Weekly PHP Roundup [26 December – 29December]
Opinions and Statistics
Poll Question: Which is the Most Powerful PHP Tool?
The International PHP Magazine conducted a poll over the week, asking for your opinion about as to which is the most powerful PHP tool. The options provided were:
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Which is better PDO or MDB2?
Jeff Moore over a new entry in his blog judges whether PDO or MDB2 is better when putting together a small test program.
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Announcements
Volume 12 of the International PHP Magazine is now available on virtual newsstands. The Cover Story by Graeme Johnson and Zoë Slattery describe some experimental work in building a PHP engine from existing virtual machine components. We were interested in seeing if we could reuse high performance VM components to create a high performance PHP implementation. We will talk about the process that we went through and what we learned about PHP along the way.
In the Freelancer’s Corner, Elizabeth Naramore says there are plenty of people out there freelancing successfully, and they’ve all learned a thing or two in the course of their careers. I’ve taken a few of these freelancers and gleaned some words of wisdom from them in the hopes that you won’t make the same mistakes they have.
In the Beginner’ Guide to PHPs track, Marc Isikoff writes that in the last issue he furthered the introduction to PHP, with an overview of strings and arrays. This completes an early learning point of all the main variable types for PHP. This issue includes a much-needed introduction to programming flow, the traversal through a PHP program with decision points and loops to show you how to weave together the variables you learned.
In the Beginners track, Matthew Peters talks about how in this issue he will survey some of what Service Component Architecture (SCA) for PHP offers the programmer. We have high hopes that the combination of reusable components, which can be called either locally, or remotely via Web Services, with the same interface will be of interest, and that anyone who works with Web Services may be interested in the ease with which an SCA component can be deployed as a Web Service: a simple matter of adding annotations and dropping the component under the web server’s document root.
In the Development track Robert-Jan de Vries says that since AJAX has become a mainstream technology for a ‘richer’ Internet, most programmers have successfully implemented it or have at least experimented with it’s possibilities. As the complexity of AJAX-based applications grows, so does the need for reliability. This article is divided into two parts, each part aiming to hand you a practical solutions to a problem that you are likely to run into on your quest for a reliable web application.
In the Enterprise track Arjen Lentz says IT decision-makers need no longer swallow the bitter pill of high-cost, slow deployment and complex management that typifies proprietary IT monitoring systems. Open source IT management solutions are rapidly gaining high-profile recruits with their comparable functionality, coupled with greater technical agility, faster deployment, lower costs and relative management simplicity. Could open source solutions prove to be the cure-all to common IT headaches?
Read the Detailed Table of Contents
DOWNLOAD CENTER
International PHP Magazine's download center is a repository that houses all volumes of the magazine till date.
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IPM Poll Question
IPM Poll Question: Major Strengths of Symfony Over its Competitors are?
The International PHP Magazine is conducting a new poll this week, asking for your opinion about the major strengths of Smpony over its Competitors. The options are:
- Great documentation
- Explicit and extensive configurability
- Active development
- Use of components rather than building everything again
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Tutorials
Article: Using JSON Libraries for PHP Applications
Cal Evans over at Zend Developer Zone talks about Gaetano Giunta’s comparison of JSON conversion methods on his blog. Cal lists Gaetano’s comparison of four methods available to PHP developers for encoding data in JSON. The four methods are:
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Key to Your Eclipse PHP IDE php.ini Location
Alexander Netkachev has a new post over his blog that provides a solution to the location of PHP.inifile when using Eclipse PHP IDE. Alexander noticed that the IDE does not load options specified in the php.ini making customizing extensions impossible.
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Article: Using PHP in SOA Solutions
Rikki Kirzner writes over at Devx about new technologies from IBM that uses PHP to simplify SOA and enterprise development. They are:
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How To Install FreeGlobes
Sridha Reena in her blog teaches how to install FreeGlobes. For the uninitiated FreeGlobes is a free PHP/MySQL links manager/directory/digg-like social bookmarking and voting script. It’s English version is available via Google and the latest FreeGlobes version is RC1.
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Article:PHP Developers in Demand in 2007
Hivemind Magazine has come up with a quick post that confirms the demand for PHP developers seems to be in a rising curve for the upcoming year 2007.
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Tutorial on Basic PHP Script Security
Void over a post in Templora, gives a tutorial on basic PHP script security. He delves deeper as to how it is becoming a major issue. Then he lists the following five steps to protect the PHP scripts.
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New Releases
PHP-Nuke Version 8.0 FINAL Released
PHP-Nuke team has come out with its new version 8.0. This version includes a new anti-flood system, several cosmetic changes, a new web based installer, improvements on advertising system, downloads, web links modules and forums. Other new features are that all BBtoNuke modules are now separated from the core system; the News module have been improved and many bugs’ fixes are added., as per the reports of the PHP-Nuke team.
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Xdebug 2.0.0RC2 released
Derick Rethans announces over a post in his blog about the second release of Xdebug 2.0.0RC2. He informs that this version is not equipped with many new things but a lot of bug fixes has been added to it.
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Here Comes the New Seagull 0.6.1
Demian Turner in Frameworks post has informed about Version 0.6.1 of Seagull Framework. He says that a bounty of a few important fixes and improvements have been added to the project.
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CakePHP Comes Out with their New Version 1.1.12.4205[1], 1.2.0.4206_dev[2]
Larry E. Masters in the Bakery blog tells us about CakePHP’s New Version 1.1.12.4205[1] and 1.2.0.4206_dev [2]. Both are packaged and available in CakeForge. CakePHP 1.1.12.4205 is a bug fix release for the stable branch.
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PEAR Releases of the Week
The Pear Release of the week are a Renderer driver using
PEAR::Pager, Services_Webservice 0.5.0 to create webservices , a package that provides a somewhat unified API for handling, a solution 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) and such.Here is the complete list:
Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Pager 0.1.2
PECL Releases of the Week
The PECL releases of the week are Xdebug 2.0 ORC2 providing functions for function traces and profiling, yaz1.0.8, a Z39.50/SRU client.
Here is the complete list:
Other Headlines- ClickHeat Clicks!
- New Plans for PHPSecInfo V.0.1.2
- Modify your MySQL Databases to UTF-8 Compliant
- Try Xdebug with PHPUnit for Code Coverage Reports
- ClickHeat Clicks!