Over at Developer.com is a new tutorial by Jason Gilmore that talked about CakePHP and how to make a simple form, complete with validation. Jason began with an introduction to CakePHP and where you can get it from as well as the basics of input validation concepts. From there, it's on to the default validators that are included with the framework. He also illustrated custom validators to facilitate better understanding.
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PHP Ranks Fifth in Popularity Contest in November
PHP stands at fifth place in the November 2006 edition of the TIOBE Programming Community index. Its position has jumped a notch since last month, while Java continued to hold the top spot. Java held the top position in November 2005 as well, recording a decrease of 1.87%. PHP has jumped a notch from the fifth position to the fourth position with a rating of 9.209% within a year. C, on the other hand, has recorded a –1.16% decrease in usage. The last entrant in the list is Visual FoxPro with a percentage of 0.431. Pascal has moved up three notches from the nineteenth position to the sixteenth position in a year’s time.
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Filter and PHP 5.2
Over at the PHP Women blog, auroraeosrose is a post that talked a lot of griping from the PHP community about a lack of unified cleaning of user supplied data, 5.2 has introduced a new extension included by default, called filter. (It was available for 5.1 through PECL). The available functions are now in the manual and there is a short tutorial on how to use filter in your code. There were a few arguments going on about the right API for the extension on the internals mailing list, the post read.
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PHP Configuration Statistics
Damien Seguy from nexen.net has posted his newest statistics project 'PHP configuration statistics'. He gathered output of around 12,000 public available phpinfo() scripts. Some of the results of his investigations include.
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PHP as a Deployment Platform
PHP has been successful as a deployment platform for web applications. PHP developers often ask what should I target? The question is the same if you want to write the next WordPress, or if you want to make sure your code is reusable for the next client that knocks on your door, Jeff Moore wrote in a new post on his blog.
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Announcements
ANN: November Issue (11.2006) of International PHP Magazine Released
Volume 11 of the International PHP Magazine is now available on virtual newsstands. The Cover Story by Stefan Priebsch talks about how in a perfect world, software would always work as expected. In the real world, however, software has errors. And even if a piece of software works today, unexpected problems might throw up tomorrow when the underlying operating system, web server, PHP installation, or even a PEAR library changes. To ensure the software works as desired, you test it. But testing software only once is not sufficient, since the environment and the software itself can change rapidly. The key to success lies in test automation.
In the Freelancer’s Corner, Elizabeth Naramore outlines the biggest challenge in freelancing is staying motivated, especially since you don't have a direct boss breathing down your neck. It's easy for freelancers to get bored, distracted, overwhelmed, stumped, and just plain burned out, she writes. They procrastinate by nature and are prone to just stick our head in the sand and hope that it 'just goes away'. Unfortunately as a freelancer, this can be deadly for your business. No outgoing work means no incoming paychecks and very unhappy clients. With this article she gives you help in slaying those unmotivational dragons and keeping you on track and productive.
In the Beginners track, Dirk A. Hemelings introduces programming to be more than just writing code. It also requires some organization talent. This article will show you how to organize your project’s folder structure and present you a set of coding guidelines. You can take these guidelines and make them your own or build your own set of guidelines based on the ones in this article. It doesn’t matter if you follow these guidelines or others, the lesson you should learn from this article is, make sure you have guidelines and stick to them! Without guidelines code can become very difficult to read and the maintainability of your project will seriously decrease if not become impossible.5.1.
In the Coloumn, ' All About Strings and Arrays', Marc Isikoff talks about how in this issue he will continue to introduce PHP as it would be taught in a formal educational setting. While strings are easy to learn and understand, arrays are slightly more difficult and more important, because a lot of information that you will use and that is native to web programming will be stored and accessed in an array. He’ll also show you how strings and arrays are also complimentary to each other. In the Development track Tobias Schlitt and Kore Nordmann talk about the first part of this article, in Issue 10.2006 of International PHP Magazine, showcased practical examples of some of the cutting-edge object-oriented technologies in PHP 5, such as property overloading, extended object comparison and objects pretending to be an array by implementing ArrayAccess, Countable and Iterator. In the second and final part of the PHP OO Candy Store, Tobias Schlitt and Kore Nordmann dig deeper into the SPL iterators and show you how to implement fluent interfaces with PHP.
In the Database track Arjen Lentz says as technology moves on, engineers gain new insights. MySQL now has its own transactional storage engines, code named Falcon. It is a transactional storage engine, based on Netfrastructure database engine, extended and integrated into MySQL. The main goals of Falcon are to exploit large memory for more than just a bigger cache, to use threads and processors for data migration. It has been designed for 'scale out' configurations, where several, relatively low-priced servers, rather than a few, more powerful machines power an application. This article introduces the Falcon OLTP storage engine.
Read the Detailed Table of Contents
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Poll Question: Common Perspectives Regarding Objects in PHP Are?
The International PHP Magazine is conducting a new poll this week, asking for your opinion on common perspectives regarding objects in PHP. The options provided are:
- Classes and inheritance are not new to PHP 5
- Managing state between pages is very straight forward in PHP
- Folks who follow design patterns religiously are missing the point
- Others
[VOTE NOW]
PHP Conference Frankfurt 2006 Slides
Derick Rethans attended the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt. He gave two presentations. One on PHP 6 and Unicode, and another one on PHP 5.2's date and time support. Some of the slides for both presentations can be found on the talks page.
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Frankfurt Slides
Ben Ramsey talked about his experience at the International PHP conference in Frankfurt, Germany all week. The conference had a good balance of catering to the community while appealing to businesses and management. It also posed as an opportunity to network with PHP programmers and the community on the other side of the pond, Ben wrote.
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Tutorials
Article: Building the Index Page for a PHP E-mail Application
In the third article of a four-part series on building a PHP e-mail application, Leidago showed you how to look at the index page. This page is the heart of the application, he said. He also demonstrated how to handle attachments in a message and how to integrate them into this application. He illustrated how to build an index page for a PHP e-mail application, navigation and headers. Leidago showed you how to retrieve messages and such.
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Article: Building an Error Logger with the Chain of Responsibility Pattern in PHP 5
In the second of a three-part series, ' Understanding the Chain of Responsibility Between PHP Objects', Alejandro Gervasio introduced you to the chain of responsibility pattern in PHP 5. This pattern is useful when a specific class cannot deal with a particular task, and must therefore transfer a program's execution to another class with the appropriate capability, he explained.
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New Releases
PHPUnit 3.0 Beta 3 Released
Sebastian Bergmann has released the third beta version of PHPUnit 3.0. A list of features is available as well as a list of changes. You can install PHPUnit using the PEAR Installer as shown below.
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Doing PHP
Lukas Kahwe Smith has unveiled the x.3.z releases of MDB2. Meaning he released MDB2 2.3.0 along with 1.3.0 versions of the driver packages. There were a lot of minor fixes for edge uses. The most important changes where in the sequence/autoincrement handling. He cleaned up a lot of little details that should make lastInsertID() and currID() more consistent. The lastInsertID() method tries to return the last value generated on the given connection, whereas currID() returns the current value of a sequence.
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PEAR Releases of the Week
The PEAR project saw many stable releases this week, including a package for creating an authentication system, an extension that provides methods for configuration manipulation, a WebDAV Server Baseclass, a replacement for the default renderer that doesn't use table tags, and generates valid XHTML output and a package that builds on PEAR DB to abstract datatypes and automate table creation, data validation, insert, update, delete, and select, combines these with
PEAR HTML_QuickForm to automatically generate input forms that match the table column definitions.Auth 1.4.2Config 1.10.8HTTP_WebDAV_Server 1.0.0RC4HTML_QuickForm_Renderer_T ableless 0.4.2DB_Table 1.4.0
PECL Releases of the Week
The PECL releases of the week are an extension for the Ingres Relational Database System, libstatgab bindings, libmagic bindings, an asynchronous resolver, a PDO driver for IBM databases and such.
Here are the releases:
Other Headlines
- Upcoming Conference: PHP Conference Brasil
- Poll Question: Which PHP Script Manages FAQs Effectively?
- Symfony at PHP Paris Forum