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Planet PHP

• 

  Ubuntu: nginx+php-cgi on a socket

  Posted: July 31st, 2009, 9:20am MDT by till

  Moving our PHP application into the cloud, means for us that we are leaving FreeBSD for Linux. Not the best move (IMHO), but I shall elaborate on this in a future blog post.

  Once we decided on Ubuntu as the Linux of our choice, I started by moving our development server to an instance on Slicehost. Point taken, Slicehost is not the cloud (as in Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Flexiscale or GoGrid) yet, but Linux on Slicehost and Linux on Amazon EC2 will be alike (or so I hope :-)) and a getting a small slice versus getting a small EC2 instance is an economical decision in the end.

  Introduction

  The following is the start script for my php-cgi processes, which I ported from FreeBSD (I previously blogged about it here).

  The advantages of this script are:

  1. php-cgi runs on a unix domain socket — no need for tcp/ip on localhost.
  2. No need for the infamous spawn-fcgi script, which never worked for me anyway, and on Ubuntu requires you to install li [httpd] (if you don't happen to be on Karmic Koala).
  3. You can setup different websites with different instances of php-cgi. This is great for virtual hosting, especially on a development server where the different workspaces may have different PHP settings and you want to run versions in parallel without sharing settings and therefore maybe affecting each other.
  4. Icing on the cake: we could even add a custom php.ini to the start call for each instance (-c option) to customize it even further.
• 

  Zend Framework 1.9.0 Released

  Posted: July 31st, 2009, 8:32am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of version 1.9.0! [framework.zend.com] Kudos and thanks go out to the huge number of community contributors who helped make this release possible. This release has been almost entirely community driven, with the Zend team contributing primarily feature additions to existing components and working on maintenance of the project. If you submitted an issue report, a documentation improvement, a patch, a documentation translation, or a component, let it be known that you helped make this release what it is!
• 

  Does my PHP app run on Project Zero?

  Posted: July 31st, 2009, 8:13am MDT by Zoe Slattery

  As the PHP implementation in Project Zero gets more complete it's possible to run quite a few significant applications. It would be nice to know in advance how likely it is that a PHP application would run on Project Zero - without investing a whole lot of time in trying to run it. Well, now you can.
  
  There is a new Project Zero application which will scan your application and tell you whether it thinks it will run on Project Zero. The way it does this is to extract information from the Project Zero PHP parser - for instance it finds out the names of functions that are declared in the application and compares them with the names of functions that are invoked. If the application scanner finds that a function is invoked by the application but is not declared by it, it uses function_exists() to figure out if it is implemented in Project Zero's PHP. Similar analysis is carried out for classes and methods in the application.
  
  The instructions for extracting and running the scanner are here. They assume that you already have a working version of Project Zero.
  
  One of the reasons that I wrote this was that I wanted to figure out if PHPUnit would run on Project Zero. This led to a horrible chicken and egg situation in that I can't write PHP without PHPUnit and most of the scanner is written in PHP. In the end I had to inch forward on both tasks simultaneously, with the final benefit that I worked out how to use PHPUnit at the same time as writing the scanner. The instructions for running PHPUnit are here. I'm not claiming full support for PHPUnit in Project Zero - but there is enough to be able to test PHP classes as you write them.
  
  The application scanner can't say definitely whether an application will run or not, this is because it is using static analysis. However it gives enough information to be able to tell whether it's worth trying or whether you should mail the Project Zero team with your scan results and ask them when they think they will have support for your app :-)
• 

  To stat() Or Not To stat()?

  Posted: July 30th, 2009, 2:33pm MDT by Brandon Savage

  The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a tool that offers a massive performance gain to almost any PHP application simply by turning it on. This extension to PHP provides both opcode caching and user caching, placing files and data into memory for fast retreival, and, if used correctly, eliminating some of the bottlenecks of the file server or database.

  Turning APC on is a great way to get a performance boost, but there are ways to help improve APC’s performance.

  The very first thing that APC does when it’s turned on is begin caching the opcode output from all of your PHP files. Essentially, it takes the compiler’s output, stores it in memory, and then retrieves it later on if that file is needed. Also by default, APC checks the file on the file system to determine if it has changed since the last time APC cached the opcodes.

  When APC does this, it executes a file-system-level stat() call, which in the scheme of the calls performed is expensive. This call basically helps APC determine if it should execute the opcodes that you have stored in memory, or if it should read and compile the file. This behavior is on by default but can be disabled.

  To disable it, you must add the following line to your php.ini file:

  apc.stat=FALSE

  This will not prevent APC from caching the file if the file is not yet in memory; it will simply keep APC from checking for an updated file each and every time it executes it.

  There are some obvious benefits to this. First, you get a performance boost. This method is used by Facebook to improve the performance of its servers. Clearly your production systems are not updated on an exceptionally regular basis, meaning that you don’t have to worry about the files becoming stale in memory.

  As with all things, there are also some drawbacks. First, a restart of the webserver or a call of apc_cache_clear() is required before the APC cache will be cleared and any changes will be reflected. This means that you may want to run APC with apc.write_lock in your INI file to keep your servers from crashing. Also, this will not improve poorly written or poorly executed code; bad code will still run slowly, no matter how many boosts you give it. This will only help well-written code run faster. APC is also only effective if the memory is not completely full, so running APC on heavily-visited sites with relatively little memory won’t earn you much of a boost at all. Finally, if you implement this on a low-traffic website you’re unlikely to see any improvement at all; the higher the traffic, the more this will benefit the web server.

  As with all things that promise performance improvements, you are encouraged to profile your code and benchmark the improvement before deploying to a production environment.

  Warning: Do not run this in a development environment; otherwise you will be unable to see your changes reflected! This is a production feature only.
• 

  Migrating to PHP 5.3 Webcast

  Posted: July 30th, 2009, 2:32pm MDT by Stefan Priebsch

  php|architect is currently hosting a weekly series of free webinars, leading up to Code Works 09. Code Works is a touring PHP conference that will take place in seven cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, and New York) starting September 22. By the way, I will be part of the tutorial team, [...]
• 

  PHP CodeSniffer Support for Netbeans

  Posted: July 30th, 2009, 1:07pm MDT by Benjamin Eberlei

  I dived into the code of my new favorite IDE Netbeans these last days and came up with an extension module, which adds PHP CodeSniffer Support on a per file basis to make my life much easier. It shows warnings and errors as annotations to the Editor and marks the affected lines in yellow and red.

  

  My Java skills being very bad, it will only work on Linux currently, since the PHP Code Sniffer "binary" is hardcoded into the Java Source code. You have to create a "/usr/bin/phpcs2" executable, which is a wrapper that looks like:

  With Manuals extensions (see the comments) the module now works without the wrapper script. It might even work under Windows now. Yet now the Zend Coding standard is enforced though. I am working on making that one configurable next.

  You can install the NBM module install file from the GitHub repository into Netbeans and it "should" work then.

  I hope to get more familiar with Netbeans in the future to add some more PHP tools and enhance Code Sniffer support.

• 

  Will content repositories kill the file?

  Posted: July 30th, 2009, 11:10am MDT by Henri Bergius

  MDK laments the demise of the simple file in the onslaught of storage services:

  Sure, the applications still give you a way to share things and take them out of the storage. You can export a contact out of your address book as a vcard file. But the role of The File here is slowly being reduced to a role of an intermediate storage medium. The business card is temporarily put in the .vcf file before it gets injected into somebody else’s database (another address book?).
  
  As more and more applications operate on databases, the computer is becoming a monolithic black-box that “has things”. How exactly (and where) the data is stored is becoming less clear. The application and the interface becomes united with the user data. It becomes one.

  This echos the sentiments of Alex Payne when he warned against what he calls Everything Buckets:

  Computers work best with structured data. Everything Buckets discourage the use of structured data by providing a convenient place to commingle “structureless” data like RTF and PDF documents. Rather than forcing the user to figure out the rhyme and reason of their data (for example, by putting receipts in a financial management application and addresses in an address book), Everything Buckets cry: “throw it all in here! Search it! Maybe I’ll corrupt my proprietary database, but maybe I won’t and you’ll have the joy of sifting through a mire of RTF documents. Doesn’t that sound great?”

  And yes, I agree that obscure application-specific databases are not really better than obscure proprietary file formats.

  This is exactly why I've been talking about content repositories, services like Midgard2 and CouchDb that not only can provide superior content storage and organization, but do it in a way that multiple applications can share. You can easily write your own scripts to perform batch operations on the data, and receive D-Bus notifications when something changes.

  And good repositories also provide easy synchronization tools so you can have your data available on all of your computers, and even on the web. If they can also do peer-to-peer sharing, we're close to achieving the fully free cloud.

  Technorati Tags: couchdb, gnome, midgard

• 

  The ZendCon Sessions Episode 24: Elegant Ways of Handling PHP Errors and Exceptions

  Posted: July 30th, 2009, 5:34am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  Presenting the latest edition of The ZendCon Sessions. The podcast that rebroadcasts sessions/talks from the last ZendCon PHP Conference. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and features Eddo Rotman giving his talk: “Elegant Ways of Handling PHP Errors and Exceptions”
• 

  Conferences, conferences, conferences

  Posted: July 30th, 2009, 4:57am MDT by Echolibre

  The last couple of months have been extremely busy for me, to a point where I have not been blogging or participating in open source project nor the local user group to the level I’d like, but it has been the good kind of busy, where you feel exhausted but very satisfied with one self.

  What has been keeping me busy? I have presented at 3 conferences (PHP Tek, DPC and OSCON), took a week vacation in Iceland with Chris Shiflett and Andrei Z, moved to a new house, work on a very fun but stressful project among other interesting things that have happened.
  A rough calculation told me that since mid May, around the time of PHP Tek, I have been away from my home a total of 38 days, almost 50%, not bad at all!

  To touch base quickly on each of the conferences I spoke at:

  PHP Tek

  Located in Chicago, as it has for the previous years, it was a great conference as always. A very good community presence at the conference, which makes it very enjoyable to attend, both to see quality talks given by some of the best PHP speakers in the world and meet old friends and make some new, the best MTA conference so far.

  I gave a whole day tutorial on caching and performance with Scott MacVicar and then gave a talk on frontend caching. Both went over fantastically, a lot of user interaction, my talk was full and the tutorial great fun with loads of people in it.

  No doubt the best PHP conference in the states at the moment, a must go to for anyone living close (or even afar)

  Tutorial slides

  1. [www.slideshare.net]
  2. [www.slideshare.net]
  3. [www.slideshare.net]
  4. [www.slideshare.net]

  Talk slides:
  [www.slideshare.net]

  Dutch PHP Conference (DPC)

  As before DPC was held by Ibuildings in the RAI in the beautiful city of Amsterdam.  DPC seems growing every year I see it and was not suffering from any recession problems this year like many events have, if anything they made things even grander than before.

  DPC is to Europe what PHP Tek is to the States, a world class conference with high quality speakers and talks, without losing sight of the community. It’s one of those conferences where I expect I will go every year for unforeseen time and try to drag along as many friends as possible, great fun!

  I gave my Caching for Cash tutorial with Scott MacVicar, where we sold out and the room was so full that people had to stand around or sit on desks way back in the room, we even brought in couple of extra seats.

  The tutorial went over very well, our best performance so far! (pun intended)

  The slides can be seen at

  1. [www.slideshare.net]
  2. [www.slideshare.net]
  3. [www.slideshare.net]
  4. [www.slideshare.net]

  OSCON

  This was the first time I go to OSCON so all I have to compare it against are the stories I hear from other people, but there was a problem with basing my expectations on those stories and that was due to the fact OSCON moved from Portland to San Jose, a move a lot of people were not happy with.

  I had high hopes but going in I must admit I didn’t really feel the “awesomeness” that a lot of people had been talking about, while a good conference with amazing speakers and good expo, it seemed like a shadow of it’s former self. It was the first year they had a decline in attandence, 500 less or so,

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2134 bytes)

• 

  OpenDocument 0.2.0 released

  Posted: July 30th, 2009, 1:08am MDT by Christian Weiske

  Part of my PEAR voluntary duties is writing documentation for undocumented packages, since that's one of the weak points in PEAR. It is time-consuming, but thanks to PhD testing is faster than ever. The big plus - what makes writing docs really worthwile - is that one learns about the package. You get to understand it, find the deeply hidden features and tell the world about it in one, two or five tutorials.

  Beginning of June I started with our undernot documented OpenDocument package. The first and hardest part is to understand how the library itself works and what you can do with it. It had three little examples, and that basically was it. Oh yes, and a dozen of nearly undocumented source code files!

  The examples created and read out text documents, but I saw not the slightest hint that one could create spreadsheet files - so that OpenDocument could be used as alternative to Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer, the bug-hogged and unmaintained beast. Digging deep into the sources revealed that there is no such thing like "multiple document types" - and that although the OASIS OpenDocument specification defines a bunch of them: Text, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Drawing, Chart, and Image.

  Writing a tutorial about generating text documents also revealed something I had feared: Apart from adding paragraphs, headlines, links and span elements, one can't do anything. A bunch of styles are supported, but one can't even align a paragraph!

  With the package in a messy state, something had to be done about it - I took it over and maintain it since. My first step was to get really deep familiar with the code - an undertake that took me two weeks. Especially hard was to understand the styling concept - two days because a docblock suggested that the style variable was an array, while it is an object in reality. The second task was to get into the OASIS OpenDocument specification, the 1300 pages beast. I spent the better part of three weeks reading it when riding the train to and from work, as well some of the sparetime at home.

  So after announcing that I'd lead the package now, nothing really happened until about 21st of june, when the first open bug was patched and the unit test for it got added.

  New functionality for a new release

  Apart from fixing some open bugs, I had two new features planned for my first OpenDocument release:

  1. A new storage engine capable of loading from and saving to different file formats - the specs actually define two: The well-known zip files containing multiple XML files plus all the embedded pictures, and all that combined in a single XML file. The latter one will come handy when debugging and testing, since one doesn't always have to unzip the document before inspection.
  2. Restructurization of the API to allow support for multiple document types (spreadsheets!), even if I won't be implementing any new type yet.

  After about three weeks of nearly daily work on it, the planned changes were made. The Single XML file storage is not completely done yet, but that wasn't a priority for the release.

  Now that we were back from honeymoon and I had to go to work again, the train rides gave me opportunity to actually pack up the release with the longest release notes I ever wrote.

  OpenDocument 0.2.0 was released in PEAR on 2009-07-28, two years after the last release. It broke backward compatibility, and the next releases will break more of it - but in the end, it will be worth all the hassle.

  Planned changes

  Apart from the usual bug fixes, implementation of new features (like lists, images and new styles), and new document types (spreadsheets!), there are three areas that need attention:

  • The way new elements are added is suboptimal and requires too much duplicated code
  • The API currently has two object layers for the document: DOM for XML storage, and a layer of own objects on top of that. I'd really like to see those two merged.
  • Style handling is currently missing some basic features and feels a bit .. jerky.

  Other implementations

  Apart from hacking on the package, I also looked for other PHP OpenDocument implementations. There are some, but many of them are dead or do onl

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2270 bytes)

• 

  India will become number 1 source of PHP developers soon

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 7:02pm MDT by PHP Classes

  India will become number 1 source of PHP developers soon By Manuel Lemos The number of Indian PHP developers has been growing at a large pace in the last few years, when compared to other countries. A few years ago, India was just one of the top ten countries with more PHP developers. Now India is number 2 and is almost surpassing United States, which is still number 1.
  
  This article presents a reflection about why this growth happened just in the latest years, as well what it means for the PHP world.
  
  Sandeep Kadam, a leader of the PHP community in India gave an interview to help clarifying this subject.
• 

  PHP TestFest 2009 Winners

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

  A group of winners of PHP elePHPhants or TestFest mugs have been picked at random from the people that contributed the 887 tests during the 2009 PHP TestFest. Winners of elePHPhantsMark Schaschke TestFest London May 2009Patrick Allaert Belgian PHP Testfest 2009Rafael Dohms testfest PHPSP on 2009-06-20Guilherme Blanco testfest PHPSP on 2009-06-20Fabio Fabbrucci Italian PHP TestFest 2009 Cesena 19-20-21 juneRodrigo Moyle testfest PHPSP on 2009-06-20Edgar Ferreira da Silva testfest PHPSP on 2009-06-20Marco Fabbri PHPTestFest Cesena Italia on 2009-06-20Jason Easter Testfest 2009 2009-06-20Simon Westcott PHPNW Testfest 2009Winners of mugsTim Eggert Testfest Berlin 2009-05-09Till Klampaeckel TestFest 2009Havard Eide Norway 2009-06-09 \o/Ŕlex Corretgé - CataloniaFrancesco Fullone TestFest Cesena Italia on 2009-06-20Ivan Rosolen testfest PHPSP on 2009-06-20Moritz Neuhaeuser Testfest Berlin 2009-05-10Daniel Convissor TestFest 2009 NYPHPMatt Raines testfest London 2009-05-09Winners will be contacted shortly. Once again a huge thank you! to everyone who helped to make this year's TestFest such an outstanding success!
• 

  Writing A Simple Twitter Client Using the PHP Zend Framework's OAuth Library (Zend_Oauth)

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 3:03pm MDT by Pádraic Brady

  During yesterday, I finally got around to patching and finishing Zend_Oauth's Consumer implementation for the OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A specification. Once I had it finished, I used it to write a quick and simple interface to post some Tweets on Twitter while I was testing it out. With some documentation and a few extra unit tests, the Consumer implementation should find its way into Zend Framework 1.10...along with the Server implementation I think. In this article I'll explore how to writea quick Twitter client so you can post tweets (those short messages of less than 140 characters) once authorised across the OAuth protocol.
  
  You can download all the necessary files (just be sure to edit them as described) or pull them from git from: [github.com]
  
  What is OAuth?
  
  If you're not aware of what OAuth is, the OAuth specification puts it this way:
  
  

  The OAuth protocol enables websites or applications (Consumers) to access Protected Resources from a web service (Service Provider) via an API, without requiring Users to disclose their Service Provider credentials to the Consumers. More generally, OAuth creates a freely-implementable and generic methodology for API authentication.

  
  
  In other words, it's a means of allowing websites to access your data on other services via a service API, like Twitter's API or Google Gdata, without actually providing those websites with your username and password. Instead, OAuth allows you to authorise such websites to access your data so that they don't need your username or password - they just use an Access Token supplied by your service provider - and you can easily deauthorise them if desired. The benefit is immediately obvious - your username and password are not shared or handed out to potentially untrustworthy sites. The glut of services using Twitter are a prime example - until recently they all needed your Twitter username and password and honestly, how would you know they wouldn't misuse that? Because they said so? OAuth eliminates this problem.
  
  The protocol works like this. The website (consumer) that wants to access your data from a service provider, contacts the provider using HTTP to retrieve a Unauthorised Request Token. The consumer will then redirect you, the user, back to your service provider so you can authorise the consumer's access. The redirect URL will contain the Unauthorised Request Token as a parameter. If you approve the access, you are redirected back to the original website with a verification code attached to the URL. The website now knows you approved its access, so it contacts the service provider, including both the newly approved Request Token (once again) and the verification code in the URL. The response to this should be a fully authorised Access Token (associated with the User) which the consumer can use in all future requests when accessing your data (until either it times out or you deauthorise the access). The Request Access token can be discarded now - in OAuth parlance you exchanged an unauthorised Request Token for an authorised Access Token.
  
  Preparations Are Always Inevitable!
  
  With this understanding in hand, let's get to writing this small Twitter client as an example! You will need to download the Zend Framework (whether the latest release or via subversion). You will also need to download/checkout the Zend Framework Incubator since Zend_Oauth is not yet part of the main trunk. Once you have stored both somewhere, make a note of the paths to their "library" directories so you can add them to the PHP include_path later.
  
  On the Twitter side there are three steps.
  
  First, get a Twitter account! Hopefully you already have one and are following @padraicb (i.e. me!).
  
  Second, you need to configure your operating system for a new local domain. Under Linux, this is done by editing /etc/hosts. You'll need root privileges here so use "sudo myeditor /etc/hosts". Under Windows, the same file is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and will require Administrator privileges to edit. Adding a local domain is dead simple, and it's needed to use Twitter's API on a local machine - Twitter refuse all requests from localhost or 127.0.0.1 but they won't filter out a local domain name since it's unfeasable and would make a lot of application developers extremely crazy. Edit the file to include a new entry like:
  
  127.0.0.1 mytwitterclient.tld
  
  Once saved, your browser should immediately respond to any address in the form of [mytwitterclient.tld] by attempting to call localhost/127.0.0.1 on your system. If you have a default web document root configured with

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 36497 bytes)

• 

  Writing A Simple Twitter Client Using the PHP Zend Framework's OAuth Library (Zend_Oauth)

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 2:03pm MDT by Pádraic Brady

  During yesterday, I finally got around to patching and finishing Zend_Oauth's Consumer implementation for the OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A specification. Once I had it finished, I used it to write a quick and simple interface to post some Tweets on Twitter while I was testing it out. With some documentation and a few extra unit tests, the Consumer implementation should find its way into Zend Framework 1.10...along with the Server implementation I think. In this article I'll explore how to writea quick Twitter client so you can post tweets (those short messages of less than 140 characters) once authorised across the OAuth protocol.
  
  What is OAuth?
  
  If you're not aware of what OAuth is, the OAuth specification puts it this way:
  
  

  The OAuth protocol enables websites or applications (Consumers) to access Protected Resources from a web service (Service Provider) via an API, without requiring Users to disclose their Service Provider credentials to the Consumers. More generally, OAuth creates a freely-implementable and generic methodology for API authentication.

  
  
  In other words, it's a means of allowing websites to access your data on other services via a service API, like Twitter's API or Google Gdata, without actually providing those websites with your username and password. Instead, OAuth allows you to authorise such websites to access your data so that they don't need your username or password - they just use an Access Token supplied by your service provider - and you can easily deauthorise them if desired. The benefit is immediately obvious - your username and password are not shared or handed out to potentially untrustworthy sites. The glut of services using Twitter are a prime example - until recently they all needed your Twitter username and password and honestly, how would you know they wouldn't misuse that? Because they said so? OAuth eliminates this problem.
  
  The protocol works like this. The website (consumer) that wants to access your data from a service provider, contacts the provider using HTTP to retrieve a Unauthorised Request Token. The consumer will then redirect you, the user, back to your service provider so you can authorise the consumer's access. The redirect URL will contain the Unauthorised Request Token as a parameter. If you approve the access, you are redirected back to the original website with a verification code attached to the URL. The website now knows you approved its access, so it contacts the service provider, including both the newly approved Request Token (once again) and the verification code in the URL. The response to this should be a fully authorised Access Token (associated with the User) which the consumer can use in all future requests when accessing your data (until either it times out or you deauthorise the access). The Request Access token can be discarded now - in OAuth parlance you exchanged an unauthorised Request Token for an authorised Access Token.
  
  Preparations Are Always Inevitable!
  
  With this understanding in hand, let's get to writing this small Twitter client as an example! You will need to download the Zend Framework (whether the latest release or via subversion). You will also need to download/checkout the Zend Framework Incubator since Zend_Oauth is not yet part of the main trunk. Once you have stored both somewhere, make a note of the paths to their "library" directories so you can add them to the PHP include_path later.
  
  On the Twitter side there are three steps.
  
  First, get a Twitter account! Hopefully you already have one and are following @padraicb (i.e. me!).
  
  Second, you need to configure your operating system for a new local domain. Under Linux, this is done by editing /etc/hosts. You'll need root privileges here so use "sudo myeditor /etc/hosts". Under Windows, the same file is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and will require Administrator privileges to edit. Adding a local domain is dead simple, and it's needed to use Twitter's API on a local machine - Twitter refuse all requests from localhost or 127.0.0.1 but they won't filter out a local domain name since it's unfeasable and would make a lot of application developers extremely crazy. Edit the file to include a new entry like:
  
  127.0.0.1 mytwitterclient.tld
  
  Once saved, your browser should immediately respond to any address in the form of [mytwitterclient.tld] by attempting to call localhost/127.0.0.1 on your system. If you have a default web document root configured with a web server running, this is where the request will be mapped to and where you should store any files. If you are really troublesome and can't take how easy that was, you can run off to play with Virtual Host configurations to use a

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 36262 bytes)

• 

  Writing A Simple Twitter Client Using the PHP Zend Framework's OAuth Library (Zend_Oauth)

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 1:35pm MDT by Pádraic Brady

  During yesterday, I finally got around to patching and finishing Zend_Oauth's Consumer implementation for the OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A specification. Once I had it finished, I used it to write a quick and simple interface to post some Tweets on Twitter while I was testing it out. With some documentation and a few extra unit tests, the Consumer implementation should find its way into Zend Framework 1.10...along with the Server implementation I think. In this article I'll explore how to writea quick Twitter client so you can post tweets (those short messages of less than 140 characters) once authorised across the OAuth protocol.
  
  What is OAuth?
  
  If you're not aware of what OAuth is, the OAuth specification puts it this way:
  
  

  The OAuth protocol enables websites or applications (Consumers) to access Protected Resources from a web service (Service Provider) via an API, without requiring Users to disclose their Service Provider credentials to the Consumers. More generally, OAuth creates a freely-implementable and generic methodology for API authentication.

  
  
  In other words, it's a means of allowing websites to access your data on other services via a service API, like Twitter's API or Google Gdata, without actually providing those websites with your username and password. Instead, OAuth allows you to authorise such websites to access your data so that they don't need your username or password - they just use an Access Token supplied by your service provider - and you can easily deauthorise them if desired. The benefit is immediately obvious - your username and password are not shared or handed out to potentially untrustworthy sites. The glut of services using Twitter are a prime example - until recently they all needed your Twitter username and password and honestly, how would you know they wouldn't misuse that? Because they said so? OAuth eliminates this problem.
  
  The protocol works like this. The website (consumer) that wants to access your data from a service provider, contacts the provider using HTTP to retrieve a Unauthorised Request Token. The consumer will then redirect you, the user, back to your service provider so you can authorise the consumer's access. The redirect URL will contain the Unauthorised Request Token as a parameter. If you approve the access, you are redirected back to the original website with a verification code attached to the URL. The website now knows you approved its access, so it contacts the service provider, including both the newly approved Request Token (once again) and the verification code in the URL. The response to this should be a fully authorised Access Token (associated with the User) which the consumer can use in all future requests when accessing your data (until either it times out or you deauthorise the access). The Request Access token can be discarded now - in OAuth parlance you exchanged an unauthorised Request Token for an authorised Access Token.
  
  Preparations Are Always Inevitable!
  
  With this understanding in hand, let's get to writing this small Twitter client as an example! You will need to download the Zend Framework (whether the latest release or via subversion). You will also need to download/checkout the Zend Framework Incubator since Zend_Oauth is not yet part of the main trunk. Once you have stored both somewhere, make a note of the paths to their "library" directories so you can add them to the PHP include_path later.
  
  On the Twitter side there are three steps.
  
  First, get a Twitter account! Hopefully you already have one and are following @padraicb (i.e. me!).
  
  Second, you need to configure your operating system for a new local domain. Under Linux, this is done by editing /etc/hosts. You'll need root privileges here so use "sudo myeditor /etc/hosts". Under Windows, the same file is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and will require Administrator privileges to edit. Adding a local domain is dead simple, and it's needed to use Twitter's API on a local machine - Twitter refuse all requests from localhost or 127.0.0.1 but they won't filter out a local domain name since it's unfeasable and would make a lot of application developers extremely crazy. Edit the file to include a new entry like:
  
  127.0.0.1 mytwitterclient.tld
  
  Once saved, your browser should immediately respond to any address in the form of [mytwitterclient.tld] by attempting to call localhost/127.0.0.1 on your system. If you have a default web document root configured with a web server running, this is where the request will be mapped to and where you should store any files. If you are really troublesome and can't take how easy that was, you can run off to play with Virtual Host configurations to use a

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 37082 bytes)

• 

  MQ+PHP - Linking IBM’s WebSphere MQ to PHP

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 12:48pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org » PHP

  During a recent project at work I had to get PHP linked with IBM's WebSPhere MQ software we have running on another internal server. Our goal was to use our existing web service to take the requests from external vendors and push their XML data back into the queue inside our firewall. Thankfully there's an extension in PECL that does just that.

  Here's the basic steps I took - hopefully it'll be useful to someone else out there in the same spot I was. This all assumes you're working on a web server that doesn't have an MQ server installed already:

  • Get the extension: Head over to the PECL page for mqseries and download the latest version. Unpack it into a directory on your local server
  • Get the MQ client libs: You'll need to go to IBM's website to download the latest client/libraries for your install (you'll need an IBM ID to get to the downloads):
    • Go to the IBM page for the MQ client listing
    • Look for the "WebSphere MQ Clients" link under the "Related products and technologies" section and click on it
    • Scroll down to the "Download Package" section and choose from one of the mirror locations
    • Select your package from the list (I went with "Linux for System x86" for our setup)
    • Click on the download link and fill out some required information (you didn't think you were getting off that easy, did you?)
    • Agree to the terms and conditions and you'll get a "Download Now" link
    • Drop the archive file (tar, tar.gz, etc) into your server and unpack into a temporary directory (mine had an issue unpacking into the local directory, not a subdirectory)
  • Install the package(s): Once you have the IBM software extracted, you should have a series of packages. You'll need to install the "MQSeriesSDK" to get the right libraries in place to compile the PHP extension
  • Build the mqseries extension: Go into the mqseries directory and run "phpize", "./configure" and "make" to create the .so file. The process should drop it into the default extensions directory.
  • If needed, move it: Be sure that the shared module for the extension is in the right directory for the PHP install to find it. (You can make a phpinfo() page if you're not sure where that is.)
  • Update your php.ini: Add in a line to include the extension in your current setup. Remember, after any changes to the php.ini, you need to restart the web server.

  Now for the fun part - if everything's working and the extension shows up in your phpinfo() as active, give this script a shot and see if you can connect to your MQ server:

  PLAIN TEXT PHP:

  1. $mq_host_ip         ='127.0.0.1';
  2. $queue_name     = 'HOST.REMOTE.Q';
  3. $mq_server      = 'WBRK_QM_U49';
  4. $mqcno = array(
  5.         'Version' => MQSERIES_MQCNO_VERSION_2,
  6.         'Options' => MQSERIES_MQCNO_STANDARD_BINDING,
  7. "/>

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 5229 bytes)

• 

  BEPHPUG: Debugging mit Eclipse und Xdebug

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 7:45am MDT by till

  Mostly German content ahead!

  Die Berliner PHP Usergroup trifft sich am 5. August, ab 20:30 Uhr, in der Z-Bar.

  Thema: Debugging mit Eclipse und Xdebug (Vortragender: Marthin Rothenberger)

  Adresse:

  
  View Larger Map

  Teilnahme: kostenlos

  ( In English: The next meetup of the Berlin PHP Usergroup will take place on the 5th August, 2009. We'll meet at Z-Bar, at around 8:30 PM. This meetup's topic is Debugging with Eclipse and Xdebug. Feel free to join. The admission is free! (Free, as in free Beer, or something)! )

• 

  Yahoo going closer to Microsoft, Rasmus’ reaction

  Posted: July 29th, 2009, 6:33am MDT by Mark Karpeles

  We got a press release from Yahoo saying that Yahoo! and Microsoft are going to share search/advertizing. In fact only the first paragraph seems of any interest, the rest of the press release is mostly marketting bullshit.

  Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

  This sounds rather awful, and reply from Rasmus was quick.

  

  Of course I immediatly tried to confirm this on IRC…

  [21:20:51] <MagicalTu> [twitter.com] <- wtf ?
  [21:21:21] <Rasmus> See the Microsoft-Yahoo press release

  So now, we’ll see how it evolves, but I guess this press conference will change a lot of things, including in PHP’s world.

• 

  PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 44: Ed Finkler on Spaz

  Posted: July 28th, 2009, 8:12pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  One more PHP Abstract coming at you! In this episode I took Ed Finkler of Funkatron Productions aside while at php|tek in Chicago and got to talk with him briefly about his work on Spaz, one of the original twitter clients.
• 

  Zend Framework 1.9.0 RELEASE CANDIDATE 1 Now Available

  Posted: July 28th, 2009, 1:19pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of the first Release Candidate for 1.9.0: [framework.zend.com] Note that because these packages are not stable, they will not be found on the zend.com CDN; please scroll to the bottom of the above page to find links to this release.
• 

  5 million

  Posted: July 27th, 2009, 5:53pm MDT by Terry Chay

  “Five million, bitches”
  —my new reply every time someone mentions Ruby

  A friend of mine is learning to program, and how to learn a programming language came up.

  The issue is that there is a lot of people who are non-programmers and have taken programming classes and not learned to program. When I was a kid, those languages were BASIC, Logo, and Karel the Robot, now they are things like C#, Java, and Ruby. Still the same problem rears its ugly head.

  Recommending what you know

  The big thing that bothers me is, too often, I think people recommend what they know already or are are learning themselves. Ignore these people, they’re idiots.

  The first language I ever became an expert in was Pascal. It’s a highly structured language that was great for learning. The last time I coded in Pascal was in 1991 in order to prove computationally that some differential equation doesn’t approach e^x but rather the curve e^x-1. It’s not a forgiving language to be programming in today, the popularity of Delphi notwithstanding. I’m sorry, if you want to learn a language with OOP bolted on, you might as well put the C gun in your mouth, pull the trigger, and blow out your brain with C++.

  I don’t code in Pascal anymore. And I don’t plan to.

  (I’m sure there is someone out there recommending people learn Erlang as a first language. I’d be offended, but I figure they’ll be dismissed because they long ago lost the ability to speak coherently.)

  Filing for divorce

  One time at a McDonald’s in San Jose, I watched a guy talk to about six different people in their native language. Asking him on how to learn a language is futile. He is so far removed from the “learning” stage that he forgot. He picks up languages as easily as I pick up new cuss words.

  It occurs to me:

  We’re that guy.

  It’s hard for a programmer to give good advice on what language to learn because we’re so divorced from the learning part that we don’t know the answer ourselves.

  Answering by analogy

  But maybe that incident clues us in to the answer. If words have meaning through paradigm the reason we call it a programming language is because it is a language.

  Programming languages are a lot like real languages—maybe the best way to learn a language can be derived from how we learn real languages. You know you can learn it in a classroom, but immersion is a much faster way to learn.

  To learn to program is have an itch that needs scratching.

  If you have a need to program, then you will immerse yourself and learn fast. If you learn in a class, oftentimes it’s a lot like those years spent diagramming sentence grammar…

  

  or memorizing declensions…

  

  Sure, my understanding of the future-perfect tense has helped me write marginally better, but you’ll learn much faster and better if you really need to speak/write/use a language.

  I believe the fundamental problem with most programming courses is that they’re more an exercise in “look how smart the teacher is” and the theory behind the language rather than actually learning the language. You can’t get more than ten pages into an introductory book on programming before being hit by a wall of terms like “object-oriented” “run-time” and “compiler.” WTF?

  When I look back at

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2666 bytes)

• 

  iPhone Windowed HTTP Live Streaming Server

  Posted: July 27th, 2009, 5:22am MDT by IONCANNON

  After some more work I have enhanced the HTTP segmenter and uploading script from my iPhone">[http-live-streaming-using-amazon-s3-and-cloudfront-proof-of-concept] streaming using AWS S3 and Cloudfront post. I added a number of features and tried to pull together some of the ideas from the comments. I'll go over some of the features here and there is a full list of configuration options on the HTTP Live Video Streaming server project page and the source is available at the github repo.

  So the major changes I have added are:

  • Yaml based configuration file. See the project page for a complete list of options.
  • Ability to transfer segments via copy, ftp, scp and s3.
  • Added the ability to do variable bitrate streams.
  • Added re-streaming support.
  • Added logging to a file and better debug output.

  The variable bitrate streams where done by using pipes. I haven't done a large amount of testing but it seems to work fairly well. I am able to stream a live HD video source into 3 different bitrates on a fairly old PC. Here are a couple clips I created to show the progressive enhancement in action, you probably want to switch to the HD version of the video and watch it full screen to get the bet view:

  
  

  The configuration file will allow for any number of encoding options or transfer options and they can be put together in a number of different ways. Here are a couple examples of both, see the example configuration files for more.

  An encoder example:

  ep_128k:
    ffmpeg_command: "ffmpeg -er 4 -y -i %s -f mpegts -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 64k -s 320×240 -vcodec libx264 -b 128k -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4×4+partp8×8+partb8×8 -subq 5 -trellis 1 -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_range 16 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -bt 128k -maxrate 128k -bufsize 128k -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30 -aspect 320:240 -g 30 -async 2 – | %s %s %s %s %s"
    bandwidth: 128000

  
  

  Transfer configuration example:

  ftp_dev:
    transfer_type: 'ftp'
    remote_host: '192.168.1.1'
    user_name: 'user'
    password: 'pass'
    directory: 'html/streamingvideo'

  As a final note on changes, you are no longer able to use the segmenter without the script now really. If you want to do that you should use the original version of the segmenter source.

  Please note that there is still some work to be done on the script to be complete. If I have time my next enhancement will be to add encryption and I will probably try to test builds on other distributions (maybe attempt to create segmenter binaries).

  "/>

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 550 bytes)

• 

  Working with unreliable APIs

  Posted: July 27th, 2009, 4:28am MDT by Demian Turner

  

  Thanks to Andrew Betts, a PHPlondon regular, for coming up with BadAPI, a service that allows you to simulate misbehaving APIs.

  These days there’s almost no such thing as a web app that’s not integrating data from various external APIs, and with that integration comes a new set of problems the developer must handle.

  From the BadApi website:

  BadAPI allows you to simulate misbehaving APIs. This is useful if your site relies on the availability of service X, and you want to ensure that any downtime experienced by that service has minimal impact on your own application.

• 

  Helping out un-informed.org

  Posted: July 27th, 2009, 3:55am MDT by Lukas Smith

  A long time roommate is participating in the UN-informed project. The idea of the project is to create a database of all the various UN resolutions so that it becomes possible to quickly find everything about a given topic. Amazingly enough there is nothing like that at the moment. So its seemingly impossible to find out what resolution is still currently relevant, what resolution even has any legal value, who has ratified the resolution etc. The final database will become an invaluable tool for NGOs, researchers and even governments around the world. However most of the people on the project have a background in economics, politics and law.

  She asked me if I can help them out with building their IT infrastructure, mainly getting them away from the excel sheets they are using right now and onto a proper RDBMS with an administration interface and more importantly a frontend for end users. Ideally this would not be a one man show however. For one I suck at frontend work (and I do not particularly enjoy it either), the time I can dedicate to this is obviously limited and obviously its never good to have one guy doing it all (bus factor and all).

  So far we are working out a DB schema (note for now I am using ENUM's not sure if that will stay this way in the final design). For the next step I am thinking of using symfony admin generator together with Doctrine to generate a first draft of the admin interface. I do not have experience with the admin generator, so I am not sure how easily custom tools can be integrated (we have a few ideas to make it easier to select the proper tags for example), so in the end we might have to move away from the admin generator.

  Anyways, is anyone interested in joining in to help out?

• 

  Unapologetic To The End? I think Zend_OpenId hates me... Hates it back!

  Posted: July 26th, 2009, 7:03pm MDT by Pádraic Brady

  Disclaimer: The following is obviously a spur of the moment tirade of sarcastic commentary and lots of (probably bad) humour. A lot of it refers to events from two years ago (that's around ZF 0.8!). Ancient history . Mostly. In any case, I have to rant about something once a year related to the Zend Framework. It's traditional. Park any attempt to take this too seriously at the door. I get a bit dramatic at times...
  
  In certain places, I do sometimes get a reputation of being a crazy person. Usually it happens shortly after I find myself going down a road that leads somewhere truly undesireable (or when I throw in a weird blog post like this one). I had one of those moments today that served as a flashback to such a point in time from 2007. It's not the first time, but it will be the last since I'll ignore it completely from now on. Believe it or not, I do get a bit upset at myself when I let these times get to me. They are completely unimportant and silly - but when I have to relive them I will react in a pretty irritated fashion (ed: that should be kneejerk incendiary fashion).
  
  This one started in 2007, right about the time I was first starting to write proposals for the Zend Framework. I felt pretty great at the time. I had lots of ideas, plenty of motivation, and then it all seemed to go downhill from there. The turning point was in June 2007, when after three months of work I felt I had enough done to propose OpenID support for the framework. Obviously a worthy cause, and also one which shouldn't cause much grief since the ZF keeps advertising its wicked web service support. Before long, that boat was scuttled with news that Zend itself had been working on just such a proposal. Okay, that was disappointing. Zend had somehow managed to completely miss a three month effort on OpenID. Just another day on the farm. Next step? Collaborate? So I waited a few days and Zend's code for what would become Zend_OpenId appeared in my inbox. Let the review commence! Okay, that ended a bit abruptly...it's a bit short. Almost like it's missing stuff and was written in a handful of days as a prototype. Talking went on and off for a while, and eventually my interest in collaborating petered out. Like any open source contributor, I participate to scratch an itch. My OpenID itch was well and truly scratched by now with my own source code, and continuing to throw time at another OpenID solution based on a different paradigm with a different ideology, little of which I agreed with, when I already had one functional was pretty pointless compared to something that still needed scratching like the Zend_View Enhanced proposal (and I really needed that shepherded through). So Zend_OpenId continued without my assistance, with something for Yadis persisting in the Incubator as an orphaned proposal. It still persists waiting that one final patch and call to the trunk... One day...
  
  This all sounds reasonable and a bit dry, but in reality I found it all intolerable. A self-professed OpenID expert who is a member of an OpenID Foundation decides to add OpenID support to the Zend Framework after working on it for three months and who has actual code to prove it, is then told about the other proposal which just happens to be coming at the same time, and has code...of course. Well, a bit of code. If I were a real nut...I'd have a field day. Collaborate? I'd already finished this twice. I'm supposed to go for round three? Yeah, I admit, I was getting pissed off very quickly back then. I was close to constructing an elaborate conspiracy between Zend, George W. Bush and the Illuminati (how could you NOT have the Illuminati ). What was nagging me from the start was the obvious - I should have told someone to stuff that proposal somewhere and forged ahead with my own. Of course I didn't. I was new, and had green stuff growing out of my ears, and it was Zend. The Zend. Silly me...
  
  The summer of 2007 left me wishing the Zend Framework Proposal Process would shrivel, die and get gobbled down by Orcses (I was hoping for Gollum but he's a hotshot movie star now). It remains the single worst open source experience I have had since I joined the open source gig in 1995. Not only was it discouraging, it was demoralising. There were points when I was driven to contemplate whether my input was even wanted. Which is probably why I remain so overly sensitive about it - I can understand the new guy is immediately suspect. But not like this. In September 2007 I finally wrote the blog post ""/>

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 6120 bytes)

• 

  Setting Up PEAR2 and PEAR Checkouts With SVN 1.5+

  Posted: July 25th, 2009, 12:32pm MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

  Now that pear2 is in svn.php.net, it is possible to do commits with
  multiple packages using a feature of subversion called “sparse checkouts.”

  Rasmus wrote about this for setting up php checkouts here:
  [news.php.net]

  Here is the version I used to set up pear and pear2 in a way that will
  allow committing to both pear and pear2 packages in a single commit.
  For packages like Console_CommandLine that live in both repositories,
  this is very useful for tracking merges.  (Note: on windows, get
  TortoiseSVN 1.6.3, and right-click “checkout” for checkout, and use the
  “update to revision” option for the sparse updates)

  svn co [svn.php.net] –set-depth empty phpsvn
  cd phpsvn
  svn up –set-depth immediates pear pear2
  svn up –set-depth immediates pear2/* pear/*
  svn up –set-depth infinity pear2/*/trunk pear/*/trunk
  svn up –set-depth immediates pear2/sandbox
  svn up –set-depth infinity pear2/sandbox/*/trunk
  svn up –set-depth immediates pear/peardoc
  svn up –set-depth infinity pear/peardoc/trunk

  At this point, your work is done.  You can perform the same steps for
  pearweb if you’re a maintainer, and be on your way.

  With the above setup, when you make a change to a package, you can
  update the documentation immediately and commit it together, by changing
  to phpsvn and running “svn commit” (Windows: right-click on the phpsvn
  folder and choose “svn commit”)

  Hopefully this will get people started with being able to develop more
  efficiently and to work effectively with PEAR2.

  If you want to start a Pear2 package, all you need to do is send an
  email to the pear-dev@lists.php.net, and the PEAR Group will get you set up.  I’m happy to answer
  any questions.

  Greg Beaver

• 

  Setting Up PEAR2 and PEAR Checkouts With SVN 1.5+

  Posted: July 25th, 2009, 12:32pm MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

  Now that pear2 is in svn.php.net, it is possible to do commits with
  multiple packages using a feature of subversion called “sparse checkouts.”

  Rasmus wrote about this for setting up php checkouts here:
  [news.php.net]

  Here is the version I used to set up pear and pear2 in a way that will
  allow committing to both pear and pear2 packages in a single commit.
  For packages like Console_CommandLine that live in both repositories,
  this is very useful for tracking merges.  (Note: on windows, get
  TortoiseSVN 1.6.3, and right-click “checkout” for checkout, and use the
  “update to revision” option for the sparse updates)

  svn co [svn.php.net] –set-depth empty phpsvn
  cd phpsvn
  svn up –set-depth immediates pear pear2
  svn up –set-depth immediates pear2/* pear/*
  svn up –set-depth infinity pear2/*/trunk pear/*/trunk
  svn up –set-depth immediates pear2/sandbox
  svn up –set-depth infinity pear2/sandbox/*/trunk
  svn up –set-depth immediates pear/peardoc
  svn up –set-depth infinity pear/peardoc/trunk

  At this point, your work is done.  You can perform the same steps for
  pearweb if you’re a maintainer, and be on your way.

  With the above setup, when you make a change to a package, you can
  update the documentation immediately and commit it together, by changing
  to phpsvn and running “svn commit” (Windows: right-click on the phpsvn
  folder and choose “svn commit”)

  Hopefully this will get people started with being able to develop more
  efficiently and to work effectively with PEAR2.

  If you want to start a Pear2 package, all you need to do is send an
  email to the pear-dev@lists.php.net, and the PEAR Group will get you set up.  I’m happy to answer
  any questions.

  Greg Beaver

• 

  PHP Job: PHP ‘guru’ position in San Francisco

  Posted: July 24th, 2009, 11:57am MDT by Terry Chay

  Senior Software Engineer (PHP/MYSQL)

  Someone who has help build scalable web apps for sites with millions of users at established Web 2.0 company.

  Seeking a self-directed senior software engineer with a desire to build scalable and interesting web applications. We desire someone who is comfortable writing efficient database schemas, clean and efficient back-end code, and has passionate opinions about user interface and interaction. Developer will be working to design and implement new features and improve the overall experience for millions of people. Developer will be part of a team that works on diverse, site-spanning projects involving community-facing tools, video, web services, security, anti-spam, user-to-user interaction, advertiser network, and more. Projects will be for both internal tools and highly-used public-facing products.

  
  Key Qualifications:

  • 5+ years software development experience
  • 5+ years MySQL programming experience
  • 5+ years PHP
  • Linux/Unix expertise is essential
  • Experience with version control systems such as Subversion or CVS
  • Intermediate to advanced html/DOM experience (ability to understand and slightly tweak UI team’s output)
  • Experience with C/C++ a bonus
  • JavaScript and JSON experience a bonus
  • AJAX familiarity; intermediate to advanced experience a bonus
  • Desire to work in a fast-paced environment
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills
  • Strong collaborative skills and flexibility in fulfilling multiple roles
  • Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science or related; or equivalent work experience

  If interested, please contact Joe Jeffrey @ 650-261-0411

• 

  Join Mayflower on Facebook

  Posted: July 24th, 2009, 11:39am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

  Do you know about our famous "Mayflower Thursday" tech talk events which are open to the public at our offices in Munich and Würzburg? How the "Maiblümchen" (that's how we call our employees because we love them so much) from Munich and Würzburg compete with each other at the local business run events? See photos of famous PHP BBQ events? Which cool projects we have launched for our customers? Just join our Mayflower group at Facebook (People working at, alumni and friends and family of Mayflower GmbH) and you won't miss those things in the future.

• 

  The greedyness of non-greedy regular expressions

  Posted: July 24th, 2009, 2:53am MDT by Liip

  We all love regular expressions, don't we? Well I usually do, but recently I lost quite a lot of time to find out this bit of particular behavior, so i thought i might share this.

  Greedyness is basically the question whether an expression matches as much as it can, or as little as necessary. You find an excellent explanation and examples here. The default is to match as much as possible. The syntax *? , +? and ?? makes the quantifiers non-greedy. However, even the non-greedy expressions may match more than you expect.

  Consider this String:

  <a href="http://planet-php.net/link">Label</a> <a href="http://planet-php.net/en">[en]</a> <a href="http://planet-php.net/fr">[fr]</a>
  

  And the regular expression

  <a href=".*?">\[[a-z]*\]</a>
  

  The ".*?" after the href=" tells the regexp engine to match non-greedy. If we omit the non-greedy order, the expression would generate one single match of the whole string. The non-greedy version generates two matches. But the first match is not the absolute minimum match on the input string:

  <a href="http://planet-php.net/link">Label</a> <a href="http://planet-php.net/en">[en]</a>

  The non-greedyness seems to result in the expression generating the maximum number of matches, but not necessarily the smallest possible match strings. A fixed regular expression to only match the language links would be this expression, which explicitely excludes the closing quotation mark from the match.

  <a href="[^"]*">\[[a-z]*\]</a>
  

  I played around with this nice web tool to test regular expressions while writing this post.

• 

  Making Life Better With The SPL Autoloader

  Posted: July 24th, 2009, 1:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

  How many of us have seen this example in code we’ve worked on?

  <?php
  
  require '/path/to/lib/DatabaseI.php';
  require '/path/to/lib/Database.php';
  require '/path/to/lib/Authenticate.php';
  require '/path/to/lib/User.php';
  require '/path/to/lib/BlogEntry.php';
  require '/path/to/lib/Comments.php';
  require '/path/to/lib/TemplateLoader.php';
  
  ?>
  

  …and well you get the point…

  If you’ve been in the business for any length of time you’d recognize this because almost every single PHP developer does it at one point or another.

  Until they learn about SPL’s autoload functions, that is.

  There’s a nifty feature built into PHP called spl_autoload_register(). This nifty function allows us to define a callback function that we can then use to automatically load things.

  For example, we can do this:

  <?php
  
  set_include_path(realpath('/path/to/lib') . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path());
  
  function autoload($className)
  {
  		require($className . '.php');
  }
  
  spl_autoload_register('autoload');
  
  $Database = new Database();
  
  ?>
  

  That’s it! That’s all there is to defining your own autoloader. This autoloader will then try to automatically get the files needed to instantiate the classes you’re calling.

  This has the benefit of not loading excess code that you may never need, which will improve your performance and the time it takes to execute your scripts. In fact, some people have found major performance improvements by using the autoloader.

  Now someone is probably thinking “wait, my classes are organized into libraries and placed into their directories. I don’t have to define all of those directories, do I?”

  The short answer is no. The long answer is that the autoloader allows us to define any rules we like, so we can do any number of things. Some of my favorite solutions:

  * Build a list when the application runs the first time, and allow the autoloader to rebuild its list if something isn’t found, and then fail gracefully.
  * Build a list on the fly, and store that in memory (memcached, APC, etc.)
  * Have a hard-coded list, and throw an exception if a class outside that list is called.
  * Apply the PECL naming conventions, and use a regular expression or explode() to derive the file path.

  Because the spl_autoload_register() function lets you write any logic you like, you can make your rules as stringent or as loose as you like.

  So spl_autoload_register() in, long sets of include and require statements out!

• 

  XDebug Slides – OSCON 2009

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 7:05pm MDT by Brandon Savage

  I gave a talk at OSCON 2009 called “XDebug Your Code: Tips and Tricks for Writing Bug-Free High Impact Code.” The talk included slides, which are posted here for people to download and use.

  Enjoy!

  XDebug Talk OSCON Slides (PDF)

• 

  “Rickroll To Go…” ZendCon Session audio posted!

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 2:23pm MDT by Brian DeShong

  My ZendCon 2008 talk, “Rickroll To Go With WURFL, PHP, and Other Open Source Tools”, was just released at Zend DevZone as ZendCon Sessions episode #23!

  If you’re just now finding my blog from there, welcome! And thanks to Eli White, Community Relations Manager for Zend, for selecting it for posting.

  You can get all of the relevant info using the links below:

  Slides and videos of the presentation materials
  ZendCon Sessions page with audio
  MP3 audio of the presentation
  iTunes DevZone podcast

  Enjoy, and thanks for listening! Find me on Twitter or email me if you’d like to discuss the materials.

• 

  Forking PHP!

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 12:17pm MDT by Brian Moon

  We use PHP everywhere in our stack. For us, it makes sense because we have hired a great staff of PHP developers. So, we leverage that talent by using PHP everywhere we can.

  One place where people seem to stumble with PHP is with long running PHP processes or parallel processing. The pcntl extension gives you the ability to fork PHP processes and run lots of children like many other unix daemons might. We use this for various things. Most notably, we use it run Gearman worker processes. While at the OReilly Open Sourc Convention in 2009, we were asked about how we pulled this off. So, we are releasing the two scripts that handle the forking and some instructions on how we use them.

  This is not a detailed post about long running PHP scripts.  Maybe I can get to the dos and don'ts of that another time.  But, these are the scripts we use to manage long running processes.  They work great for us on Linux.  They will not run on Windows at all.  We also never had any trouble running them on Mac OS X.

  The first script, prefork.php, is for forking a given function from a given file and running n children that will execute that function. There can be a startup function that is run before any forking begins and a shutdown function to run when all the children have died.

  The second script, prefork_class.php, uses a class with defined methods instead of relying on the command line for function names. This script has the added benefit of having functions that can be run just before each fork and after each fork. This allows the parent process to farm work out to each child by changing the variables that will be present when the child starts up. This is the script we use for managing our Gearman workers. We have a class that controls how many workers are started and what functions they provide. I may release a generic class that does that soon. Right now it is tied to our code library structure pretty tightly.

  We have also included two examples. They are simple, but do work to show you how the scripts work.

  You can download the code from the dealnews.com developers' page.

• 

  Why I love PHP

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 11:22am MDT by Manuel Pichler

  While working on PHP_Depend's parser I realized one major reason Why I love PHP, it's the flexibility of language. Even if you think you now know all ways to solve a problem, there is always one more way to solve it.

  
  class f {
      function bar() { echo __METHOD__, '()', PHP_EOL; }
      function __toString() { return 'v'; }
  }
  class v { function __toString() { return 'c'; } }
  class m { function __toString() { return 'bar'; } }
  
  $c = 'f';
  
  $${'v'} = new ${(string) new ${$v = 'v'}()}();
  $$$$$$v->{(string) new m()}();
   

  But to be serious, don't be worried, if you don't get it.

• 

  The ZendCon Sessions Episode 23: Rickroll To Go With PHP, WURFL, and Other Open Source Tools

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 10:54am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  Presenting the latest edition of The ZendCon Sessions. The podcast that rebroadcasts sessions/talks from the last ZendCon PHP Conference. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and features Brian DeShong giving his talk: “Rickroll To Go With PHP , WURFL , and Other Open Source Tools”
• 

  Zend Framework 1.9.0 Beta Now Available

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 8:55am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of a beta release of version 1.9.0: [framework.zend.com] Note that because these packages are not stable, they will not be found on the zend.com CDN; please scroll to the bottom of the above page to find links to this release.
• 

  Hiring PHP5 Programmers

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 7:36am MDT by Rich Zygler

  My company has placed an ad looking for more PHP5 programmers to work mostly in the social networking area.  We have a coding test that we give to everyone whose resume passes muster.  It’s a basic test, includes some CRUD database functions as well as creating a basic Facebook app.  We specify PHP5 all over the place.

  But no one who takes the test ever uses any of PHP5’s attributes.  Not one test app has come back using classes of any kind other then the Facebook reference.

  Am I being too hard on people for this?  Maybe we need to specify that creating classes is recommended if not mandatory?  I don’t  know what the answer is, but I know that upon receiving several recent test apps in “PHP5″ that have include files that contain only functions, I’m a little depressed.  And yes, I used the quotes around php5 on purpose.

  .

  Share this via del.icio.us, digg, email, etc.

• 

  PHPUnit with Zend_Controller_Action_Helper

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 12:36am MDT by Lorna Mitchell

  I'm currently working on a REST service built in Zend Framework and I ran into problems very quickly - when I tried to write the first unit test for the first action in fact! PHPUnit was just dying when I asked it to dispatch() any URL which didn't return html, it wasn't even giving its usual output.
  
  What was actually happening was I was making use of Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Json, my service returns JSON and this action helper takes input, transforms it into JSON, sets the content-type correctly and tells ZF not to look for a view since we don't need one. I thought this was pretty neat.
  
  But look at the start of the declaration for the action helper:
  
  class Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Json extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Abstract
  {
      /**
       * Suppress exit when sendJson() called
       * @var boolean
       */
      public $suppressExit = false;
  ...
   
  By default the JSON action helper will exit() - which of course when run from phpunit causes that to exit as well! There is the class variable there so it was simple to turn off - I just extended my class and changed the value of that $suppressExit variable.
  
  class Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ServiceJson extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Json {
      public $suppressExit = true;
  }
   
  My tests now run successfully and I can build my application, hopefully next time I'll realise what I'm doing wrong faster!
• 

  Unicode identifiers

  Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 4:33pm MDT by Johannes Schlüter

  When I see people talking about Unicode and PHP 6 I often see them mentioning one fact as a big change: PHP 6 allows (mostly any) arbitrary Unicode character as (part of an) identifier. So you can have code like this:

  function 新日本石油() {
    echo "Let's hope this isn't an offensive function name... ";
    echo "it's copied from some news site";
}

新日本石油();

  Well yes, that's funny, at first but serves a purpose: Consider you have an application tied to an environment with a special terminology, then translating this terms to English might be extremely confusing (especially as programmers often don't really know the correct terminology of that domain) and it's good to call the thing by it's name - while that can be quite complicated, too, in a previous job we had such a case and often used the German terms which produced quite funny names for getters and setters which didn't satisfy us ... but that's not what I wanted to talk about.

  The purpose of this were some bad news: That's nothing new. The relevant scanner rule hasn't changed since 4.0 - the only change is that PHP 6 doesn't treat it as random set of bytes anymore but knows about Unicode codepoints and interprets is as such.

  Out of interest I did some little digging into the PHP repository's history:

  $ svn annotate trunk/Zend/zend_language_scanner.l
...
34779 zeev LABEL [a-zA-Z_\x7f-\xff][a-zA-Z0-9_\x7f-\xff]*
...
$ svn log -r 34779
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r34779 | zeev | 2000-10-29 15:35:34 +0100 (Sun, 29 Oct 2000) | 2 lines

Unify the names of these last 3 files...

------------------------------------------------------------------------


  The result? - The rule, as it is in PHP 6 wasn't changed since 2000, really nothing new there with PHP 6, and even then the only change was that the scanner file was renamed...

• 

  PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 43: Future of PHP and Standards

  Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 10:44am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  It’s about time for some more PHP Abstract! In this episode I sit around a table with Keith Casey and Cal Evans as we ramble on a bit discussing the future of PHP (including PHP 5.3 and PHP 6) as well as talking about the framework standards group that has been formed. This was recorded while at php|tek in Chicago, before PHP 5.3 was released.
• 

  Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch.

  Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 3:36am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

  ... so titelt die Werbe- und Sympathiekampagne des Landes Baden-Württemberg. Auf einen ähnlichen Gedanken muß wohl der anonyme Forenschreiber bei golem.de gekommen sein, als er einen Kommentar zur von uns versandten Pressemitteilung zur neuen Version von phpMyFAQ postete. In seinem Forenbeitrag schrieb der anonyme Poster (Rächtschreipunkfehler unredigiert übernommen):

  Das sagt doch alles.... Ausgeblasene Typen, die meinen, sie hätten voll die Peilung. Dabei können die NIX!!

   

  Unser technischer Leiter, Johann-Peter Hartmann, überlegt ganz kurz und kommt zum Schluss:

  Das mit dem "NIX können" stimmt leider und ärgert uns auch ziemlich.
  
  Deshalb investieren wir viel Zeit und Geld, um bessser zu werden. Schliesslich bekommt man Knowhow nicht durch selbstgefühlte Leetness, Marketingkampagnen und Mehrheitsbeschlüsse hin, sondern durch echte Arbeit.

   

  Auch wenn Mayflower ein bayrisches Unternehmen ist, so sind uns die Tugenden der Kollegen aus dem Südwesten der Republik bestens bekannt. Und so erklärt Johann gebetsmühlenartig und in einer sehr ausführlichen Replik, was wir alles unternehmen, um unser KnowHow zu verbessern - wir meinen, dass wir stolz darauf sein können, wieviel wir in den Aufbau und die Verbesserung des KnowHows investieren. Wir können die Leser beruhigen: es ist weder selbstgefühlte Leetness noch weichgespülte Marketingkampagnen, sondern harte Arbeit. Ohne diese könnten wir sonst nicht seit vielen Jahren erfolgreiche & komplexe Industrieprojekte im Webumfeld zur Zufriedenheit unserer Kunden realisieren.

   

  Übrigens, phpMyFAQ ist kein Produkt der Firma Mayflower. Thorsten Rinne hat's erfunden & programmiert ;-) Mayflower schätzt den Wert von OpenSource Software und hilft unseren Mitarbeitern, die aktiv OpenSource Projekte entwickeln, zum Beispiel durch den Versand von Pressemitteilungen bei neuen Releases. Auch auf unseren jährlichen Barcamps steht die Entwicklung für OpenSource Software wie PHProjekt oder phpMyFAQ hoch im Kurs. Und wir mögen die PHP Community, was man auch daran erkennen kann, dass wir zusammen mit anderen Sponsoren die PHP 5.3 Release Party unterstützt haben, auf der knapp 100 Personen anwesend waren (Nachlese zB hier).

   

  PS: wer Ironie findet, darf sie behalten :-)

• 

  Welcome PHP 5.3!

  Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 1:10am MDT by Liip

   Since we did not make it to the 5.3 release party in Munich, we decided to record a little video instead. Memi, our resident movie director, steered the camera and took care of the post production. Since we had a fair number of visitors from the Fribourg/Bern offices, we managed to put together a fairly representative \a-ho\a-wave.

  At Liip we have been closely tracking the development. Actually through my role as release manager probably more than close. Long before 5.3 was released we had already made sure that OkAPI, FluxCMS and friends are running smoothly with the upcoming release. So soon we will start launching our first projects using PHP 5.3, leveraging the new features and enjoying the nice improvements in performance.

• 

  Get Your Cloud on with Zend Server CE

  Posted: July 21st, 2009, 5:31pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  With their promise of massive scalability and high availability, Amazon Web Services (AWS) are getting a lot of attention from PHP developers. In particular, EC2 can run fully optimized and configured PHP environments that can be used to test and deploy applications without the headaches of hardware provisioning and management. But developers have been left with the chore of building and finely tuning these PHP images. No more! Zend has built a full-featured Zend Server CE Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that can be spun up and ready to do your bidding within minutes. In this article, I'll show how easy it is to find and launch this AMI.
• 

  Use Registry To Remember Objects (So You Don’t Have To)

  Posted: July 21st, 2009, 3:30pm MDT by Brandon Savage

  One of the biggest challenges in OOP programming with PHP is the ability to pass around objects and let other objects use them. This challenge can be solved with careful design, however. Here we will discuss the registry pattern, not a member of the GoF’s original patterns but still an important pattern nonetheless.
  

  Warning: Design patterns are about solving problems, not adhering to specific rules or limiting creativity. To that end, if you get hot and bothered when someone presents an idea that doesn’t mesh with your preconceived notions about design pattern theory, this probably isn’t the blog post for you.

  Take the following code example:

  <?php
  
  class DatabaseObj
  {
  protected $_resource;
  
  public function __construct($user, $pass, $db)
  {
  // Connect to the database.
  
  $this->_resource = $returnedResource;
  }
  
  public function getData($string)
  {
  // Query the database
  
  return $resultResource;
  }
  
  public function clean($var)
  {
  // Do cleaning here.
  
  return $varClean;
  }
  }
  
  class Authenticate
  {
  
  protected $dbObj;
  
  public function checkCredentials($user, $pass)
  {
  
  $userClean = $dbObj->clean($user);
  $passClean = $dbObj->clean($pass);
  
  return $dbObj->getData('SELECT * FROM users WHERE user = "' . $userClean . '" AND pass = MD5("' . $passClean . '")');
  }
  }
  

  This is fairly straight-forward, right? Well, no. We want to use our defined database object. However, we have to supply that object to Authenticate in order to use it (and avoid getting an error). There are a few ways to do this. We could do this:

  <?php
  
  class Authenticate
  {
  
  protected $dbObj;
  
  public function __construct($user, $pass, $db)
  {
  
  $this->dbObj = new DatabaseObj($user, $pass, $db);
  
  }
  
  public function checkCredentials($user, $pass)
  {
  
  $userClean = $this->dbObj->clean($user);
  $passClean = $this->dbObj->clean($pass);
  
  return $this->dbObj->getData('SELECT * FROM users WHERE user = "' . $userClean . '" AND pass = MD5("' . $passClean . '")');
  }
  }
  
  ?>
  

  This would certainly give us a database object to use. However, if we have six or seven objects in our script, creating a new database object each time means that you’d have six or seven MySQL connections by the end of the script, which is not optimal! Also, if you ever change the signature of the constructor in the database object, you have to change it everywhere else that instantiates the object, which could be every single object. This is a problem.

  We could also turn the database class into a singleton, and make our code look like this:

  <?php
  class DatabaseObj
  {
  protected static $thisObj = false;
  
  protected $_resource;
  
  protected $user = 'me';
  protected $pass = 'P@ssw0rd!';
  protected $db = 'mydb';
  
  protected function __construct($user = null, $pass = null, $db = null)
  {
  // Connect to the database.
  
  $this->_resource = $returnedResource;
  }
  
  public function getData($string)
  {
  // Query the database
  
  return $resultResource;
  }
  
  public function clean($var)
  {
  // Do cleaning here.
  
  return $varClean;
  }
  
  public static function getConnection($user = null, $pass = null, $db = null)
  {
  if((self::$thisObj instanceof DatabaseObj))
  return self::$thisObj;
  
  self::$thisObj = new DatabaseObj($user, $pass, $db);
  
  return self::$thisObj;
  }
  }
  
  class Authenticate
  {
  
  protected $dbObj;
  
  public function __construct()
  {
  $this->dbObj = DatabaseObj::getConnection();
  }
  
  public function checkCredentials($user, $pass)
  {
  
  $userClean = $this->dbObj->clean($user);
  $passClean = $this->dbObj->clean($pass);
  
  return $this->dbObj->getData('SELECT * FROM users WHERE user = "' . $userClean . '" AND pass = MD5("' . $passClean . '")');
  }
  }
  
  ?>
  

  Using this design pattern will ensure that you always get the same database object no matter what. This is exactly the behavior we want: it ensures that we never establish more than one connection and it takes care of the signature problem (albeit not completely). Let’s take a moment to discuss how and why this works.

  In PHP 4, objects were essentially arrays with functions associated with them. That changed in PHP 5, when objects became more like real objects, being stored in memory and returning a “pointer” to the lookup table (for more on how objects work in PHP5 you should read Sara Golemon’s blog post "/>

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 5382 bytes)

• 

  New job!

  Posted: July 21st, 2009, 12:52pm MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

  I am quite excited to announce that I have found a new job. Starting two weeks from now, I will be working at Unet, a dutch company for broadband, fiber and VOIP services mostly aimed at the business market. My job will combine senior developer work with being the team lead of the PHP development team at Unet.
• 

  Type Hinting - Conclusion

  Posted: July 21st, 2009, 6:47am MDT by Ilia Alshanetsky

  It has been a rather crazy last two weeks at work, so I didn't get a chance to revisit the type hinting matter. Unfortunately, while initial outpouring of support for inclusion of type hinting into PHP 5.3 and 6 was substantial, it all kinda petered out once more people started voting. To be specific, there is a large amount of support for the feature in general, but very few people seem to think it should go into 5.3.
  
  I feel that 5.3 is the only release that would make this feature usable, since that is the version of PHP I could see myself using at work in a near future as well as a release other people would be using for the next few years, at least. PHP 6 is just very far a way from any sort of a release, let alone a production worthy version and at the same time there is no tentative agreement on making 5.4 in the near future. If it went to 5.3, which would be "work worthy" I could justify spending the time to maintain the patch across all branches, but with PHP 6 only, it is simply too impractical.
  
  That said, at work we will transition to 5.3 soon, probably around 5.3.2/3 time, so I do need a type hinting patch. To that effect I've cleaned up and improved the old patch based on comments from various people, notably Stas and Dmitry (thank guys) and made a copy that I intend to use for work.
  
  The patch is now pure type hinting, no more virtual types like SCALAR and NUMERIC, it also does not offer any type casting support. Basically its just a type hinting patch, with full reflection support. Since the last iteration of the patch the following improvements have been made:
  
  1) Modify the parser to not reserve string/integer/etc... keywords used for type hinting. Won't break code that uses "class string", etc...
  2) Added getTypeHint() reflection method to determine the type of hint a parameter has
  3) Revised the parser (thanks Stas) to properly parse out type hints.
  
  The patch can be found here: [ilia.ws]
  and the test suit here: [ilia.ws]
  
  Update July 22, 2009
  
  A bug was found by Gwynne, which prevented constants (other then NULL) from being used as default values of type hints, she was also kind enough to provide the patch for the problem. The patch was updated with this fix and an additional test was added for this eventuality. Thanks Gwynne!
  
• 

  SabreDAV 0.9

  Posted: July 20th, 2009, 11:02pm MDT by Evert Pot

  Just released the 0.9 version of SabreDAV.

  This release mainly contains bugfixes and some API changes that will facilitate future extensions, such as ACL and CalDAV.

  • download
  • Migrating from 0.8 to 0.9
  • Full Changelog

  Although these changes might not be relevant to most people, upgrading is recommended in order to keep a solid upgrade path. Fortunately for most people the API breaks are minimal.

  
• 

  Speaking at symfony Day 2009

  Posted: July 20th, 2009, 3:17pm MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

  On september 4th Germany will see a new conference: symfony Day Cologne. I am happy to announce that I will be hosting a full-day workshop at this new symfony conference.
• 

  More about “In the Cloud”

  Posted: July 20th, 2009, 1:28pm MDT by Maggie Nelson

  Schematic gave me some props for speaking at the NYSE panel I mentioned earlier:

  

  Thanks for the reference!

• 

  Zend_Feed_Writer and Zend_PubSubHubbub In Proposal Queue

  Posted: July 19th, 2009, 9:03am MDT by Pádraic Brady

  I have a few proposals with Zend Framework. I also have an established record of not finishing them very reliably, yay! Ok, so that's not a good thing. I seem to have established a weird tradition of finding myself in just the right scenario at the completely wrong time to hold me up. Luckily (it's a bit like thinking THIS year will see a real Summer in Ireland), I do have oddles of time to burn right now. The ZF book is finally climbing Reboot Hill (the translated versions are progressing, and I will get to the next chapter soon - lots happened in the ZF since the drafts were written). Zend_Feed_Reader is in the ZF trunk, and definitely will be in 1.9. Zend_Oauth has been reviewed by me and patches are incoming in the next day to finish it (that should make it's way into 1.10 along with Zend_Crypt).
  
  Before this all goes sour and I a) wind up hospitalised after a freak accident involving Stephen Fry running me down while sending a Tweet on an iphone, b) see Eircom attacked by mysterious hackers intent on the downfall of Brian Cowen because he shows his appreciation for free speech by introducing legislation with the new criminal act of "blasphemy" defined or c) I'm abducted by Kerrymen (just because...well...they're all mad down there), I've started pounding frantically on my keyboard for a new proposal called Zend_Feed_Writer.
  
  ZFW is the counterpart to Zend_Feed_Reader (as if that wasn't obvious). It's purpose is to, once again, offer an alternative to the current Zend_Feed component using similar principles to those applied in Zend_Feed_Reader:
  
  1. Use a simple, intuitive and limited API to eliminate guesswork and uncertainty.
  2. Utilise PHP's DOM to handle the complex internal construction of feeds.
  3. Adhere to standards: RSS 2.0 (based on the RSS Advisory Board 2.0.11 spec) and Atom 1.0 (RFC 4287)
  4. Behind the scenes, implement support for commonly used RSS/Atom modules like Dublin Core/Slash/Atom Threads
  5. Allow users to implement/register Extensions (i.e. plugins) to add support for other modules
  6. Liberally throw tests at every conceivable (including the possibly insane) scenario for use.
  
  Just like Zend_Feed_Reader, there is obviously a question mark. Do we even need an alternative to Zend_Feed? ZFR had the major advantage that it was conceived of not only as a major simplification making developer's lives significantly easier, but also as something that understood feeds - it was able to sift through numerous alternatives for commonly queried data points until it found a match, removing the need for developers to take on that role with custom abstraction layers and interpretive work. Zend_Feed_Writer does something similar, only in reverse. It creates feeds based on the most commonly inputted data points which contain the most logical or specification defined elements. It removes the guesswork, the need to cram up on the RSS/Atom standards, the specifications and the specs for all the different modules used. It eliminates work - and that's always been the main goal. If you want to learn a bit more - look at the Zend Framework 1.9 Preview, and compare the documentation for Zend_Feed with that for Zend_Feed_Reader. It should highlight where both diverge in a meaningful way.
  
  I'm currently drafting the Zend_Feed_Writer proposal over at Zend_Feed_Writer - Padraic Brady.
  
  Which brings us to upcoming proposal number two, the colourfully named Zend_PubSubHubbub! Or Zend_Feed_PubSubHubbub depending on which name is most appropriate.
  
  To explain, PubSubHubbub defines a protocol where any subscriber (that's you) can subscribe to a hub server which notifies you when any feed you want to follow has changed. Wait for it... Publishers, the origin of the RSS/Atom feeds you want to follow, can then notify their hub server which in turn notifies you. It's a push system. Publisher adds new content, and notifies Hub immediately. The Hub can then push the update to you right away. There is no polling every 30 mins for new content - it's delivered to you, or you are told where to fetch it from, right away. It eliminates the delay between source and polling, the lack of which has given services like Twitter a major advantage in getting news/articles/videos out to hundreds of people almost instantaneously and seen traditional feeds lose some of their attraction. As the PubSubHubbub team put it:
  
  

  A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom.
  
  Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (Atom URL) they're interested in is updated.
  
  The protocol in a nutshell is as follows:
  
  An Atom URL (a "topic")

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 3321 bytes)

• 

  Dynamically Create Menu With PHP DOM

  Posted: July 19th, 2009, 5:43am MDT by Kevin Waterson

  Programatically createing menus using php is a task many programmers will need to do over and over again in developing applications and web sites. Most PHP coders will have their own menu generation class that will take an array or an item and add it to a html un-ordered list or other tag and the styling is handled with CSS. This has proven to be a worthy solution to menu creation, however, PHP already has all the tools and classes built in to create a menu using DOM. It is both powerful and extensible and further eliminates for yet another class in your tree.
• 

  New DLTK indexing is promising

  Posted: July 19th, 2009, 5:12am MDT by Michael Spector

  The last couple of weeks I've been working on improving DLTK indexer, which was derived from JDT as is. The original bug report sounds like: "Indexing must be adapted for dynamic languages". I have to explain this point a little bit. In Java, every element reference is strongly bound to the original declaration. This is why one can calculate this binding during source code parsing and hold it in a memory (probably update it when referenced/referencing elements are changed). This is not the case for dynamic languages, consider this example (PHP):
  
  <?php
  
  function __autoload($class_name) {
  
      require_once $class_name . '.php';
  
  }
  
  $obj  = new MyClass();
  
  ?>
  
  In this example PHP file is included before the class is loaded, and there's no way for IDE to determine which one. In order to have all JDT-like features in DLTK-based IDE resolution of elements binding is done each time from scratch. This ends up with a lot of queries and updates to index file, which are very I/O intensive operations.
  
  We've tried to implement indexing using H2 database, and the results are really amazing! Here's a screen-cast showing how fast building of full hierarchy for 'Exception' class is using H2 database based index. Comparing to an older implementation I must admit that it's 10 times faster. Due to the fast access to the model most of other features will have great performance as well: Code Assist, Source Navigation, Source Editing, Mark Occurrences, etc...
  
  I hope this will be included into DLTK 2.0.0 and PDT 2.2.0.
• 

  Zend Framework 1.9.0 Preview Release Now Available

  Posted: July 17th, 2009, 2:53pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of a preview release of version 1.9.0: [framework.zend.com] Note that because these packages are not stable, they will not be found on the zend.com CDN; please scroll to the bottom of the above page to find links to this release.
• 

  New PHP-focused Yum Repository

  Posted: July 17th, 2009, 1:13pm MDT by Clay Loveless

  PHP 5.3 is now yum-installable.

  Ever been frustrated that the latest this-or-that package for PHP is bogged down in Big Distro Packaging politics? I have been. That’s why I’ve put together a deliberately-current-as-possible repository for PHP RPMs.

  The repository is currently i386-only, though I’ll be adding x86_64 packages within the next week or so. Also, “regular” and “debug” builds are available for all packages, so that users may be more helpful in troubleshooting what issues they find.

  The current list of packages, as well as all the RPM spec files for building them and information on how to set up the repository for use on your CentOS5/RHEL5 servers is available at the killersoft-yum Google Code site.

  Have fun!

  Update: I forgot to mention one of the things I think is interesting about the way I’ve packaged the PHP modules in the repository. Each supported SAPI — apache2handler (mod_php), fastcgi and cli — each have their own configuration paths and php.ini files.

  /etc/php.mod.d/php.ini

  /etc/php.cgi.d/php.ini

  /etc/php.cli.d/php.ini

  Within each directory, a subdirectory for per-extension config is present.

  If you don’t like this setup, no problem: just symlink them all together and you won’t know the difference. However, I think it’s convenient to be able to easily specify extensions that you want to use in mod_php that you don’t want to use in the PHP CLI, and vice versa. If you need an ultralight PHP CLI for some reason, you can have it without having to hobble mod_php that’s running on your website.

  
• 

  Goodbye OmniTI

  Posted: July 17th, 2009, 9:57am MDT by Chris Shiflett

  At the end of August, I'm leaving OmniTI.

  The summary is easy. The explanation is not. A leader's departure is fertile soil for speculation, but hopefully my brief explanation will be enough to satisfy your curiosity. If you want more details, you're welcome to speak with me about it directly.

  Like many of my OmniTI colleagues, I'll be in San Jose next week for OSCON.

  I'm not going to tell you things are great, but things aren't that bad either. I just have ambitions that cannot be fulfilled at OmniTI.

  OmniTI has many strengths, and there is no better company in the world for help with hard problems like scalability and performance, architecture and infrastructure, and data management. Sound interesting? If you answered yes, OmniTI has your job. If you answered no, you and I have that in common. I do appreciate working with people who have expertise in these areas, however, because it means I don't have to. That's one benefit of working at OmniTI I'll surely miss.

  I'm happy to have been a part of OmniTI's success over the past few years, and to have had the opportunity to work with smart, friendly people. I'm especially proud to have played a role in hiring so many of them:

  • Alejandro Garcia
  • Anthony Gentile
  • Bedrich Rios
  • Carolyn Wood
  • Christian Dailey
  • Elizabeth Smith
  • Jon Gibbins
  • Jon Tan
  • Luke Welling
  • Nick Sloan
  • Paul Jones
  • Sean Coates

  It has been a fun ride, but it's time to move on. New, exciting things await, and I can't wait to tell you about them. To all of my colleagues at OmniTI, so long, and thanks for all the fish!

  Posted Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:57:30 GMT in Chris Shiflett’s Blog

• 

  Goodbye, OmniTI

  Posted: July 17th, 2009, 9:57am MDT by Chris Shiflett

  At the end of August, I'm leaving OmniTI.

  The summary is easy. The explanation is not. A leader's departure is fertile soil for speculation, but hopefully my brief explanation will be enough to satisfy your curiosity. If you want more details, you're welcome to speak with me about it directly.

  Like many of my OmniTI colleagues, I'll be in San Jose next week for OSCON.

  I'm not going to tell you things are great, but things aren't that bad either. I just have ambitions that cannot be fulfilled at OmniTI, so I have decided to say goodbye.

  OmniTI has many strengths, and there is no better company in the world for help with hard problems like scalability and performance, architecture and infrastructure, and data management. Sound interesting? If you answered yes, OmniTI has your job. If you answered no, I can empathize. I really appreciate working with people who have expertise in these areas, however, because it means I don't have to. That's one of the benefits of working at OmniTI I'll surely miss.

  I'm happy to have been a part of OmniTI's success over the past few years, and to have had the opportunity to work with smart, friendly people. I'm especially proud to have played a role in hiring so many of them:

  • Alejandro Garcia
  • Anthony Gentile
  • Bedrich Rios
  • Carolyn Wood
  • Christian Dailey
  • Elizabeth Smith
  • Jon Gibbins
  • Jon Tan
  • Luke Welling
  • Nick Sloan
  • Paul Jones
  • Sean Coates

  It has been a fun ride, but it's time to move on. New, exciting things await, and I can't wait to tell you about them. To all of my colleagues at OmniTI, so long, and thanks for all the fish!

  Posted Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:57:30 GMT in Chris Shiflett’s Blog

• 

  Where Multiple Inheritance Will Kill You

  Posted: July 17th, 2009, 6:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

  One of the best features of PHP’s object model (and really all object models) is the concept of inheritance – that is, derived classes inherit the members and methods of their parents. This is a fantastic way to further encapsulate and abstract your code because it means you can define some base functionality and then later on extend that class to add new functionality and even override existing functionality to make the class specific.

  But this concept is a double-edged sword in PHP (and all other languages). Here’s where multiple inheritances can kill you.
  
  Imagine that your source code has the following…

  <?php
  
  abstract class BaseClass
  {
      // Some code here.
  }
  
  abstract class AddSomeFunctionality extends BaseClass
  {
      // More basic functions.
  }
  
  class DoSomeWork extends AddSomeFunctionality
  {
      // Actual work done.
  }
  
  class DoSomeMoreWork extends DoSomeWork
  {
      // More work done; override some of the methods in prior classes.
  }
  

  On its face this might not look too terribly complex. It’s not until you actually get into the code that you start to have some problems. Imagine the following function:

  <?php
  
  function Execute(DoSomeWork $object)
  {
      $object->runMyFunc();
  }
  
  $object = new DoSomeMoreWork();
  Execute($object);
  

  What happens here? Does this work? Absolutely; the way inheritance works is that every class that is part of the family is considered an “instanceof” for our purposes. But imagine that runMyFunc() had been defined in AddSomeFunctionality and then overridden in DoSomeMoreWork. You’re going to get unpredictable behavior by passing it an object of DoSomeMoreWork, even though it passes the typehinting check.

  This is certainly a problem that can be solved through wise coding and understanding how inheritance works. It’s surely true that you could institute a simple check using instanceof; however, if you ever some day extend DoSomeWork with a new class (say called DoMyWork) then the check will fail just as it does above.

  The better solution is to be cautious with inheritance. Developers owe it to themselves and to their peers to master the concepts of “is-a” versus “in a”. Objects that are of the same family should extend one another; objects that are not part of the same family should be given to one another but should not extend one another.

  An example:

  <?php
  
  abstract class Fruit {}
  
  abstract class TreeFruit extends Fruit {}
  
  abstract class SummerFruit extends TreeFruit {}
  
  class Cherry extends SummerFruit {}
  
  /* Now for a class that shouldn't be in the family */
  class FruitSalad extends Cherry {}
  

  In this example, we have fruit. We extend that into tree fruits (cherries, peaches, pears, etc.) and furthermore we extend it into summer fruits. From summer fruits we could go any number of directions; I chose cherries (because I love cherries). But we could also have a class of peaches, plums, etc. that would classify as summer tree fruits. But as soon as we extend cherry to fruit salad, we create a problem. This is where inheritance can kill you. A fruit salad is not a fruit (our base class); a fruit salad is composed of fruits. Let’s take a look at a better object model.

  <?php
  
  /** Assume that all classes not redefined here exist from our last example **/
  
  final class Cherry extends SummerFruit {}
  
  class FruitSalad
  {
      protected $_fruits;
  
      public function addFruit(Fruit $fruit)
      {
          if(!is_array($this->_fruits))
              $this->fruits = array();
  
          return $this->_fruits[] = $fruit;
  }
  

  This is a much better object model; instead of trying to extend the Cherry class we can have a full fruit salad (composed of any other fruits we might define). FruitSalad may not inherit the methods of Cherry, but it will be able to access the Cherry API (the public methods).

  Inheritance is a glorious and useful tool, but used improperly it creates terrible problems. Good design, smart architecture, and understanding what is a member of the family and what is not will help ensure that the programmers who come after you will be more easily able to understand your code.

• 

  Where Multiple Levels Of Inheritance Will Kill You

  Posted: July 17th, 2009, 6:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

  One of the best features of PHP’s object model (and really all object models) is the concept of inheritance – that is, derived classes inherit the members and methods of their parents. This is a fantastic way to further encapsulate and abstract your code because it means you can define some base functionality and then later on extend that class to add new functionality and even override existing functionality to make the class specific.

  But this concept is a double-edged sword in PHP (and all other languages). Here’s where multiple inheritances can kill you.
  
  Imagine that your source code has the following…

  <?php
  
  abstract class BaseClass
  {
      // Some code here.
  }
  
  abstract class AddSomeFunctionality extends BaseClass
  {
      // More basic functions.
  }
  
  class DoSomeWork extends AddSomeFunctionality
  {
      // Actual work done.
  }
  
  class DoSomeMoreWork extends DoSomeWork
  {
      // More work done; override some of the methods in prior classes.
  }
  

  On its face this might not look too terribly complex. It’s not until you actually get into the code that you start to have some problems. Imagine the following function:

  <?php
  
  function Execute(DoSomeWork $object)
  {
      $object->runMyFunc();
  }
  
  $object = new DoSomeMoreWork();
  Execute($object);
  

  What happens here? Does this work? Absolutely; the way inheritance works is that every class that is part of the family is considered an “instanceof” for our purposes. But imagine that runMyFunc() had been defined in AddSomeFunctionality and then overridden in DoSomeMoreWork. You’re going to get unpredictable behavior by passing it an object of DoSomeMoreWork, even though it passes the typehinting check.

  This is certainly a problem that can be solved through wise coding and understanding how inheritance works. It’s surely true that you could institute a simple check using instanceof; however, if you ever some day extend DoSomeWork with a new class (say called DoMyWork) then the check will fail just as it does above.

  The better solution is to be cautious with inheritance. Developers owe it to themselves and to their peers to master the concepts of “is-a” versus “in a”. Objects that are of the same family should extend one another; objects that are not part of the same family should be given to one another but should not extend one another.

  An example:

  <?php
  
  abstract class Fruit {}
  
  abstract class TreeFruit extends Fruit {}
  
  abstract class SummerFruit extends TreeFruit {}
  
  class Cherry extends SummerFruit {}
  
  /* Now for a class that shouldn't be in the family */
  class FruitSalad extends Cherry {}
  

  In this example, we have fruit. We extend that into tree fruits (cherries, peaches, pears, etc.) and furthermore we extend it into summer fruits. From summer fruits we could go any number of directions; I chose cherries (because I love cherries). But we could also have a class of peaches, plums, etc. that would classify as summer tree fruits. But as soon as we extend cherry to fruit salad, we create a problem. This is where inheritance can kill you. A fruit salad is not a fruit (our base class); a fruit salad is composed of fruits. Let’s take a look at a better object model.

  <?php
  
  /** Assume that all classes not redefined here exist from our last example **/
  
  final class Cherry extends SummerFruit {}
  
  class FruitSalad
  {
      protected $_fruits;
  
      public function addFruit(Fruit $fruit)
      {
          if(!is_array($this->_fruits))
              $this->fruits = array();
  
          return $this->_fruits[] = $fruit;
  }
  

  This is a much better object model; instead of trying to extend the Cherry class we can have a full fruit salad (composed of any other fruits we might define). FruitSalad may not inherit the methods of Cherry, but it will be able to access the Cherry API (the public methods).

  Inheritance is a glorious and useful tool, but used improperly it creates terrible problems. Good design, smart architecture, and understanding what is a member of the family and what is not will help ensure that the programmers who come after you will be more easily able to understand your code.

• 

  ZendCon User Group Content - Free Pass Announcements

  Posted: July 16th, 2009, 12:12pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  As previously announced, Zend held a contest here to give away 5 free tickets to ZendCon 2009 to 5 deserving User Groups. It’s now time for the announcements of who won!
• 

  ZendCon User Group Contest - Free Pass Announcements

  Posted: July 16th, 2009, 12:12pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  As previously announced, Zend held a contest here to give away 5 free tickets to ZendCon 2009 to 5 deserving User Groups. It’s now time for the announcements of who won!
• 

  Work with us, we’re awesome!

  Posted: July 16th, 2009, 7:40am MDT by Echolibre

  So, it’s been a while since our last post. We’ve been busy working with some very smart and talented Irish entrepreneurs on start up ideas, and the last few months have been a blast. We’ve got lots in store over the next six months and we’ve started to scale up our team.

  Behind the scenes our team has grown to six, soon to be seven. Continuing on with this growth, we’re looking for two new team members: a PHP developer, and a Business developer.

  PHP Dev

  The Need-to-Haves

  • you’ve coded something *for fun* in the last year
  • you’ve a passion for web tech and the industry
  • you’ve a solid understanding of REST web services
  • …and Zend Framework experience (>1.6)
  • …and advanced understanding of OO concepts
  • …and the ability to work alone and in team
  • good knowledge of source control tools as such as svn, git, cvs is a given
  • you’ve got a security minded approach to development
  • …and performance analysis and debugging is something you love
  • finally, you need to have PHPUnit experience

  The Nice-to-Haves

  • Other Framework experience, eg Symfony
  • Contributor to an Open Source project

  How to get in touch

  Send a short email to freedom@echolibre.com, telling us who you are, what your background is, and why you’d make a great addition to our team. Bonus points for attaching code samples, links to working apps, your Twitter feed etc.

  This is for a short-term contract, if you’re a good match to our team we’d love to consider the position full time. Ideally, this suits a freelancer looking for something more permanent.

  echolibre is a distributed company. Our devs work in pairs, from Dublin, Cork and London. Telecommuting is fine by us. Ideally you’re based in Ireland, Europe, North America.

  Business Development

  First off - you need to be London based.

  It’s a given that you’re a “self-starter, highly motivated individual, team player, yada, yada, yada…”

  We work with start up web companies, so you need to be passionate about the UK and European web startup scene. Having some existing connections in this area is nice. However, the ability to make new connections is crucial. It would be a real advantage to have some web tech or design background. The bottom line is: we’re a web software company, so you need to have an understanding of web software, industry trends and web development in general. You need to be able to communicate with clients and developers alike.

  As with the above position, this is a short-term contract for now, and if you like us and we like you, we’d love to make it something more permanent. This is the kind of role that would suit someone who’s been a web developer for a number of  years, has always had a bit of an entrepreneurial streak, and is looking to go in a new direction.

  How to get in touch

  Send a short email to freedom@echolibre.com, telling us who you are, what your background is and why you’re the right person for the job. Needless to say having an established presence on things like Twitter, LinkedIn is an obvious advantage.

  Recruiters

  We love recruiters, really, we do. We understand you’ve a tough job to do these days, however, we’re not looking for help from you on these positions. Thanks

  Outsourcing Companies

  We’re good, thanks!

• 

  Debug of the year

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 6:04pm MDT by Michael Maclean

  I saw this article on the BBC, where a man who bought a packet of cigarettes from a petrol station in the US ended up being charged $23,148,855,308,184,500 instead. Wow. I was a little curious as to how this could have happened, though the number didn't look familar - I know roughly what 2^32, 2^32 / 2, 2^64, 2^64 / 2 look like, and this didn't appear to be any of those. A swift Google though led me to Stack Overflow, which is a fantastic site. Therein lies a quite plausible explanation:

  Add the cents to the number and you get 2314885530818450000, which in hexadecimal is 2020 2020 2020 1250.

  Do you see the pattern? The first six bytes has been overwritten by spaces (hex 20, dec 32).

  Ingenious! I can imagine spending quite a while trying to come up with that...

• 

  Subversion Migration Complete

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

  The migration from CVS to Subversion is complete. The web interface is at svn.php.net. You can read about it at php.net/svn.php, wiki.php.net/vcs/svnfaq. The URL to feed to your svn client is [svn.php.net] There is also a github mirror. Please use that instead of trying to do a full git clone from the svn repository. See the instructions at wiki.php.net/vcs/svnfaq#git Many thanks to Gwynne who did the bulk of the work and also all the other folks who pitched in. It was a major effort to move 14 years of CVS history to another RCS.
• 

  What Constitutes A Web Service?

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 2:21pm MDT by Brandon Savage

  The explosion of the concept of “web services” has generated a debate over what “web services” actually are. An article by Raj Mishra tries to limit the concept of “web service” to a strict ten-point list, insisting that a web service have a WSDL and uses SOAP. While this is a perfectly fine sentiment (even the one endorsed by WC3), it certainly is a limiting description.

  The reality is that the definition of “web service” has grown, and Mr. Mishra’s list is both inaccurate and misleading.

  While the W3C description defines a web service as using SOAP and having a WSDL, it also states that “There are many things that might be called “Web services” in the world at large. … without prejudice toward other definitions, we will use the following definition.” In other words, W3C’s definition is neither comprehensive nor exclusive.

  Some of the world’s most popular web services no longer force use of WSDL or SOAP. Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and even Google allow access to their data and services without using SOAP, either by way of XML, REST, JSON-RPC or XML-RPC. And when the big players decide that their definition of “web service” includes these things, that really breaks any definition issues by anyone else.

  So perhaps it’s time now for a new definition of “web service” starting. Here’s mine.

  A web service is any service that meets the following criteria:

  1. Provides an endpoint or endpoints for the retrieval and/or addition of data through a standard format; and
  2. Contains one or more documented method(s) for retrieving or adding that data; and
  3. Allows access by users who are not operating from the same servers as the endpoint(s).

  How does a service like say, Twitter, follow these? First, it provides an endpoint for both the addition and retrieval of information (in XML and JSON). Second, it contains more than one documented method for doing so. Third, almost the whole point of Twitter is to access it from somewhere OTHER than the web – SMS, desktop applications, etc. Thus, Twitter would qualify as a web service, whether you use their WSDL or their REST API.

  The reality is that as much as we might want to constrain concepts to a particular corner, the major players and the world at large will determine what qualifies as a “web service” and what does not. SOAP is one of many different ways to consume and access web services but it is by no means the sole way to do so. Limiting the concept of “web services” to a definition issued by W3C, who themselves acknowledge that there may be other “web services” that don’t fit their definition, just makes you look silly.

• 

  Database Abstraction Layers Must Live!

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 11:46am MDT by Ralph Schindler

  I come preaching true hope, against the fallacies.

  I’ve heard the arguments for and against database abstraction layers (DALs) time and time again. I must say first, I agree with them all, both sides, equally. Interestingly, I can put the vocal proponents of each side of the argument in one of two boxes: a programmer guy box, or a database guy box. For some unknown reason though, they never seem to see eye to eye.

  Honestly though, I like to put myself in the middle of that argument. I see both sides. I think fine tuning an application’s core business with vendor specific features is tremendously important, after all, that is why there are so many competing database vendors. Generally speaking of database driven projects, I feel like planning to use a specific vendor up front, knowing its pro’s and con’s, and tailoring an application to the chosen database’s strengths can only help in the long run. Also, I feel that building a database model first before any code, offers many performance and scalability advantages than does code first development.

  That said, I also see value in using a database as a simple data-store when the actual database is not a key component of the overall application. That’s right, it is completely valid to say that the data-storage & database component of an application sometimes is not the key component; a database guy probably will never agree with you there. Just as there are programmers who swear by this code first, database later mantra, there are database developers that will swear by the database first, code later mantra.

  The fact is, each project is unique. It’s this uniqueness of projects and their execution that ultimately shapes the perspectives of developers as well as the tools they write and consume. To say that one mantra is clearly a better choice over another is simply being ignorant.

  The Use Case of Abstraction Layers

  To be honest, I don’t really buy the “I might switch database vendors at some point” argument either, as Jeremy Zawodny points out. For larger projects (on the scale of the facebooks, the twitters, etc), switching the database underneath after a project has been in production is a monumental task- regardless if you have an abstraction layer or not. Chances are, you used some of the database specific features, not to mention, you now have a large set of mission critical data that also has to be ported. Long story short, its never as easy as swapping the abstraction layers database adapter out.

  What I will buy though, is there are some problems that fall in thicker end of the Pareto Principle that can be solved with a database abstraction layer. For the uninitiated, the Pareto Principle is effectively the 80/20 rule. In software use cases, when applying this term- the 80% use case is the majority of use cases. These use cases are generally not that interesting in terms of database interaction. To give it a label, we can call these the CRUD, BREAD, or <<insert your favorite terminology here>> operations. That is not to say that these operations are not important, but they are not special. In fact, they are so un-special, that we can just about apply a standard query syntax (SQL 92) to them, and expect that the query is both portable between databases and common across applications that wish to use them.

  This is where database abstraction fits in. As a developer, you’ll come across this problem time and time again. A large portion of an application are CRUD screens and the smaller more interesting part of your application is your reporting screens. With an abstraction layer, we are able to code against both a unified API as well as have a layer that will produce consistent and vendor compatible queries. This allows us to build more specialized data access layers (patterns) for multiple database vendors with great ease. You want Table Gateway- done, you want Row Gateway- done, you want Active Record- done. Each can be implemented to tackle the 80% part of the 80/20 rule when applied to the database centric business code of an application.

  The Slow Path & The Fast Path

  When I talk a

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 8165 bytes)

• 

  Zend_Feed_Reader promoted to Zend Framework trunk (watch out for ZF 1.9!)

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 6:03am MDT by Pádraic Brady

  I'm happy to say that Zend_Feed_Reader has been made it through its two week cleanup effort and emerged from Matthew's review to join the Zend Framework trunk. Once the Zend Framework 1.9 release process spins up I look forward to more feedback how this component has turned out. Thanks to Jurriën Stutterheim (my co-conspirator), Matthew Weier O'Phinney for shepherding this through, and a special mention goes to Kawsar Saiyeed whose feedback while using Zend_Feed_Reader to build a feed aggregator over the past week was invaluable.
  
  Zend_Feed_Reader grew out of my need to have something that is not just capable of reading feeds, but was capable of understanding and interpreting them. If you've used Zend_Feed, you know that getting something simple like content, or a creation date, is a task that requires a bit of work. Feeds come in three distinctly different forms: RSS, RDF/RSS and Atom, all with multiple versions. Each has it's own way of presenting information. Each can also utilise extensions like RSS's popular Dublin Core 1.1 module or Atom's Threaded Extensions RFC. Getting a simple point of data can mean sifting through feeds to see what type and version they are, what elements to look for, what alternatives exist, and what alternatives should be prioritised over others. It's work that has led developers to write long classes designed to handle the task. Zend_Feed is also not without its flaws. Its API is inconsistent, its namespace handling questionable, and extending it is not as easy as it looks.
  
  So, is Zend_Feed_Reader any different? Well, I hope so . But you'll have to dig a little deeper to see it. Here's a quick example from the documentation showing off the API briefly.
  
  $feed = Zend_Feed_Reader::import('http://www.planet-php.net/rdf/');
  $data = array(
      'title'        => $feed->getTitle(),
      'link'         => $feed->getLink(),
      'dateModified' => $feed->getDateModified(),
      'description'  => $feed->getDescription(),
      'language'     => $feed->getLanguage(),
      'entries'      => array(),
  );
  
  foreach ($feed as $entry) {
      $edata = array(
          'title'        => $entry->getTitle(),
          'description'  => $entry->

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 14945 bytes)

• 

  Zend_Feed_Reader promoted to Zend Framework trunk (watch out for ZF 1.9!)

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 5:33am MDT by Pádraic Brady

  I'm happy to say that Zend_Feed_Reader has been made it through its two week cleanup effort and emerged from Matthew's review to join the Zend Framework trunk. Once the Zend Framework 1.9 release process spins up I look forward to more feedback how this component has turned out. Thanks to Jurriën Stutterheim (my co-conspirator), Matthew Weier O'Phinney for shepherding this through, and a special mention goes to Kawsar Saiyeed whose feedback while using Zend_Feed_Reader to build a feed aggregator over the past week was invaluable.
  
  Zend_Feed_Reader grew out of my need to have something that is not just capable of reading feeds, but was capable of understanding and interpreting them. If you've used Zend_Feed, you know that getting something simple like content, or a creation date, is a task that requires a bit of work. Feeds come in three distinctly different forms: RSS, RDF/RSS and Atom, all with multiple versions. Each has it's own way of presenting information. Each can also utilise extensions like RSS's popular Dublin Core 1.1 module or Atom's Threaded Extensions RFC. Getting a simple point of data can mean sifting through feeds to see what type and version they are, what elements to look for, what alternatives exist, and what alternatives should be prioritised over others. It's work that has led developers to write long classes designed to handle the task. Zend_Feed is also not without its flaws. Its API is inconsistent, its namespace handling questionable, and extending it is not as easy as it looks.
  
  So, is Zend_Feed_Reader any different? Well, I hope so . But you'll have to dig a little deeper to see it. Here's a quick example from the documentation showing off the API briefly.
  
  $feed = Zend_Feed_Reader::import('http://www.planet-php.net/rdf/');
  $data = array(
      'title'        => $feed->getTitle(),
      'link'         => $feed->getLink(),
      'dateModified' => $feed->getDateModified(),
      'description'  => $feed->getDescription(),
      'language'     => $feed->getLanguage(),
      'entries'      => array(),
  );
  
  foreach ($feed as $entry) {
      $edata = array(
          'title'        => $entry->getTitle(),
          'description'  => $entry->

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 14933 bytes)

• 

  Zend_Feed_Reader promoted to Zend Framework trunk (watch out for ZF 1.9!)

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 5:33am MDT by Pádraic Brady

  I'm happy to say that Zend_Feed_Reader has been made it through its two week cleanup effort and emerged from Matthew's review to join the Zend Framework trunk. Once the Zend Framework 1.9 release process spins up I look forward to more feedback how this component has turned out. Thanks to Jurriën Stutterheim (my co-conspirator), Matthew Weier O'Phinney for shepherding this through, and a special mention goes to Kawsar Saiyeed whose feedback while using Zend_Feed_Reader to build a feed aggregator over the past week was invaluable.
  
  Zend_Feed_Reader grew out of my need to have something that is not just capable of reading feeds, but was capable of understanding and interpreting them. If you've used Zend_Feed, you know that getting something simple like content, or a creation date, is a task that requires a bit of work. Feeds come in three distinctly different forms: RSS, RDF/RSS and Atom, all with multiple versions. Each has it's own way of presenting information. Each can also utilise extensions like RSS's popular Dublin Core 1.1 module or Atom's Threaded Extensions RFC. Getting a simple point of data can mean sifting through feeds to see what type and version they are, what elements to look for, what alternatives exist, and what alternatives should be prioritised over others. It's work that has led developers to write long classes designed to handle the task. Zend_Feed is also not without its flaws. Its API is inconsistent, its namespace handling questionable, and extending it is not as easy as it looks.
  
  So, is Zend_Feed_Reader any different? Well, I hope so . But you'll have to dig a little deeper to see it. Here's a quick example from the documentation showing off the API briefly.
  
  $feed = Zend_Feed_Reader::import('http://www.planet-php.net/rdf/');
  $data = array(
      'title'        => $feed->getTitle(),
      'link'         => $feed->getLink(),
      'dateModified' => $feed->getDateModified(),
      'description'  => $feed->getDescription(),
      'language'     => $feed->getLanguage(),
      'entries'      => array(),
  );
  
  foreach ($feed as $entry) {
      $edata = array(
          'title'        => $entry->getTitle(),
          'description'  => $entry->

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 14903 bytes)

• 

  Zend_Feed_Reader promoted to Zend Framework trunk (watch out for ZF 1.9!)

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 5:33am MDT by Pádraic Brady

  I'm happy to say that Zend_Feed_Reader has been made it through its two week cleanup effort and emerged from Matthew's review to join the Zend Framework trunk. Once the Zend Framework 1.9 release process spins up I look forward to more feedback how this component has turned out. Thanks to Jurriën Stutterheim (my co-conspirator), Matthew Weier O'Phinney for shepherding this through, and a special mention goes to Kawsar Saiyeed whose feedback while using Zend_Feed_Reader to build a feed aggregator over the past week was invaluable.
  
  Zend_Feed_Reader grew out of my need to have something that is not just capable of reading feeds, but was capable of understanding and interpreting them. If you've used Zend_Feed, you know that getting something simple like content, or a creation date, is a task that requires a bit of work. Feeds come in three distinctly different forms: RSS, RDF/RSS and Atom, all with multiple versions. Each has it's own way of presenting information. Each can also utilise extensions like RSS's popular Dublin Core 1.1 module or Atom's Threaded Extensions RFC. Getting a simple point of data can mean sifting through feeds to see what type and version they are, what elements to look for, what alternatives exist, and what alternatives should be prioritised over others. It's work that has led developers to write long classes designed to handle the task. Zend_Feed is also not without its flaws. Its API is inconsistent, its namespace handling questionable, and extending it is not as easy as it looks.
  
  So, is Zend_Feed_Reader any different? Well, I hope so . But you'll have to dig a little deeper to see it. Here's a quick example from the documentation showing off the API briefly.
  
  $feed = Zend_Feed_Reader::import('http://www.planet-php.net/rdf/');
  $data = array(
      'title'        => $feed->getTitle(),
      'link'         => $feed->getLink(),
      'dateModified' => $feed->getDateModified(),
      'description'  => $feed->getDescription(),
      'language'     => $feed->getLanguage(),
      'entries'      => array(),
  );
  
  foreach ($feed as $entry) {
      $edata = array(
          'title'        => $entry->getTitle(),
          'description'  => $entry->

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 14903 bytes)

• 

  How to Use PHP Namespaces, Part 3: Keywords and Autoloading

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 2:56am MDT by SitePoint » PHP

  In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we looked at PHP namespace basics, the use operator, and name resolution. In this final article we discuss some of the more advanced namespace options.

  The __NAMESPACE__ Constant

  __NAMESPACE__ is a PHP string that always returns the current namespace name. In the global space it will be an empty string.

  
  <?php
  namespace App\Lib1;
  echo __NAMESPACE__; // outputs: App\Lib1
  ?>
  

  The value has obvious benefits during debugging. It can also be used to dynamically generate a fully-qualified class name, e.g.

  
  <?php
  namespace App\Lib1;
  
  class MyClass {
  	public function WhoAmI() {
  		return __METHOD__;
  	}
  }
  
  $c = __NAMESPACE__ . '\\MyClass';
  $m = new $c;
  echo $m->WhoAmI(); // outputs: App\Lib1\MyClass::WhoAmI
  ?>
  

  The namespace Keyword

  The namespace keyword can be used to explicitly reference an item within the current namespace or a sub-namespace. It is the namespace equivalent of self within classes:

  
  <?php
  namespace App\Lib1;
  
  class MyClass {
  	public function WhoAmI() {
  		return __METHOD__;
  	}
  }
  
  $m = new namespace\MyClass;
  echo $m->WhoAmI(); // outputs: App\Lib1\MyClass::WhoAmI
  ?>
  

  Autoloading Namespaced Classes

  One of the best time-saving features of PHP 5 is autoloading. In global (non-namespaced) PHP code, a standard autoload function could be written:

  
  <?php
  $obj1 = new MyClass1(); // classes/MyClass1.php is auto-loaded
  $obj2 = new MyClass2(); // classes/MyClass2.php is auto-loaded
  
  // autoload function
  function __autoload($class_name) {
  	require_once("classes/$class_name.php");
  }
  ?>
  

  In PHP 5.3, you can create an instance of a namespaced class. In that situation, the fully-qualified namespace and class name is passed to the __autoload function, e.g. the value of $class_name could be “App\Lib1\MyClass”. You could continue to place all your PHP class files in the same folder and strip the namespace from the string, however, that could result in file name clashes.

  Alternatively, your class file hierarchy could be organized in the same way as your namespace structure. For example, a MyClass.php file could be created in the folder /classes/App/Lib1:

  /classes/App/Lib1/MyClass.php:

  
  <?php
  namespace App\Lib1;
  
  class MyClass {
  	public function WhoAmI() {
  		return __METHOD__;
  	}
  }
  ?>
  

  A file in root folder could then use the following code:

  myapp.php:

  
  <?php
  use App\Lib1\MyClass as MC;
  
  $obj = new MC();
  echo $obj->WhoAmI();
  
  // autoload function
  function __autoload($class) {
  
  	// convert namespace to full file path
  	$class = 'classes/' . str_replace('\\', '/', $class) . '.php';
  	require_once($class);
  
  }
  ?>
  

  Explanation:

  1. The class App\Lib1\MyClass is aliased as MC.
  2. new MC() is translated to new App\Lib1\MyClass() during compilation.
  3. The string “App\Lib1\MyClass” is passed to the __autoload function. This replaces all namespace backslashes with file path forward slashes, and modifies the string so the file “classes\App\Lib1\MyClass.php” is loaded.

  I hope you found this series of PHP namespace articles useful. Will you be namespacing in your PHP code?

  See also:

  • How to Use PHP Namespaces, Part 1: The Basics
  • How to Use PHP Namespaces, Part 2: Importing, Aliases, and Name Resolution
  • How to Install PHP 5.3 on Windows

  <script src="http://ads.aws.sitepoint.com/adjs.php?region=137&did=adz&adtype=horizontal" type="text/javascript">
  
  
• 

  Top 5 Reasons Windows shops should consider WIMP over LAMP

  Posted: July 14th, 2009, 11:07am MDT by Paul Reinheimer

  Disclaimer, I'm no Windows Fanboy: I use a Mac at home, and at work deploy code to over a hundred LAMP servers on three continents (using a Windows desktop).
  
  I'm always looking for better ways to get my job done, save my employer money, and expand my skill set. So whenever I get a chance I'm looking at the competition of the tools we're currently using to see if there's tricks to learn, or reasons to switch. I've been keeping an eye on IIS on various Windows servers for a while, more recently I've been looking at SyBase and SQL Anywhere, as well as CouchDB for data storage (but more on those two later).
  
  So: Windows, WIMP, and why I think you should be giving it a serious look if you're currently a Windows shop.
  
  1. Use the expertise you already have in-houseIf you're currently running Windows you already know how to: install patches, restart machines, manage security and ACLs, connect and administer, get help, etc. When I say you I mean you as an organization, not an individual.
  
  When I was younger, and slightly more full of stupid than I am now. I made probably the stupidest decision of my professional life (thus far). I was in a Windows shop running Windows servers for everything, with quite a few applications running through Lotus Notes. I was tasked with building a new Intranet. Rather than re-training myself (one person, and an intern at that) to use the monstrosity that was Lotus Notes R5, I somehow managed to convince my boss that we should put a Linux machine in the server room. The project for the most part worked: I built a decent (by my then current standards) Intranet system for the company.
  
  I guarantee the system didn't survive six months after my departure.
  
  Why? Because maintaining it required everyone else (many more than one) in IT to learn what I was good at. They had to re-train themselves to maintain a single system in a network of many. It simply wasn't worth the effort.
  
  2. Avoid duplication of ServersWhen you introduce a new stack, you're inevitably introducing a new server. That's an extra server to maintain, backup, power, upgrade, manage, etc. If you're doing a small roll out there's inevitably a machine in the room already that's not seeing a lot of load, just throw it on there. If it's an entirely different stack your current solutions for a lot of the problems aren't going to work (your backup scripts and applications for Windows won't auto-magically migrate over to Linux).
  
  If you read my first story, you can see how many additional problems I caused there. Backing up the machine was going to take extra effort. It was another slot in the rack that couldn't be used for anything else (despite ridiculously low load).
  
  3. Avoid duplication of StaffWhen you're running multiple stacks for important or critical applications, you need staff to support them. If you've got Windows servers and Linux servers you've got staff supporting them both. Multiple sys-admins, multiple people on-call, multiple sets of vacations to manage.
  
  At my current employer, this is our current situation, as we have linux servers for the web, and Windows for everything else. This means we have two sets of system administrators, one for the Windows stuff, the other for Linux. We've got multiple pagers so one person from each team can be on call 24x7. I'm not suggesting this is bad per se, but it is an additional cost.
  
  4. Integrate tightly with current technologiesWhen you're consistently running systems of a similar stack, things just play nicely with each other. Reporting applications, backup, information sharing, etc. It all just works. You don't need a different username password combination for your development server as you do for your machine logon, and another one still to restart a service. If your security policies permit (and it seems wise) you can centralize this.
  
  At work we have passwords, many of them. We mount dev systems over semi-reliable samba shares, with unique logins and directory structures not entirely tied to our general login accounts. This causes both groups of sysadmins to come together for every new hire to create the appropriate directories and entries in various configuration files.
  
  
  5. There's features out there not available on LAMPMany of us have become overly complacent in the thought of Microsoft as a follower in the web arena, products like Internet Explorer aren't doing much to shake this. IIS 7 is more than a follower, in a lot of realms I feel it has advantages over the technologies I'm used to using. In particular I might call out their XML based configuration system, and per-directory configuration without the performance hit. In terms of configuration XML has a lot of advantages over .ini, in terms of parsing, grouping of elements, p

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2269 bytes)

• 

  More distributed key/value storage options

  Posted: July 14th, 2009, 8:47am MDT by Maggie Nelson

  CouchDB has infected me and I’ve been reading a lot about alternative ways to store data AND organize it. In the midst of options for alternatives to relational databases, these two stand out:

  Cassandra - “Cassandra is a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store. Cassandra brings together the distributed systems technologies from Dynamo and the data model from Google’s BigTable. Like Dynamo, Cassandra is eventually consistent. Like BigTable, Cassandra provides a ColumnFamily-based data model richer than typical key/value systems.”

  The huge appeal of Cassandra seems to be the approach to make it highly fault-tolerant. Writes never fail. Data is always available. No single point of failure. If you’re making a Twitter-like app, you should consider it.

  Tokyo Cabinet - “Tokyo Cabinet uses hash algorithm to retrieve records. If a bucket array has sufficient number of elements, the time complexity of retrieval is “O(1)”. That is, time required for retrieving a record is constant, regardless of the scale of a database. It is also the same about storing and deleting. Collision of hash values is managed by separate chaining. Data structure of the chains is binary search tree. Even if a bucket array has unusually scarce elements, the time complexity of retrieval is “O(log n)”.”

  Tokyo Cabinet is slightly newer and is apparently stupidly fast, faster than any other storage solutions out there (at least for now). It’s written in C and provided as API of C, Perl, Ruby, Java, and Lua.

  Do you know anyone who has used these two already? Care to share your experiences?

• 

  PHP 5.3 Release Party

  Posted: July 14th, 2009, 5:19am MDT by Johannes Schlüter

  In my blog post for the 5.3 release I already mentioned it and some others posted it, too: We're planning a release party in Munich, currently we have around 60 people who registered. That's the official announcement:

  We like to invite you to the PHP 5.3 release party on Friday, the 17th of July in Munich. The release party offers a chance to talk to other PHP enthusiasts and enjoy that PHP is alive and kicking. If you just can't resist a decent barbecue together with some beer and other drinks you are also welcomed.
  

  The happening will take place at the Waldwirtschaft beer garden irrespective of the weather. We will meet at 19:00 o'clock - open end.
  The location is famous for its huge beer garden (2,500 available seats, a children’s playground) and its typical Bavarian but also international food. On sunny weather you may even enjoy live-music and listen to the sounds of Jazz, Blues, Swing or Dixi.
  Catering will be provided and as a special delicacy you may enjoy a suckling pig!
  
  If you like to join the event please register at PHPUG-Munich Wiki and follow it for updates.
  Alternatively you may register at Facebook as well and follow this for updates.
  
  For any questions please visit IRC channel: #phprp on irc.uni-erlangen.de.
  
  
  The PHP 5.3. BBQ release party is sponsored by:
  
  

     
   

  
  
  Supporters for the PHP 5.3 BBQ release party are:
  

  • Sun Microsystems
  • PHPUG.de

• 

  FluentDOM Loaders

  Posted: July 14th, 2009, 4:37am MDT by Thomas Weinert

  We are still improving and experimenting with FluentDOM. We removed the constructor and added a load() method. The reason was to allow the creation of new documents with FluentDOM.

  Now this is possible:

  $fd = new FluentDOM();
$fd->append($fd->document->createElement('html'))
   ->append($fd->document->createElement('body'))
   ->append('<h1>Hell World</h1>');
echo $fd;

  FluentDOM uses loader objects (Thanks for the idea Toby) and supports different types of sources. You can load html or XML , files or strings or define your own custom loaders. To load a html file you can just use the FluentDOM function or the load() method:

  $fd = FluentDOM($fileName, 'text/html');

  $fd = new FluentDOM();
$fd->load($fileName, 'text/html');

  Or you define your own loader object:

  $fd = new FluentDOM();
$fd->setLoaders(array(new MyFluentDOMLoader()));
$fd->load($source, $contentType);

  You can find an example for inifiles in ~/examples/iniloader/.

  
• 

  How to Use PHP Namespaces, Part 2: Importing, Aliases, and Name Resolution

  Posted: July 14th, 2009, 2:00am MDT by SitePoint » PHP

  In part 1, we discussed why PHP namespaces are useful and the namespace keyword. In this article, we examine the use command and the way PHP resolves namespace names.

  For the purposes of this example, we will define two almost identical code blocks; the only difference is their namespace:

  lib1.php:

  
  <?php
  // application library 1
  namespace App\Lib1;
  
  const MYCONST = 'App\Lib1\MYCONST';
  
  function MyFunction() {
  	return __FUNCTION__;
  }
  
  class MyClass {
  	static function WhoAmI() {
  		return __METHOD__;
  	}
  }
  ?>
  

  lib2.php:

  
  <?php
  // application library 2
  namespace App\Lib2;
  
  const MYCONST = 'App\Lib2\MYCONST';
  
  function MyFunction() {
  	return __FUNCTION__;
  }
  
  class MyClass {
  	static function WhoAmI() {
  		return __METHOD__;
  	}
  }
  ?>
  

  There is a little PHP terminology to understand before we begin…

  Fully-qualified name
  Any PHP code can refer to a fully-qualified name — an identifier starting with the namespace backslash separator, e.g. \App\Lib1\MYCONST, \App\Lib2\MyFunction(), etc.

  Fully-qualified names have no ambiguity. The initial backslash operates in a similar way to a file path; it signifies the ‘root’ global space. If we implemented a different MyFunction() in our global space, it could be called from lib1.php or lib2.php using \MyFunction().

  Fully-qualified names are useful for one-off function calls or object initialization. However, they can become impractical when you are making lots of calls. As we will discover below, PHP offers other options to save us from namespace typing cramps.

  Qualified name
  An identifier with at least one namespace separator, e.g. Lib1\MyFunction().

  Unqualified name
  An identifier without a namespace separator, e.g. MyFunction().

  Working Within the Same Namespace

  Consider the following code:

  myapp1.php:

  
  <?php
  namespace App\Lib1;
  
  require_once('lib1.php');
  require_once('lib2.php');
  
  header('Content-type: text/plain');
  echo MYCONST . "\n";
  echo MyFunction() . "\n";
  echo MyClass::WhoAmI() . "\n";
  ?>
  

  Although we include both lib1.php and lib2.php, the identifiers MYCONST, MyFunction, and MyClass will only reference code in lib1.php. This occurs because the myapp1.php code is within the same App\Lib1 namespace:

  result:

  
  App\Lib1\MYCONST
  App\Lib1\MyFunction
  App\Lib1\MyClass::WhoAmI
  

  Namespace Importing

  Namespaces can be imported with the use operator, e.g.

  myapp2.php:

  
  <?php
  use App\Lib2;
  
  require_once('lib1.php');
  require_once('lib2.php');
  
  header('Content-type: text/plain');
  echo Lib2\MYCONST . "\n";
  echo Lib2\MyFunction() . "\n";
  echo Lib2\MyClass::WhoAmI() . "\n";
  ?>
  

  Any number of use statements can be defined or you can separate individual namespaces with a comma. In this example we have imported the App\Lib2 namespace. We still cannot refer directly to MYCONST, MyFunction or MyClass because our code is in the global space and PHP will look for them there. However, if we add a prefix of ‘Lib2\’, they become qualified names; PHP will search through the imported namespaces until it finds a match.

  result:

  
  App\Lib2\MYCONST
  App\Lib2\MyFunction
  App\Lib2\MyClass::WhoAmI
  

  Namespace Aliases

  Namespace aliases are perhaps the most useful construct. Aliases allow us to reference long namespaces using a shorter name.

  myapp3.php:

  
  <?php
  use App\Lib1 as L;
  use App\Lib2\MyClass as Obj;
  
  header('Content-type: text/plain');
  require_once('lib1.php');
  require_once('lib2.php');
  
  echo L\MYCONST . "\n";
  echo L\MyFunction() . "\n";
  echo L\MyClass::WhoAmI() . "\n";
  echo Obj::WhoAmI() . "\n";
  ?>
  

  The first use statement defines App\Lib1 as ‘L’. Any qualified names using ‘L’ will be translated to ‘App\Lib1′ at compile-time. We can therefore refer to L\MYCONST and L\MyFunction rather than the fully-qualified name.

  The second use statement is more interesting.

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2966 bytes)

• 

  In the Cloud, Fanatically.

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 5:36pm MDT by Maggie Nelson

  As you may remember from my excited Twitter posts, I spoke on a panel organized by Rackspace at the New York Stock Exchange on June 17th. The audience of the panel was mostly composed of representatives from various NYC agencies that, basically, build cool websites for clients (Yours Truly’s employer included).

  The panel topic was loosely defined and the conversation tended gravitate toward Twitter and Twitter-like applications. Why Twitter? It gained huge popularity, resulting in performance problems, often leading to the surfacing of the beloved Fail Whale. It also attracts some of the biggest buzzwords of Web 2.0: social networks, information architecture, folksonomy (hash tag anyone?). In the end, Twitter has piles and piles of data - a lot of it is noise, but there is a method to the madness. The panel talked about the possibilities other applications like it mean to the Internet and to future people-oriented business.

  Among others, I shared the panel with Jonathan Bryce, the co-founder of Mosso.com, now rebranded to The Rackspace Cloud and Robert Scoble, a Twitterer and FriendFeeder Extraordinaire!

  The Rackspace team took a video of the panel, so check it out! (Warning: pretty big .mov file.) I already Adrianna Bustamante and her team for the efficient nerd-wrangling! (Although I still got to mention robot overlords in the panel!)

  

  Oh, and as for the question: “How do we make money from Twitter?” The answer is “Nobody knows, and even if they did, they sure aren’t going to tell you for free!”

• 

  Superglobals In Classes: Revisited

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

  Last December, I wrote about the use of PHP superglobals inside of classes (link here). I asserted at the time that superglobals inside of a class violated some basic rules on what a class was supposed to do. Today, I am revisiting that discussion.
  
  The placement of superglobals inside a class creates an impossible situation for code reuse. Take for example my original sample:

  <?php
  
  class VerifyLogin extends UserObject
  {
  	function verifyCredentials()
  	{
  		$username = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['username']);
  		$password  = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['password']);
  		$passwordhash = MD5($username . $password); // Salt our PW Hash
  		$sql = 'SELECT id FROM userTable WHERE username = ' . $username . ' AND password = ' . $passwordhash . ' LIMIT 1';
  
  		$resource = mysql_query($sql);
  
  		if(mysql_numrows($resource) > 0)
  		{
  			$array = mysql_fetch_row($resource);
  			$this->userID = $array[0];
  			$this->loggedIn = true;
  			return true;
  		}
  		else
  			return false;
  	}
  }
  
  ?>
  

  This code will work just fine for our purposes – on this site. But what happens when we want to move this to another site? Unless we leave our form fields named “username” and “password” we’ll have to modify the original code. This makes reusing the code more difficult. Since user validation is particularly frequent, there’s no reason why we should be rewriting this code each and every time we create a new application.

  There is a way to refactor this code to make it easier to reuse later on (note that my re-factoring simply is addressing superglobals, and no other facet of the code):

  <?php
  
  class VerifyLogin extends UserObject
  {
  	function verifyCredentials($username, $password)
  	{
  		$passwordhash = MD5($username . $password); // Salt our PW Hash
  		$sql = 'SELECT id FROM userTable WHERE username = ' . $username . ' AND password = ' . $passwordhash . ' LIMIT 1';
  
  		$resource = mysql_query($sql);
  
  		if(mysql_numrows($resource) > 0)
  		{
  			$array = mysql_fetch_row($resource);
  			$this->userID = $array[0];
  			$this->loggedIn = true;
  			return true;
  		}
  		else
  			return false;
  	}
  }
  
  $ValidUser = new VerifyLogin($_POST['username'], $_POST['password']);
  
  if($validUser)
  {
  	// Do something here
  }
  else
  {
  	// Do something else
  }
  
  ?>
  

  This refactored code means that we can use our class anywhere we like, for anything we like, without having to really care what our $_POST array looks like. We simply have to supply the data to the method, and it will do the work for us.

  Object-oriented programming in PHP allows us to do amazing things like build frameworks and libraries that can be used over and over again. We shouldn’t muck that up by including short-term or application-specific functions and variables when they’re unnecessary.

  Warning: The above code has security holes and should never be used without refactoring. It is intended for demonstration purposes only.
• 

  About planetary-sized posters

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 3:17pm MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

  Geez, what a week! On Friday, we'll party on celebrating the PHP 5.3 release in Munich/Germany. For those of you who can't be there, I'm sure there will be enough photos on Flickr, Facebook and the like. But, as you may remember, we've produced some very cool Zend Framework posters. I just got an e-mail from Rob Zienert about planetary-sized posters. :-)

   

  If you want to experience the true size of our Zend Framework poster, just drop me an e-mail and tell me your company address and if you want to have the poster in English (as long as it's available) or German. Oh, and btw, we're currently finishing a PHP Web Security poster (at the same size) by Stefan Esser from SektionEins. Don't miss it!

• 

  More on PHP performance

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 2:50pm MDT by PHP 10.0 Blog

  A
• 

  PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 42: Keith Casey & Web2Project

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 1:41pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

  Another Episode of PHP Abstract! In this episode I interview Keith Casey while we were both at php|tek in Chicago. Keith Casey is a lead developer on the open source software: Web2Project, which was being released the day that this interview was recorded.
• 

  vfsStream 0.4.0 released

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 1:19pm MDT by Stubblog - Planet PHP

  Some minutes ago I released vfsStream 0.4.0, introducing support for file modes, owners and groups. While I planned to implement this at least since a year it took me three tries to get it implemented, and while implementing this I stumbled about some issues which can not be solved by vfsStream. Major problem is that the PHP functions chmod(), chown() and chgrp() do not work with vfsStream URLs due to limitations imposed by PHP (or possibly by underlying C, not sure). The stream wrapper API has no support to enable setting file modes, owner or group of a userland stream implementation. This means the usage of file mode support is limited and can not be applied to create tests for classes using one of the three functions. However, it is still possible to use file modes for testing correct usage of is_readable(), is_writable() and is_executable(). Another usage scenario is to make sure directories created with mkdir() receive the correct file mode, see the file mode example. I'm sure users will come up with other usage scenarios I did not even thought of.
  
  Beside this new feature the release contains a bugfix for vfsStreamDirectory::addChild() to make sure adding another child of the same name as an existing child replaces this existing child, and a fix to return correct results for stat() calls. Grab the release via it's pear channel pear.php-tools.net and try it out. I suspect the file mode support may contain bugs because I did not have the time to use it in other projects, but after all, it is still in alpha stage.
• 

  New Look for the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 1:15pm MDT by Christopher Jones

  Thanks to the Oracle Technology Network design team our very popular, free Underground PHP & Oracle Manual has had a makeover and gained a snazzy new front cover. Farewell to the photo of the underground car park door that used...
• 

  Released PHPillow 0.4-alpha

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 5:00am MDT by Kore Nordmann

  PHPillow just got a new release and a new website..
• 

  How to Use PHP Namespaces, Part 1: The Basics

  Posted: July 13th, 2009, 12:49am MDT by SitePoint » PHP

  Namespaces are one of the most significant changes in PHP 5.3. They will be familiar to C# and Java developers, and they are likely to change the structure of PHP applications for the better.

  Why Do We Need Namespaces?

  As the size of your PHP code library increases, there is increased risk of accidentally re-defining a function or class name that has been declared before. The problem is exacerbated when you attempt to add third-party components or plugins; what if two or more code sets implement a ‘Database’ or ‘User’ class?

  Until now, the only solution has been long class/function names. For example, WordPress prefixes every name with ‘WP_’. The Zend Framework uses a highly descriptive naming convention that results in long-winded class names such as Zend_Search_Lucene_Analysis_Analyzer_Common_Text_CaseInsensitive.

  Name collision problems can be solved with namespaces. PHP constants, classes, and functions can be grouped into namespaced libraries.

  How are Namespaces Defined?

  By default, all constant, class, and function names are placed in the global space — like they were before PHP supported namespaces.

  Namespaced code is defined using a single namespace keyword at the top of your PHP file. It must be the first command (with the exception of declare) and no non-PHP code, html, or white-space can precede the command, e.g.

  
  <?php
  // define this code in the 'MyProject' namespace
  namespace MyProject;
  
  // ... code ...
  

  The code following this line will be assigned to the ‘MyProject’ namespace. It is not possible to nest namespaces or define more than one namespace for the same code block (only the last will be recognized). However, you can define different namespaced code in the same file, e.g.

  
  <?php
  namespace MyProject1;
  // PHP code for the MyProject1 namespace
  
  namespace MyProject2;
  // PHP code for the MyProject2 namespace
  
  // Alternative syntax
  namespace MyProject3 {
  	// PHP code for the MyProject3 namespace
  }
  ?>
  

  Although this is possible, I would advise against it: retain your sanity by defining a single namespace per file.

  Sub-namespaces
  PHP allows you to define a hierarchy of namespaces so libraries can be sub-divided. Sub-namespaces are separated using a backslash (\) character, e.g.

  • MyProject\SubName
  • MyProject\Database\MySQL
  • CompanyName\MyProject\Library\Common\Widget1

  Calling Namespaced Code

  In a file named lib1.php, we will define a constant, a function, and a class within the App\Lib1 namespace:

  lib1.php

  
  <?php
  // application library 1
  namespace App\Lib1;
  
  const MYCONST = 'App\Lib1\MYCONST';
  
  function MyFunction() {
  	return __FUNCTION__;
  }
  
  class MyClass {
  	static function WhoAmI() {
  		return __METHOD__;
  	}
  }
  ?>
  

  We can now include this code in another PHP file, e.g.

  myapp.php

  
  <?php
  header('Content-type: text/plain');
  require_once('lib1.php');
  
  echo \App\Lib1\MYCONST . "\n";
  echo \App\Lib1\MyFunction() . "\n";
  echo \App\Lib1\MyClass::WhoAmI() . "\n";
  ?>
  

  No namespace is defined in myapp.php so the code exists in the global space. Any direct reference to MYCONST, MyFunction or MyClass will fail because they exist in the App\Lib1 namespace. To call code in lib1.php, we can add a prefix of \App\Lib1 to define fully-qualified names. The following result is output when we load myapp.php:

  
  App\Lib1\MYCONST
  App\Lib1\MyFunction
  App\Lib1\MyClass::WhoAmI
  

  Fully-qualified names can become quite long and there are few obvious benefits over defining long class names such as App-Lib1-MyClass. Therefore, in the next article, we will discuss aliasing and take a closer look at how PHP resolves namespace names.

  See also:

  • How to Install PHP 5.3 on Windows
  • How to Use PHP Namespaces, Part 2: Importing, Aliases, and Name Resolution

  <script src="http://ads.aws.sitepoint.com/adjs.php?region=137&did=adz&adtype=horizontal" type="text/javascript">
  
  
• 

  Great expectations

  Posted: July 11th, 2009, 12:00pm MDT by till

  If you ever contributed your spare time to any project which gives away something at the price of zero, you may be familiar with a large variety of feedback.

  It's always reassuring for those who spend their time to get feedback from happy users. But of course there's no way to please everyone at the same time. And aside from the usual "This doesn't work!!!11 WTF?!!", some people seem to be particularly ungrateful, or just way out of bounds when they email in.

  I hereby classify feedback into three different types:

  • valuable
  • useless
  • mediocre — in between the above

  By classifying feedback, I don't mean classify the content. Of course I have to admit that I prefer positive feedback over negative (Who doesn't?), but in the end it's more or less the attitude and effort which people bring to the table — in emails or bug reports.

  Even if someone basically told me that something sucks, I can — given it's valuable feedback — work with them to improve.

  Last night, a user had the urge to email us (RoundCube) to tell us how ridiculous RoundCube is. So according to him RoundCube does not provide enough features, whatever we provide is not up to his personal standards, he had issues installing it, using it and suggested that we should drop RoundCube and instead provide an ajax frontend to Squirrelmail.

  He also managed to insult some ISP (pobox.com), which his "schoolmate from high school" founded.

  No offense Squirrelmail (I'm using you as a backup from my non-JavaScript-friendly mobile), but I really don't see anything valuable in the email I read. I could have taken this a lot more personal when I took the liberty to reply. For transparency I copied our dev@ mailing list on my response.

  This morning the user complained to me about sharing his email with the world, told me I attacked his family (Err, what?), then attacked me personally and demanded that I remove his personal information from the archives.

  His response was of course emailed off-list and I didn't feel sharing it again to fuel the fire.

  Anyway, I did reply on key and stayed away from personals. But I just received another email from him where he emailed the SourceForge legal team and CC'd myself (and most developers again), demanding that we remove his information, or that they make us because I violated SourceForge's terms of service (3A).

  Err... it's certainly not going to ruin my weekend. But what the hell?

• 

  Article about vfsStream in german PHP magazine

  Posted: July 11th, 2009, 9:45am MDT by Stubblog - Planet PHP

  The current issue of the german PHP magazine features an article about vfsStream. On three pages Mike Wittje (I hope this is the correct Mike, just guessed ) describes how vfsStream can be used to simplify and improve unit tests for classes utilizing the file system and file system functions. Thanks to Mike for writing the article, helping to spread the word about vfsStream.
  
  Over the weekend I'm going to test vfsStream with PHP 5.3 and try to fix any issues which pop up. I already received a patch by mail which is said to fix an issue with is_readable() (not tested yet), so it seems reasonable there will be a new release within the upcoming days.
• 

  Inserting and Updating Oracle XMLType columns in PHP

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 5:56pm MDT by Christopher Jones

  Today a reader mailed me about manipulating XMLType columns when the data is longer than the 4K limit that character-type handling imposes. My free book (see sidebar) has examples of how to do this using CLOB handling in PHP. I...
• 

  Flash ExternalInterface - Debug checklist

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 1:24pm MDT by Evert Pot

  Flash' ExternalInterface api allows you to communicate between Javascript and Actionscript. A very useful tool, and we've used it quite a few times. Often times it just doesn't work though, and it can be difficult to get to the root of the issue. This is a list of things you should be looking out for if ExternalInterface does not work for you:

  Give your <object> tag an id

  In order to call your flash application, your <object> tag needs to have an id attribute. Make sure this attribute is unique.

  The id cannot collide with items in the document object

  Internet Explorer will add any element with an id to the document object. So if you were to, say, give your object the name 'window', 'getElementById' or anything to that respect EI will not work.

  The object cannot be embedded in a <form> tag

  EI will not work in IE if the object sits in a <form>-tag. For some reasons IE will treat any element within a form slightly different.

  Don't use 'play' or 'stop' for method names

  Another IE issue. play and stop are somehow reserved for IE. This only applies to actionscript functions you're calling from javascript.

  Check your domain names

  If your swf is loaded from a different domain as your html document, you need to make sure you add this domain through flash.system.Security.allowDomain. In our case it was fine to just add Security.allowDomain('*').

  If all else fails, know how to debug.

  Much like with XM [HTTPRequest,] errors will not show up in Firebug by default, but you can trace everything if you check everything in the Console-tab-submenu. This will also allow you to see some of the automatically generated javascript Flash produces.

  Most of the above issues are in IE, but thankfully Microsoft's script debugger will actually catch these (rather cryptic) errors, which might help you find your problem.

  We've run into every single one of these issues, if you have any others like this, please comment :). I figured it would be helpful to have one single source of documentation.

  
• 

  The ZendCon Sessions Episode 22: PHP Extension Writing

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 11:00am MDT by planetphp

  Presenting the latest edition of The ZendCon Sessions. The podcast that rebroadcasts sessions/talks from the last ZendCon PHP Conference. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and features Sara Goleman giving her talk: “ PHP Extension Writing”
• 

  Storing Sessions in Memcache (how everything behaves)

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 10:35am MDT by Paul Reinheimer

  type="text/css"> ol#boh li { margin-bottom: 10px; }

  I’ve been using memcached to store session data for the past while, but we ran into a few problems at work that led me to dive in a bit deeper and see how PHP, Sessions, and memcached play along.

  Short Version

  When you start up a session a new entry is created in memcache, the expiry is the same as session.gc_maxlifetime. Session data is retrieved each time a session is started (either with session_start(), or if you have session.auto_start enabled, etc).

  Long Version:

  When session_start() is called for a new user several things happen very quickly:

  1. A session ID is generated for the end user, this is seen in the HTTP response headers. [HTTP] 200 OK Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:07:21 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.11 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6-3ubuntu4.1 Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=c446fc5309c3b8d3aa6e90343dddab29; path=/ Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 23 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html
  2. PHP Contacts memcached and attempts to retrieve any information in that particular session ID get c446fc5309c3b8d3aa6e90343dddab29
  3. Memcached returns no data for that entry, as it doesn’t exist yet.
  4. Your page executes, setting data in the session
  5. PHP pushes data into memcached: set c446fc5309c3b8d3aa6e90343dddab29 0 1440 32 name |s:6”asdasd;bar|s:3:”foo”;

  On every subsequent page where a session is used, a very similar sequence of events is executed. When the session is started PHP contacts memcached and asks for the session data. When the page is complete it pushes the data now in the session to memcached. That last step is kind of critical, because it’s what’s controlling the expiry of the data within memcached. Take a quick look at the data being set once more.

  set c446fc5309c3b8d3aa6e90343dddab29 0 1440 32 name |s:6”asdasd;bar|s:3:”foo”;

  Data is being set, the key is your session id, 0 is a set of flags that the client can use to mark the data (often used to mark data that’s been compressed). The 1440 represents the expiry time for the data, 1440 seconds from now (24 minutes). That value was taken directly from session.gc_maxlifetime . It’s important to keep in mind that what memcached guarantees is that the data will not be available after that expiry runs out, but it promises nothing about how long it will be available. If your memcached instance crashes, or runs out of memory you’re going to start losing data a lot sooner. Finally we have the data in a somewhat truncated version of PHP’s serialize.

  The fact that the data is sent to memcached after every request, even if you haven’t changed what’s stored in the session, is rather important. It’s what makes your session last for session.gc_maxlifetime after the user last did something, rather than simply that amount plus the last time you requested a document.

• 

  Next Webtuesday: Sebastian Bergmann about PHP 5.3

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 9:01am MDT by Liip

  Next Webtuesday is soon. As Sebastian Bergmann is giving a testing workshop that day for the Liip employees, we thought that would make a perfect fit for an interesting talk at the webtuesday. Sebastian will be talking about PHP 5.3 and its many new features with focus on closures.

  It's at the Amiado Offices in Zurich with roof-top beer afterwards. Bring your own beverages, but some is sponsored :)

  If you want to come, it would be nice if you write your name to the webtuesday wiki.

  See you there.

• 

  PHP Hidden Gem: similar_text()

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 8:24am MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

  Every once in a while you need to solve this unique problem. This problem that you usually only have to solve once or twice. So you start developing, but quickly wonder what the best solution is. You can write your own solution, but it pays off to at least search through PHP.net a bit to see if there is not already a solution for it in PHP.
• 

  Wanted: Friends Who Write

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 8:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

  We live in a technological world, one that allows us to communicate instantly. Through email, instant message, IRC, Twitter, Facebook, and tons of other platforms, a message we have to share can be spread to anyone in the world almost instantly. So it would seem odd, then – in fact, almost paradoxical – that as a world we’re less interconnected than ever. But we are.

  How is this even possible?

  As the world has become faster, the number of communiques we receive each day has increased. And yet the value perceived from those communiques has declined. In addition, the methods we used to use (sending notes, cards, thank yous, and wedding invitations) have become less common, as we’ve tried to replace them with electronic means, without realizing that the value of these things is in their personality.

  No electronic note can replace the feeling of good paper and a hand-written message. And yet we’ve tried, desperately, to reduce the burdens of buying paper, stamps and ink. When a true note is exchanged between friends or lovers, there’s a magic to it that is lost in the electronic form. A card from a long absent friend, or a letter from a parent, all these things have an electronic counterpart, but no electronic equivalent.

  My girlfriend and I regularly exchange love notes. She gave me stationary as a gift, a long-standing holdover of another generation but relevant for this one, too. I’m certain the postman has back problems, for all the mail she receives, of personalized cards, postcards, and letters. But she’s actually taken the time to cultivate relationships with friends, and she’s joyful every time she gets a letter. A technophobe she is not; she even has a Twitter account. She just knows the value of getting something in the mail.

  This long-lost art doesn’t have to be either. Instead, we can all do better. A hand-written thank you note or a postcard from a trip is all it takes. The truth is that once you take the time to write, others will reciprocate. And they will appreciate you, too.

• 

  Another failure in Web page styling and design.

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 7:17am MDT by Vidyut Luther

  This one comes from Microsoft, and their Silverlight install page. Since I already have silverlight installed, I can’t show what the actual download link looked like, but it wasn’t obvious at first.

  Why do people still not pay attention to this stuff?

  I’m not commenting on choice of colors, but rather that it’s not obvious what is, and what isn’t a link

  

  Failure in web page design. July 10th 2009

• 

  Book Review: Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1

  Posted: July 10th, 2009, 1:01am MDT by Sebastian Nohn

  I've been using phpMyAdmin since... Hmmm... Well... The times before I used to code in PHP. So when offered to review Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 by Marc Deslisle, I didn't expected to learn anything new, but I was bwrong.

  The book is full of information for all kinds of users from beginner to professional. I only gallopped through the first chapters covering setup, basic usage etc. while luckily not covering basic SQL topics, so if you are new to phpMyAdmin and know basic SQL, this book may be the right one for you. Since phpMyAdmin has evolved in the last years and is still evolving, also the experienced user may find something new here.

  About one third of the 326 pages cover advanced topics like the SQL validator, advanced bookmarking or the database documentation generator Although I've been using phpMyAdmin for years now, some of the covered topics were new to me and my fellow reviewers.

  If you are new to phpMyAdmin, you should buy this book. Even if you are using phpMyAdmin since some years, you may find Mastering phpMyAdmin useful.

• 

  Cairo Alpha Released

  Posted: July 9th, 2009, 4:14pm MDT by Elizabeth Marie Smith

  The first alpha of the PECL Cairo extension I’ve been working on is finally out. Cairo is a 2D graphics library written in C with support for multiple output devices. The extension provides an Object Oriented API, but also includes procedural methods. This is similar to PHP’s date and mysqli extensions. [...]
• 

  Getting Started with Drizzle and PHP

  Posted: July 9th, 2009, 12:27pm MDT by planetphp

  Drizzle is a new, lightweight fork of MySQL specifically designed for cloud applications. Although Drizzle is still under development, it's attracting a lot of attention from developers around the world. This article introduces you to Drizzle and shows you how to use the Drizzle PHP extension to perform queries, retrieve result sets and handle errors in your Drizzle+PHP application.
• 

  Paamayim Nekudotayim p0wnd!

  Posted: July 9th, 2009, 10:56am MDT by Bertrand Mansion

  Yeah I know, I am rancorous... :)
  
  Back in 2002, I asked php-internals for support of $c = "classname"; $c::someMethod(). After having obviously bored a few people there, I was finally replied that it wouldn't be supported which I found was mean at the time (I changed my mind, but still...). Derick even made fun of my request in his PHP Loop back 2002. Well with PHP 5.3, now it's time for REVENGE!
  
  Now I am wondering if the following still works in PHP 5.3:
  Class foo {
function bar() {
echo $this->param;
}
}

Class MyObject {
var $param;
function MyObject($param) {
$this->param = $param;
foo::bar();
}
}
$obj = new MyObject('out of this');

--> prints : "out of this"


  It was pretty strange back then.
  
• 

  2009 PHP TestFest

  Posted: July 8th, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

  So finally we are at the end of the 2009 PHP TestFest. It has been an outstanding success with the coverage increasing by about 2.5% overall and 887 new tests contributed in the TestFest SVN repository of which 637 have already been added to PHP CVS. User groups from all over the world have worked hard to make this happen and we thank each and every one of you for your contribution to PHP! You really made a difference to the PHP5.3 release quality. There still are few loose ends to tie up - the TestFest SVN repository will be closed for contributions later this week and the last few tests will be moved into the main PHP repository. Finally, we have 10 elePHPants and 9 TestFest mugs to give out. The winners of mugs and elePHPants will be drawn at random from a list of people who wrote tests; the winner's names will be announced later this month. For those that would like to continue to make a difference by writing tests there are two options. You can simply continue by submitting new tests to the QA mailing list, or, if you have written a significant number of tests you might consider applying for your own PHP CVS (or SVN) ID. In your application you should reference the tests that you have written in support of your application. Last but not least, we would like to thank all of the companies and institutions that sponsored TestFest. These include Combell, Corretgé, Faculdade Impacta de Tecnologia, IBM, iBuildings, Itera, Mayflower, Microsoft, Nexen (Alter Way Group), php|architect, Redpill-Linpro, Steinigke Showtechnic, Verges Council and Zend.
• 

  On no! Not more tests!

  Posted: July 8th, 2009, 1:18pm MDT by Zoe Slattery

  One of the problems with the incredible level of success of the PHP TestFest is that PHP gets more tests, 887 more to be precise.
  
  Well, isn't that the point? Yes, but it's beginning to take *forever* to run them which is a bad thing and as TestFests get bigger and better this will only get worse.
  
  A year or so ago I started worrying about this, then I met Stefan Priebsch at IPC and made him worry about it too. Together we started a project to re-factor the code that runs tests (run-tests.php) so that it could run tests in parallel.
  
  In May we had a prototype going, it ran most of the tests in sequence. It still doesn't have all of the capability of run-tests.php but it was enough for our PHP GSOC student (Georg Gradwohl) to start writing and integrating code that would run groups of tests in parallel.
  
  Yesterday I ran some tests on my dual core lap top - this isn't a proper benchmark and I had all sorts of other stuff going on too...but here they are:
  
  
  
  The chart shows the time taken to run 7700 tests with the current code (old), new code sequentially (seq) and the new code with increasing numbers of parallel tasks (para). As you can see we are able to run this sample in about half the time taken by the code that is used at the moment. There is still a long way to go with this but I'm happy to say that a couple of people have started to check out the code and try and run it. At the moment this only works on *ix, supporting Windows is on the TODO list.
  
  With the help of the 'many hands' of the PHP community I'm quietly confident that by the time PHP gets all the tests it needs we will have something that will run them efficiently :-)
• 

  Why you should use a content repository for your application

  Posted: July 8th, 2009, 5:37am MDT by Henri Bergius

  

  I gave my Midgard2: Content repository for desktop and the web talk yesterday in GCDS. The slides are available on SlideShare. The main idea was that any application that deals with structured data could benefit from using a content repository like Midgard2 or CouchDB.

  So, what is a content repository? It is a service that sits between an application and a data store. It provides several advantages:

  • Common rules for data access mean that multiple applications can work with same content without breaking consistency of the data
  • Signals about changes let applications know when another application using the repository modifies something, enabling collaborative data management between apps
  • Objects instead of SQL mean that developers can deal with data using APIs more compatible with the rest of their desktop programming environment, and without having to fear issues like SQL injection
  • Data model is scriptable when you use a content repository, meaning that users can easily write Python or PHP scripts to perform batch operations on their data without having to learn your storage format
  • Synchronization and sharing features can be implemented on the content repository level meaning that you gain these features without having to worry about them

  Midgard2 is a content repository library that is built on top of glib, libgda and dbus, making it fit the general free desktop infrastructure very well. You can use it in any application that is written in C, Objective-C, Python, PHP, or soon Mono. Learn more from the slides!

  Technorati Tags: couchdb, gnome, midgard, mono

• 

  PHP 5.3 BBQ Release Party Munich

  Posted: July 8th, 2009, 4:03am MDT by David Soria Parra

  We like to invite you to the PHP 5.3 release party which is an event to
  celebrate the 5.3 release, happening Friday, the 17th of July in Munich.
  The release party offers a chance to come together with other php
  enthusiasts and enjoy that php is alive and kicking. And of course people
  in favour of a decent barbecue, together with some beer and other drinks
  are invited.

  The happening will take place at Waldwirtschaft ( [www.waldwirtschaft.de] )
  beer garden, at any weather. We will meet at 19:00 o’clock – open end.

  Catering will be provided and as a special delicacy you may enjoy a suckling pig!…hopefully vegetarian food. If you like to join the event please register at PHPUG-Munich Wiki ( [phpugmunich.org] ) and follow it for updates. Alternatively you may register at Facebook
  ( [www.facebook.com] ) as well and follow
  this for updates.

  For any questions please visit IRC channel: #phprp on irc.uni-erlangen.de.

  The PHP 5.3. BBQ release party is sponsored by:
  – Microsoft
  – Mayflower GmbH
  – Swoodoo AG
  – Zend Technologies GmbH

  Supporters for the PHP 5.3 BBQ release party are:
  – Sun Microsystems
  - PHPUG.de

• 

  "Professional Refactoring" talk @Mayflower - Munich

  Posted: July 8th, 2009, 2:00am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

  We are happy to announce that Thorsten Rinne will be holding a presentation on the topic "Professional Refactoring" in our office in Munich and you are invited to join us!
  
  The presentation will take place on July 16th, 18:00h in our office (Mannhardtstrasse 6, 80538 Munich, S-Bahn Isartor).
  
  So what is "Profesional Refactoring" all about? As Thorsten says:
  "You have a large application built in PHP 4, permanently growing and changing featuresets? Every release is like Russian roulette and the number of bugs are growing? New developers don't like to work with the code? It's time for refactoring! The session will give an overview about how to refactor, introducing test-driven development and covering risks and chances during the refactoring."
  
  This is the first of a series of talks open for all that we are organising in the near future. Talks will be held in Munich as well as in Würzburg. So check out this blog regularly for more upcoming talks!
  
  We are looking forward to meeting you here at the Munich office!
  
  
  Größere Kartenansicht
• 

  PHP 5.3 Release Party

  Posted: July 8th, 2009, 12:13am MDT by Stefan Priebsch

  PHP 5.3 BBQ Release Party München Wir würden dich gerne zu der PHP 5.3 Release Party einladen, bei der das PHP 5.3 Release in München gefeiert werden soll. Der Event findet am Freitag, den 17.07.2009 in München statt. Die Release Party bietet auch die Möglichkeit zu einem lockeren Treffen mit anderen “PHP-Begeisterten”. Natürlich bist du auch [...]
• 

  PHP 5.3 BBQ Release Party Munich

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 11:51pm MDT by Lars Jankowfsky

  Folks, it’s Paaaaaaaaaaarty Time!

  

  We like to invite you to the PHP 5.3 release party which is an event to
  celebrate the 5.3 release, happening Friday, the 17th of July in Munich.
  The release party offers a chance to come together with other php
  enthusiasts and enjoy that php is alive and kicking. And of course people
  in favour of a decent barbecue, together with some beer and other drinks
  are invited.

  The happening will take place at Waldwirtschaft beer garden, at any weather. We will meet at 19:00 o’clock - open end. The location is famous for its huge beer garden (2500 available seats, a children’s playground) and its typical Bavarian but also international food. On sunny weather you even may enjoy live-music and listen to the sounds of Jazz, Blues, Swing or Dixi.

  Catering will be provided and as a special delicacy you may enjoy a suckling pig!

  If you like to join the event please register at PHPUG-Munich Wiki and follow it for updates.
  Alternatively you may register at Facebook as well and follow this for updates.

  For any questions please visit IRC channel: #phprp on irc.uni-erlangen.de.

  The PHP 5.3. BBQ release party is sponsored by:

  * Microsoft
  * Mayflower GmbH
  * Swoodoo AG
  * Zend Technologies GmbH

  Supporters for the PHP 5.3 BBQ release party are:

  • Sun Microsystems
  • PHPUG.de

  I hope to see you there!

  Update: edited sponsor list

• 

  pecl/memcached turns 1

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 4:21pm MDT by Andrei Zmievski

  This morning I released the first stable version (1.0.0) of the PHP memcached extension that I started soon after joining Digg. It’s been stable for a while actually, but some people were hesitant to use it in production while it still had the beta designation. Well, no more, go forth and use it.

  As the underlying libmemcached library evolves, I plan to keep adding and exposing more features in the extension. Up next are probably memcached_dump() and server auto-ejection support.

• 

  Articles on other sites

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 1:59pm MDT by PHP-GTK Community

  Here is a list of various articles about PHP-GTK2, recently updated:

  • 2009-07-07 : Beginning PHP-GTK: Signals, on Codecall.net
  • 2009-06-29 : Beginning PHP-GTK: Creating a Simple Interface, on Codecall.net
  • 2009-04-25 : Building PHP-GTK with Cairo Support on Ubuntu Jaunty, on IShouldBeCoding.com
  • 2009-03-28 : Distributing PHP-GTK applications on Windows (not a reference to Gnope or Scott's chapter on the subject)
  • 2009-01-25 : building PHP-GTK 2 with PHP 6. A set of patches and an explanation
  • 2008-03-05 : a fresh intro to PHP-GTK by Bob Majdak
  • http://www.developertutorials.com/tutorials/php/building-desktop-applica...

  read more

• 

  The value of complexity metrics - Cyclomatic Complexity (1/2)

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 1:20pm MDT by Manuel Pichler

  Software metrics are currently on everyone's lips and a frequently discussed topic. There are many conference talks, blog posts and other presentations that talk about software metrics. But to me it seems as if this subject is a closed book for many developers, so I decided to write this little post about a special category of software metrics, the complexity metrics.

  Complexity metrics are a theoretical approach to measure the subjective complexity of a software fragment, where the words software fragment stand for a paraphrase for functions, methods, classes and nearly every logical unit that can be found in a software system. The most prevalent procedure to calculate complexity values is static code analysis, where an application parses the raw source code of a project, counts different statements and expressions and packs up the determined results in simple classification numbers. And with this information you already know the main concepts behind most software metrics, classification numbers and counting. As you can see there is no magic behind the scene, the only thing required is a good background knowledge to interpret those values.

  The Cyclomatic Complexity Number or short CCN is the oldest complexity metrics. The first time this software metric was mentioned was 1976 by Thomas J. McCabe. This metric counts the available decision paths in a software fragment to determine its complexity. Each decision path starts with one of the conditional statements from the following list, so that it is fairly easy to detect them in existing source code.

  • ?
  • case
  • elseif
  • for
  • foreach
  • if
  • while

  A look at this list of statements may result in the questions: Is this list wrong, it doesn't list else and default? But it is correct. The assumption is that both statements will contain the defaut execution path of a program which also exists when there are no special cases to capture.

  Each decision path gets the value 1 and the sum of all these values represents the Cyclomatic Complexity of the analyzed software fragment. Note that each function and method also counts with a value of 1 With this knowlegde we can now calculate the complexity of the following example code:

  
  <?php                                 
  class CyclomaticComplexityNumber
  {
      public function exampe( $x, $y ) // (1)
      {                                               
          if ( $x > 23 || $y < 42 ) // (1)
          {                                 
              for ( $i = $x; $i >= $x && $i <= $y; ++$i ) // (1)
              {
              }
          }
          else
          {
              switch ( $x + $y )
  

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 22033 bytes)

• 

  Zend Framework 1.8.4pl1 Now Available

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 7:24am MDT by planetphp

  The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of version 1.8.4pl1: [framework.zend.com] This patch-level version corrects a missing patch for Zend_Loader_PluginLoader that provided some critical functionality for Zend_Amf users. If you utilize that component, you are encouraged to upgrade immediately; for all other uses, the release tarball remains the same as the 1.8.4 version, and upgrading is left to your discretion.
• 

  PHP Type Hinting

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 6:50am MDT by Mike Willbanks

  PHP Type Hinting may soon come to PHP from a patch from Ilia Alshanetsky. This feature has been a long time debate on internals and several RFC’s for type hinting have come about.

  You may be wondering why you would want type hinting in a dynamic language. This can come in very handy especially if you are looking to enforce a specific type or need to ensure that you are indeed working with say an integer. Since this is written in C, it will be far faster than actually type casting it yourself or enforcing it yourself. General speed improvements are always nice to have.

  Examples

  The following example will only accept a type of integer, if it is not an integer it will fail except in the cases of null values.

  1 2 3

  function find (int $id) { .... }

  What if you simply would like to type cast the variable and force it to a value of an integer?

  1 2 3

  function find ((int) $id) { .... }

  State of the Vote

  So far it looks like the vote is going to pass with everyone in favor, remember the day is still young although it has been posted for just about 11 hours as I write this posting. The current vote is 16 in favor, 0 not in favor. While the vote may change as the day goes on, it looks like it will pass with flying colors up to this point. Ilia thank you for the work that you’ve put into this patch having it not affect the binary level to keep compatibility for the current 5.x branches!

• 

  Thank you!

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 6:28am MDT by Lukas Smith

  This might come off as ironic, but the proposal for type hinting illustrated to me quite well what kind of restraint people have put on themselves in order to work together for the greater good of releasing 5.3.0. Let me explain: To me even the thought of talking about adding a language syntax feature right after 5.3.0 is out is so inconceivable that I cannot even begin to express how shocked I am that a long time RM like Ilia would bring this up and then moan about discussions being needles bickering and preventing him to commit the patch within less than a week. Even more surprising is that apparently so man people thinks its a good idea to do so. This is not because I think that strict type checking is not a good fit for PHP, but simply because putting this in CVS now means, that we have no time to let the feature mature in CVS for a while as we need to make a bug fix release fairly soon. Adding a language syntax, even if its an optional syntax, should never be pushed into a stable release so quickly imho.

  Now, given this displayed attitude about releases processes, I am now starting to see the level of constraint that people were giving Johannes and myself over the last few months. I was starting to get a bit annoyed at complaints about the short commit freezes we put into effect. But overall people still swallowed it down and so the main stumbling blocks in the last months were more time constraints of key people, which is simply a fact of life and nothing I can or will complain about. So I want to thank you all for having been so willing to work with Johannes and myself doing this release and accept what we felt was best to get the release out. I appreciate the amount of trust you have given us!

  I still think that PHP could benefit from a rethinking of the release process, specifically to make sure that we do not need these commit freezes anymore (RM has their own branch and can easily cherry pick patches) while still ensuring that really big stuff like doesn't get delayed again and again because people get frustrated over smaller, yet non trivial, patches not making it into a stable release quickly enough.

  However the feedback I got from my "competing" RFC to Ilia's proposal once again illustrated to me that I simply do not have what it takes to write a clear and easy to understand RFC (maybe I should have realized that back when I was trying to document the namespace decisions). Plus in recent months I felt my patience for humanity slowly fade away, which is not however a direct cause of me RMing 5.3. This certainly has causes through out my entire professional and personal life. Its just a phase I am going through. As a result, I will leave it to others to decide if they want to do some formal adjustments to the current implicit PHP development and release process.

  UPDATE:
  Seems like internals@ is not as insane as I began to fear and now people have finally realized that Ilia suggested this for 5.3. Now this does not reduce the fact that I am thankful for how well we all pulled together towards the end.

• 

  Pretty URLs: Pretty Easy!

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 2:33am MDT by SitePoint » PHP

  Back when I wrote the third edition of Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL, it was still acceptable (though certainly unfashionable) to lump all of the code together to generate a web page into a single file, and then use a URL naming that file to access the page.

  PHP has moved on. These days, a developer that builds web sites that way is unlikely to gain a job (except perhaps one that pays poorly). Developers are expected to organize their code into multiple files, and URLs containing file names like index.php are definitely on their way out.

  Experienced developers will use finely-crafted frameworks and web server configurations to convert so-called pretty URLs like [www.example.com] No ".php" advertising the fact that the site is built in PHP, no specific filename at all. URLs like this one are designed to be as simple and memorable as possible.

  For the fourth edition of the book, I wanted developers to make a habit of this earlier, without forcing them to fiddle with their server configuration, or learn a complex PHP framework.

  The easiest possible way I could find to produce pretty URLs was to take advantage of a feature built into every PHP-equipped web server out there: a URL that points to a directory on the server will automatically run a PHP script named index.php sitting in that directory.

  With that in mind, here’s how all of the examples in the book from Chapter 3 onward are structured:

  • A folder
    Everything goes inside a folder, whose name is the only visible part in the URL. So if the example displays "thingies", you would start by creating a folder named thingies, and the URL of the example would be [www.example.com]
  • A controller, index.php
    When a browser requests the example’s URL, the server will automatically run the index.php script contained in the folder. This file is called the controller, and contains all the logic for handling browser requests and performing tasks in response.
  • Include files, like db.inc.php
    Pieces of code that will be useful in more than one example are pulled out of index.php and placed in separate PHP files. This is basic stuff for PHP veterans, but it’s a valuable coding technique that was covered much later in the third edition, in Chapter 12. Now it’s in Chapter 3.
  • Template files, like thingy.html.php
    Once the controller (with the assistance of one or more include files) does all the work, it must prepare a web page to send back to the browser in response. Rather than slopping all the html code into index.php (which is what we did all the way through the third edition of the book), the fourth edition uses a separate file for the html code for each type of page. These template files consist mostly of pure html; the only PHP code they contain is there to output the values of PHP variables created by the controller. The code in these files is kept very simple, so that they can be handed off to designers who may be unfamiliar with PHP at all. Also, using separate files makes it easy to generate several different types of page (that is, serveral different template files) from a single controller.

  All the little changes in approach like this one are what really makes me proud of Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL, 4th Edition. I used to describe the third edition of this book as giving beginners "just enough rope to hang themselves with."

  With the fourth edition, beginners can breeze past the self-strangulation stage — hopefully straight into a well-paying career as a PHP developer!

  I bet you’re wondering where the code is, right? To see how the “pretty URL” technique described above looks in code, be sure to check out Chapter 3 when we publish it on Thursday. Or if you’re unable to wait, grab all four chapters in PDF format today — free of charge.

  <script src="http://ads.aws.sitepoint.com/adjs.php?region=136&did=adz&adtype=vertical" type="text/javascript">
  
  
• 

  How to Install PHP 5.3 on Windows

  Posted: July 7th, 2009, 1:22am MDT by SitePoint » PHP

  With all the excitement surrounding Firefox 3.5, it may have escaped your attention that PHP 5.3 has also been released. This is the most significant update since version 5.0 and several features that were originally scheduled for version 6.0 have been slipped into the build. You’ll be hearing about these on SitePoint soon but, first, we need to install PHP 5.3 on our Windows development systems.

  A Word of Warning…

  PHP 5.3 is new and you may experience some problems (see below). If you already have a stable PHP environment, ensure you keep a backup of your current php folder and settings.

  Web Server Installation

  If you have not installed Apache, refer to How to Install Apache Web Server on Windows. Optionally, you can also install the MySQL database — refer to How to Install MySQL.

  PHP 5.3 Installation

  Windows PHP distributions are now available from a dedicated microsite at [windows.php.net] . The choice is a little bewildering and the instructions are vague but, since we will be installing PHP as an Apache 2.2 module using the Apache Lounge build, so you should download the VC9 x86 Thread Safe Zip file.

  General note:
  Download the VC6 builds if you are using the standard Apache.org web server. The VC9 builds should be used for the Apache Lounge binaries or IIS.

  A Thread Safe version should be used if you install PHP as an Apache module. The Non Thread Safe version should be used if you install PHP as a CGI binary.

  You can now follow the instructions at How to Install PHP on Windows from step 2 onwards. Note that, in step 3, php.ini-recommended is now named php.ini-development; you still need make a copy and rename it php.ini.

  If you have previously defined a working PHP configuration file, a tool such as WinMerge can help you compare and copy existing values to your new php.ini file.

  PHP 5.3 Error Reporting

  The first time you load your previously bug-free PHP application, you are likely to be confronted by reams of long-winded error messages. Don’t panic! PHP 5.3 introduces a number of new error directives which are enabled by default in the development php.ini configuration:

  • E_STRICT suggests improvements that ensure best interoperability and forward compatibility of your code, and
  • E_DEPRECATED warns you about code that will not work in future versions of PHP.

  Very useful. In my experience, the majority of messages report that a time zone has not been defined and assigning a return values using new by reference is deprecated.

  Unfortunately, applications can display so many minor errors they become impossible to use. You can disable the new error directives by setting the error_reporting value to "E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED" on line 514 of php.ini and restarting Apache.

  However, several web applications, including WordPress, define their own error_reporting settings and may continue to show messages. It will take a developers some time to upgrade their applications to full PHP 5.3 compatibility.

  Have you installed PHP 5.3 successfully? Have you experienced any major issues or problems with existing code?

  <script src="http://ads.aws.sitepoint.com/adjs.php?region=136&did=adz&adtype=vertical" type="text/javascript">
  
  
• 

  A Twitter Adapter for Zend_Auth

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 1:54pm MDT by Christian Stocker

  From time to time I write some little scripts for my own needs or just to test out new stuff. And I realised, that I blog about it way too little. So here I start with my latest addition: Zend_Auth_Adapter_Twitter

  The occasional webapp needs a login for managing users. Doing that by yourself is 1) cumbersome and moreover 2) very outdated (who likes to remember login/password for each and every site). As I was playing with oauth for Twitter anyway lately, I came up with a Zend_Auth Adapter for Twitter. The integration was pretty easy, but the code is very basic and rough. Nevertheless, it does the job and alongside the Openid Adapter I can offer a federated login for many people already. Now, someone should do a Zend_Auth_Adapter_Google :)

  The code and a super simple example can be found in our SVN repository, it also needs the Zend_Auth_Result_Twitter class. And here's the "Live Demo"

• 

  intl in 5.3

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 12:46pm MDT by PHP 10.0 Blog

  A
• 

  Don't make them compete, make them work together!

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 12:41pm MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

  Over the past weeks while I was trying to find a new job, I've made an interesting observation. Well, I made the observation before already, but my interviews over the past weeks have confirmed it: Most developers seem to limit themselves to a single framework. Be it Zend Framework (more popular than I even thought), be it symfony, there's even still a huge amount of custom "we built it because we have our own needs" frameworks out there, even in companies doing things similar to any other web development company out there.
• 

  html 5 won over Xhtml 2

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 12:23pm MDT by Martynas Jusevicius

  Some time ago I was wondering what the future of Xhtml 2 and html 5 is going to be. Now it seems to be clear: W3C announces end of work on Xhtml 2, and hopes to accelerate work on html 5.It's good to have it finally sorted out, and html 5 seems to bring some long awaited features. However, one thing about it worries me a lot, and it's the syntax. The specification now defines two variants of them: html 5 (old-school html style, with no closing tags) and Xhtml 5 (XML serialization, with namespaces etc.).Years have been spent on developer education and improving XML support in browsers and parsers, and html 5 seems to make them useless again and bring even more confusion. Even though W3C promises XML serialization of html to remain compatible with XML (I hope there were no plans to change that, at least?) we still will have 2 syntaxes and 2 sets of tools to process them, and once beggining to seem possible, convergence to a single XML serialization will be as far away as 10 years ago.html is not easier to parse than Xhtml, supported basically on the same level, has no extension mechanism (like namespaces), and is arguably less logical to write (when is there a closing tag, and when not?). So why the nonsense?
• 

  Internationalization in PHP 5.3

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 12:13pm MDT by planetphp

  PHP 5.3 has recently been released and one of the new features in core is the internationalization extension. It allows you to support a multitude of languages and local formats much easier than before, without having to learn all the tiny the details of local formats and rules.
• 

  CouchDb and Midgard talking with each other

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 11:54am MDT by Henri Bergius

  CouchDb is a really cool document-oriented map/reduce database that is nowadays an Apache project. Previously we created the distributed CRM application Ajatus on top of the system and ported CouchDb to Maemo.

  Here in Gran Canaria Desktop Summit CouchDb has been somewhat a hot topic, as the Ubuntu project is planning to use it as the content repository for desktop applications.

  We had a lunch with Jan Lehnardt today and discussed how to make Midgard2 and CouchDb interoperate better, and as it happens, it is actually very easy: CouchDb has a replication protocol that we can support also in Midgard, making the two repositories able to synchronize content with each other.

  There is now a first test implementation of Midgard-to-CouchDb synchronization support, with better Midgard integration and CouchDb-to-Midgard coming soon. Check out the Midgard MVC component on Github. Anyway, already pretty cool!

  Setting up replication on CouchDb admin UI:

  

  Midgard record replicated successfully into CouchDb:

  

  I'll talk more about this and repository-oriented application development in my Midgard2: Content repository for desktop and the web talk tomorrow at 16:45. Be there!

  Technorati Tags: couchdb, midgard, replication

• 

  Calling Conventions - when you need to know C to understand PHP

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 10:26am MDT by David Soria Parra

  I think most of the people using PHP wonder from time to time about particular behavior of the language. That’s pretty much the same case with every language. Pythoneers have their wtf moments, Ruby programmers have their wtf moments and C programmers tend to live in a whole wtf universe. But lately I stumbled over a nice one. It looked like a bug in PHP, but turns out to be an interesting, curious, part of the C-language. Imagine the following PHP code sample and note that $a and $b are not defined (yeah I know, it’s bad coding style..blabla..):
  
<?php
var_dump($a + $b);
?>

  What is the expected result with error_reporting set to E_ALL?
  
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: b in /var/foo/bla on line 1
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: a in /var/foo/bla on line 1
.
  Are you sure? I’m not. On x86 hardware b is fetched before a is fetched and therefore the executor detects that b is not set first. But wait. Let’s test this on a SPARC machine:
  
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: a in /var/foo/bla on line 1
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: b in /var/foo/bla on line 1
.
  What? It evaluates it in the reversed oder? What is happening? So I spend a few minutes with my lovely debugger and it turns out that this is what happens in the engine (I use pseudo code here):

  result ZEND_ADD_OPCODE()
  {
     return add_function(get_op1(), get_op2());
  }
  

  Voila, that’s the problem. On SPARC get_op1() is executed before get_op2(), while it’s the other way round on x86. As get_opX() detects if a variable exists, the error messages appear in reversed oder. I did a little bit research (thank you SunCC Team for your answer!) and it turned out, that C99 doesn’t define the way function calls in parameter lists are executed. Therefore, every system and compiler is free to use it’s own ordering mechanism. My current plan: Write a compiler that does this by random(). The fix is trivial:
  
result ZEND_ADD_OPCODE()
{
op2 = get_op2();
return add_function(get_op1(), op2);
}
. It’s a lovely curiosity.

• 

  Calling Conventions – when you need to know C to understand PHP

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 10:26am MDT by David Soria Parra

  I think most of the people using PHP wonder from time to time about particular behavior of the language. That’s pretty much the same case with every language. Pythoneers have their wtf moments, Ruby programmers have their wtf moments and C programmers tend to live in a whole wtf universe. But lately I stumbled over a nice one. It looked like a bug in PHP, but turns out to be an interesting, curious, part of the C-language. Imagine the following PHP code sample and note that $a and $b are not defined (yeah I know, it’s bad coding style..blabla..):
  
<?php
var_dump($a + $b);
?>

  What is the expected result with error_reporting set to E_ALL?
  
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: b in /var/foo/bla on line 1
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: a in /var/foo/bla on line 1
.
  Are you sure? I’m not. On x86 hardware b is fetched before a is fetched and therefore the executor detects that b is not set first. But wait. Let’s test this on a SPARC machine:
  
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: a in /var/foo/bla on line 1
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: b in /var/foo/bla on line 1
.
  What? It evaluates it in the reversed oder? What is happening? So I spend a few minutes with my lovely debugger and it turns out that this is what happens in the engine (I use pseudo code here):

  result ZEND_ADD_OPCODE()
  {
     return add_function(get_op1(), get_op2());
  }
  

  Voila, that’s the problem. On SPARC get_op1() is executed before get_op2(), while it’s the other way round on x86. As get_opX() detects if a variable exists, the error messages appear in reversed oder. I did a little bit research (thank you SunCC Team for your answer!) and it turned out, that C99 doesn’t define the way function calls in parameter lists are executed. Therefore, every system and compiler is free to use it’s own ordering mechanism. My current plan: Write a compiler that does this by random(). The fix is trivial:

  result ZEND_ADD_OPCODE()
  {
    op2 = get_op2();
    return add_function(get_op1(), op2);
  }
  

  . It’s a lovely curiosity.

• 

  PECL/Cairo 0.1.0 released

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 7:40am MDT by Michael Maclean

  The first alpha of the PECL Cairo extension I've been helping out with has been released. Please download it, play with it, try and break it, and file bugs if you do! There isn't an official manual yet (for licencing-related reasons which I'm hoping to sort out soon), but I'll update this post when there is one. For now, there is a lot of stuff in the examples/ directory in the source which can be used as inspiration.

• 

  Book Review: Guide to Date and Time Programming

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 6:00am MDT by Rafael Dohms

  This review has been pending for a while, but recently I finished reading Derick Rethans‘ book: Date and Time Programming. A first look at the topic (Date and Time) might get you thinking, “Why the hell do I need a book to teach me about time?” But further investigating, and some life experience will show you that dealing with Date and Time is not always as straightforward as “Its twelve o’clock”. Derick’s book gives you an in depth look into handling various factors of date and time such as timezones and days that did not exist, as well as finally delivering something missing from php.net: documentation of the DateTime Object.

  The book covers a lot of ground, even tough it looks rather thin. Derick does a wonderful job of introducing date/time matter in the opening chapter, covering all the calendar switches (Julian to Gregorian) and its complexities (did you know Feb 30th has already happened once?) as well as timezones, solar times and daylight-saving details. This is all very valuable information for anyone working with dates.

  The progressing chapters dwell into the various operations we use with and around date and time, like parsing, representing, manipulating and bringing attention to various perks of timezone and daylight saving handling in all the various functions in PHP. Its also very interesting that the book fully covers and makes crystal clear the new features in PHP 5.3 to deal with this topic.

  The book also dewlls into PHP internals and describes how to use timezones and to update the internal timezone database, as well as how to deal with database engines and still get back correctly timezoned dates.

  The book is a really pleasant read in a very orderly fashion, Derick covers all steps before introducing new issues instead of just throwing them out and explaining afterwards. It also functions very well as reference book, since documentation on this topic is not all it should be on the PHP Manual. This is a *must-read* book for anyone that has ever had to deal with handling date or time in a PHP system, or anyone who plans on launching systems that are aware of timezone differences.

  .

  php/architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming
  by Derick Rethans
  Paperback: 152 pages
  Publisher: Marco Tabini & Associates, Inc. (April 20, 2009)
  Language: English
  ISBN-10: 0981034500
  ISBN-13: 978-0981034508 book, datetime, derick rethans, PHP, review
  

  © Rafael Dohms for Rafael Dohms, 2009. | Permalink | No comments
  Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Livros, PHP.

  
• 

  html 5 for a better Web

  Posted: July 6th, 2009, 3:40am MDT by PHP Classes

  html 5 for a better Web By Manuel Lemos The html 5 will definitely contribute to a better Web. Despite its specification is still being drafted, several browsers like Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, Safari 4, Chrome 2 and Opera 10 already implement a significant part of the current html 5 specification.
  
  This article reviews a bit of the history of how we got to html 5 and presents an overview of the enhancements that html 5 introduces to provide a better Web.
  
  It also presents a reflection about whether html 5 will render useless browser extensions like Flash, Silverlight and Java.
• 

  Installing PHP 5.3 On Ubuntu

  Posted: July 5th, 2009, 3:40pm MDT by Brandon Savage

  With the release of PHP 5.3 to the world, I wanted to be one of the first to try it. The problem is that the typical package managers for Ubuntu won’t include PHP 5.3 for some time – perhaps as long as a year. This is a problem, since I really want to try PHP’s latest and greatest features for myself.

  The problem is, there seems to be a lack of clear, coherent instructions online about compiling PHP on Ubuntu from source. Either it’s so insanely simple that anyone who does it figures everyone else knows how, or everyone relies on the pre-built binaries released by the world that any time I search for “Ubuntu PHP source” I get “why don’t you just use the built-in package manager?” And so, I wanted to write a set of instructions for how I configured and compiled PHP, on Ubuntu Jaunty.

  For the most part we’ll use standard out-of-the-box packages that Ubuntu provides. Since the features I’m looking for are in PHP 5.3, I’m fine with having slightly outdated packages for other software as long as they’re compatible with PHP 5.3.
  

  Warning: Messing with Apache and PHP on a live web server can cause serious problems! Do this only on a development system or on a system that is not critical to your operation! Trying to install a new version of PHP with a current version running might work, or it might sleep with your wife and eat your children. You’ve been warned! Warning: Remove any existing instances of PHP, either compiled from source or installed by package, and all related files, before proceeding!

  1 Install Apache.

  The first step is to install Apache. You can feel free to use your own web server, but for this example I opted for Apache based on the simplicity of installing PHP as an Apache module. This command should also install the development tools, which PHP will need to properly configure itself for Apache.

  aptitude install apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-prefork-dev apache2-utils apache2.2-common

  2. Install MySQL and PostgreSQL

  Most people use MySQL, but almost all PHP installations seem to have PostgreSQL installed as well. I think it’s always good to keep your options open, and you might take a look at Postgres at some point. If you opt not to install Postgres, that’s fine; just alter your configure statement to exclude it.

  aptitude install postgresql-8.3 postgresql-client-8.3 postgresql-client-common postgresql-common postgresql-server-dev-8.3

  aptitude install mysql-client mysql-client-5.0 mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.0 mysql-server-core-5.0

  3. Install required libraries

  PHP itself is very easy to configure and install. However, if you want to get the most out of it you’ll need to install the dependency libraries it uses for various functions like mcrypt and gd. This can be the most challenging part of installing PHP; many hours can be spent issuing a configure command only to have it fail, have to install another library, and repeat the process.

  These libraries are the libraries that were needed to install the options in the configure statement below. You may need more or fewer libraries depending on your individual needs and desires.

  aptitude install libtidy-dev curl libcurl4-openssl-dev libcurl3 libcurl3-gnutls zlib1g zlib1g-dev libxslt1-dev libzip-dev libzip1 libxml2 libsnmp-base libsnmp15 libxml2-dev libsnmp-dev libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev libpng12-0 libpng12-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev libbz2-dev libxpm4-dev libmcrypt-dev libmcrypt4

  4. Download the PHP Source Code

  Visit http://www.php.net and download the latest version of PHP 5.3. The following commands may be helpful:

  cd ~
  wget [us3.php.net]
  tar xvfz php-5-3-0.tar.gz

  5. Configure.

  Change your working directory to the unpacked PHP source code. Execute the following command.

  ./configure –with-apxs2=/usr/bin/apxs2 –with-mysql=/usr –with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config –with-pgsql=/usr –with-tidy=/usr –with-curl=/usr/bin –with-curlwrappers –with-openssl-dir=/usr –with-zlib-dir=/usr –enable-mbstring –with-xpm-dir=/usr –with-pdo-pgsql=/usr –with-pdo-mysql=/usr –with-xsl=/usr –with-ldap –with-xmlrpc –with-iconv-dir=/usr –with-snmp=/usr –enable-exif –enable-calendar –with-bz2=/usr –with-mcrypt=/usr –with-gd –with-jpeg-dir=/usr –with-png-dir=/usr –with-zlib-dir=/usr –with-freetype-dir=/usr –enable-mbstring –ena

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 4145 bytes)

• 

  Nginx+PHP+FastCGI: Testing your web application with bleeding edge PHP

  Posted: July 5th, 2009, 7:00am MDT by till

  So, every once in a while I find myself in need of trying out newer, maybe, not-yet-released features in PHP. For example, recently, I wanted to test RoundCube PHP6 — this is how I did it.

  On a side note, the same setup would also work for testing code with previous versions of PHP.

  Toolbox

  I used nginx and the PHP source a little bit of ./configure and make — for kicks!

  My O.S. of choice is FreeBSD and therefor the installation steps covered are tailored to it. With a small amount of Linux/Unix-fu, anyone should make it work on another distribution regardless.

  Install nginx

  First off, install nginx. On FreeBSD, this should be all:

  • cd /usr/ports/www/nginx-devel && make install distclean

  On other systems, this maybe a:

  • apt-get install nginx
  • emerg nginx
  • rpm -shoot-myself nginx

  The next step includes the infamous spawn-fcgi which many people use to control the php-cgi processes. A lot of tutorials on the net suggest to install li [httpd] because it's a part of it, but on FreeBSD, you may skip that and do the following instead:

  • cd /usr/ports/www/spawn-cgi && make install distclean

  Pretty cool, huh?

  So once this is done, the usual tasks need to be completed — in no particular order:

  • edit the nginx config and enable fastcgi in nginx (/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf)
  • enable nginx itself in /etc/rc.conf (nginx_enable="YES")
  • get another nifty start script (see Shell Script) to wrap spawn-cgi

  ... and done!

• 

  PHP with Oracle RAC

  Posted: July 4th, 2009, 7:14pm MDT by John Lim (PHP Everywhere - By John Lim)

  My article on High Performance and Availability with Oracle RAC and PHP is out on the Oracle web site.

  It discusses my experiences creating an Oracle Real Application Cluster and running it with PHP 5.2 and oci8 1.3 for a customer. Since that article was written I currently recommend that oci8.events be turned off in php.ini since I've had some reliability issues with this setting.

  

• 

  Type hinting rehashed (now with type casting support)

  Posted: July 4th, 2009, 11:22am MDT by Ilia Alshanetsky

  There has been a lot of comments both on this blog and the internals list. There seems to be a fairly large group of core developers who like the idea as well as surpassingly large support base on the user level too (wow, didn't think that this many people want type hinting). Unfortunately, there have also been, as is typically on the internals list a few people complaining for the sake of complaining. Their arguments have ranged from type hinting is against PHP's loosely typed nature and people will mis-use it and make PHP into something that it is not, to I don't need or will use it, so no one should get it.
  
  That said these people are in the minority, albeit a rather vocal one, so progress is being made. There have also been a number of really good suggestions by folks who have reviewed the patch (big thanks guys) and their improvements have been incorporated into the version 2 of the patch. Here is the quick changelog.
  
  1) Added support for "object" type hint
  2) Modified the patch not to break binary compatibility so you can now use patched PHP without having to re-compile your extensions or having issues with binary ones.
  3) Added full reflection support, which I appropriated from Felipe's earlier work on type hinting
  4) Added support for type casting, where by you can do things like this function a((int)$foo), which will force PHP to cast the value of $foo to an integer
  5) Added tests, which again I partially appropriated from Felipe's earlier work.
  
  The updated patch is available here: [ilia.ws]
  The mini test suit which can also show practical examples & limitations of the functionality can be found here: [ia.gd]
  
  I am posting it here for peer review and comment. If all goes well, I am going to post it to internals for a vote, which will hopefully pass. So, if you want the feature in, or you think its crap, watch internals on Monday so you can make your opinion known via a +/- vote.
• 

  Scaffolding, implementing and using project specific Zend_Tool_Project_Providers

  Posted: July 4th, 2009, 8:41am MDT by Raphael Stolt

  Working on a project involving several legacy data migration tasks, I got curious what the Zend_Tool_Project component of the Zend Framework offers to create project specific providers for the above mentioned tasks or ones of similar nature. Therefore the following post will try to show how these providers can be developed in an iterative manner by scaffolding them via the capabilities of the Zend_Tool_Project ProjectProvider provider, enlived with action/task logic, and be used in the project scope.Scaffolding project specific providersAll following steps assume there is a project available i.e. recordshelf initially created with the Zend_Tool_Project Project provider and that the forthcoming commands are issued from the project root directory against the zf command line client. The scaffolding of a project specific provider can be triggered via the create action of the ProjectProvider provider by passing in the name of the provider i.e. csv and it's intended actions. As the next console snippet shows it's
  possible to specify several actions as a comma separated list.

  sudo zf create project-provider csv importSpecials,importSummersale

  After running the command the project's profile .zfproject.xml has been modified and a new providers directory exists in the project root directory containing the scaffolded Csv provider. The next code snippet shows the initial Csv provider class skeleton and its two empty action methods named importSpecials and importSummersale. At the point of this writing, using the Zend Framework 1.8.4 and PHP 5.2.10 on a Mac OS X system the generated Csv provider code or the mapping in the .zfproject.xml is incorrect, but can be fixed by renaming the class from CsvProvider to Csv.

  <?php
  
  require_once 'Zend/Tool/Project/Provider/Abstract.php';
  require_once 'Zend/Tool/Project/Provider/Exception.php';
  
  class CsvProvider extends Zend_Tool_Project_Provider_Abstract
  {
  
      public function importSpecials()
      {
          /** @todo Implementation */
      }
  
      public function importSummersale()
      {
          /** @todo Implementation */
      }
  
  
  }

  Implementing the action logicHaving the project provider class skeleton ready to get going, it's time to enliven the actions with their intended features by using either other components of the Zend Framework, any suitable third party library or plain-vanilla PHP. For the sake of brevity I decided to implement only the importSpecials action which transforms the data of a known CSV file structure into a relevant database table. The CSV parsing steps shown next might not be that sophisticated, as their sole purpose is to illustrate an exemplary implementation of a project specific provider action.

  <?php
  
  require_once 'Zend/Tool/Project/Provider/Abstract.php';
  require_once 'Zend/Tool/Project/Provider/Exception.php';
  
  class Csv extends Zend_Tool_Project_Provider_Abstract
  {
      private function _isProjectProviderSupportedInProject(Zend_Tool_Project_Profile $profile, 
          $projectProviderName)
      {
          $projectProviderResource = $this->_getProjectProfileResource($profile, 
              $projectProviderName);
          return $projectProviderResource instanceof Zend_Tool_Project_Profile_Resource;
      }
  
      private function _isActionSupportedByProjectProvider(Zend_Tool_Project_Profile $profile, 
          $projectProviderName, $actionName)
      {
          $projectProviderResource = $this->_getProjectProfileResource($profile, 
              $projectProviderName);
          $projectProviderAttributes = $projectProviderResource->getContext()
                                                               ->getPersistentAttributes();
          return in_array($actionName, explode(',', $projectProviderAttributes['actionNames']));
      }
  
      private function _getProjectProfileResource(Zend_Tool_Project_Profile $profile, 
          $projectProviderName)
      {
          $profileSearchParams[] = 'ProjectProvidersDirectory';
          $profileSearchParams['ProjectProviderFile'] = 
              array('projectProviderName' => strtolower($projectProviderName));
          return $profile->search($profileSearchParams);  
      }
  
  public function importSpecials($csvFile, $env = 'development')
      {
          $relatedTablename = 'specials';
  
          if

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 6272 bytes)

• 

  Using Symfony Dependency Injection with Zend_Application

  Posted: July 4th, 2009, 1:28am MDT by Benjamin Eberlei

  As a follow-up to my recent post on Dependency Injection containers and Zend_Application I was eager to find out if its possible to integrate the new Symfony Dependency Injection Container into the Zend Framework. To my suprise its possible without having to make any changes to one of the two components. An example use-case would look like:

  $container = new sfServiceContainerBuilder();
   
  $loader = new sfServiceContainerLoaderFileXml($container);
  $loader->load(APPLICATION_PATH.'/config/objects.xml');
  
  $application = new Zend_Application(
      APPLICATION_ENV,
      APPLICATION_PATH . '/config/application.xml'
  );
  $application->getBootstrap()->setContainer($container);
  $application->bootstrap()
              ->run();
  

  Resources instantiated by Zend_Application are then injected into the container by the name of the resource and are given the resource instance. Any object from the Symfony container can then use these dependencies in their object setup. The only drawback of the integration is the fact that the Symfony Container is case-sensitive in regards to the service names but Zend_Application lower-cases all service before injecting them into the container. The following code is a restatement of my previous example of a MyModel class which requires a Zend_Db and Zend_Cache constructor argument.

  $container->register('myModel', 'MyModel')
            ->addArgument(new sfServiceReference('db'))
            ->addArgument(new sfServiceReference('cache'));
  

  Access to a MyModel instance with its dependencies is then granted through the call $container->myModel throughout the application. Make sure to call this after running Zend_Application::bootstrap, so that the Resource dependencies are injected first.

• 

  Speaking in the Fall

  Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 8:47pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org » PHP

  With the announcement of the speakers for this year’s Zend/PHP Conference it seems I’ll be giving three talks this fall (in the span of two months):

  First at CodeWorks 2009 (Dallas) I’ll be giving a talk on best practices, standards and tools to help with both in your PHP development:

  • “B,S,T…Easy as 1,2,3″

  The other two will be at ZendCon (in San Jose). They’re on two different topics:

  • “Taming the Deployment Beast” - looking at some of the development and deployment practices that can make releasing your code simpler
  • “Right Where You Belong (The PHP Community)” - no matter what your skill level or area of focus, everyone has a place they can call their own in the PHP community. This talk highlights a few of them.

  Hope to see you all there! Here’s more info on the two conferences: CodeWorks (Sept. 26th-27th in Dallas) and ZendCon (Oct. 19th-22nd in San Jose)

• 

  DPC 2009 Day 1

  Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 6:18am MDT by Ibuildings Blog

  After my colleague Cal reviewed DPC's tutorial day, it's now my turn to look back at the first real conference day of 2009's Dutch PHP Conference.
  
  The day started with a nice movie made by Almer and Norman after which Cal officially opened the Dutch PHP Conference and introduced Andrei Zmievski to do the opening keynote. Andrei gave an outline of developments in PHP including the changes we are going to see in future versions. Closures, namespaces, better garbage collection and a few more things are coming to PHP5.3, but I think this isn't new to most people. I haven't really read a lot on PHP6 yet other than Unicode, so the addition of traits, C# style getters and setters and scalar/return value type hinting were new to me. I think this was a nice talk to be the opening keynote, because other than just being infomrative the talk also had the right amount of humor with some examples of frustrated people reporting "bugs" and a setting for y2k compliance. I wasn't active in PHP 10 years ago, but it made me laugh when I heard that the y2k_compliance setting basically did nothing other than stop people asking about it.
  
  
  Continue reading "DPC 2009 Day 1"
• 

  PHP with Oracle RAC

  Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 5:13am MDT by John Lim (PHP Everywhere - By John Lim)

  My article on High Performance and Availability with Oracle RAC and PHP is out on the Oracle web site. Enjoy.

  

• 

  PHPNW: Site, Tickets and CfP

  Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 1:23am MDT by Lorna Mitchell

  The date for PHPNW was announced a few weeks ago as Saturday 10th October 2009, and now we've got all the official bits and bobs to go with it! In outline:
  
  The website: [conference.phpnw.org.uk]
  
  Tickets: [conference.phpnw.org.uk] . Early bird pricing until September 11th, student tickets available - look on the website for instructions on getting student tickets.
  
  Call for Papers: [conference.phpnw.org.uk] . Speakers wanted! If you have something to share and you think you can do that coherently - then submit to us please, we're always looking for new people, new talks, as well as the talks and speakers you'd expect to see at the bigger PHP conferences. If you're not sure if something fits, feel free to contact us.
  
  This is officially a one-day Saturday event, with a full day with two tracks of talks and an attendance of 200+ people. In reality its a whole weekend of geeking out in Manchester - with a pre-conference social on Friday night, the main event on Saturday, a conference social running on Saturday night and an informal set of sessions on Sunday morning for anyone with the energy to keep on going before everyone makes tracks to their homes.
  
  If you're going, thinking of going, went last year, or wishing you could be there - add a comment! I'm looking forward to meeting many of you at the event :)
• 

  nested trees in mysql - handy stored procedures.

  Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 12:52am MDT by Alan Knowles

  Storing tree data in Mysql databases, is relatively common, however, all the existing documentation about doing this, makes the whole process rather complex.
  
  If you google it, you will probably find the quite definitive answer at mysql.com, describing the classic  parent_id method, and the left/right numbering process. Both of these methods involve rather complex SQL to fetch and update the tree.
  
  In seeking a better solutions for a tree that was infrequently updated, but frequently queried, I thought I'd try seeing if I could write a few stored procedures to simplify the process.
  
  Our basic database structure looks like this:
  

  CREATE TABLE _TREE_ (
      id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
      parent_id   int(11)  NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
      seqid int(11)  NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
      depth int(11)  NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
      leaf int(1)  NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
      name varchar(128) default '',
      fullpath TEXT default '',
      PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
      INDEX qlookup( parent_id , seqid , depth)
  );
  

  our key components are
  

  • id (the nodes id)
    
  • parent_id (the nodes parent - pretty clasic)
  • name (the textual name of the node)
  • seqid - the generated order item for the whole tree
  • depth - how deep the node is (usefull for indenting)
  • leaf - is it a leaf node (eg. has no children) - usefull for icons

  The trick of the stored procedures is to correctly generate the seqid, this consists of two parts, the top level wrapper and the recursive prodedure to update the table.
  
  
  

  
  DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS _TREE__resequence;
  
  DELIMITER $$
  CREATE PROCEDURE _TREE__resequence(i_sep VARCHAR(4))   DETERMINISTIC
    BEGIN
          DECLARE v_p, v_d, v_s INT(11);
          DECLARE v_fp TEXT;
          SET v_fp = '';
          SET v_p =0;
          SET v_d =0;
          SET v_s =0;
          SET max_sp_recursion_depth=255;
          CALL _TREE__resequence_sub(v_p, v_d, v_fp, i_sep, v_s);
  
  
      END $$
  DELIMITER ;
  
  
  
  
  
  DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS _TREE__resequence_sub;
  
  DELIMITER $$
  CREATE PROCEDURE _TREE__resequence_sub(
      i_parent INT(11),
      i_depth INT(11),
      i_fullpath TEXT,
      i_sep VARCHAR(4),
      INOUT i_seqid INT(11)
      )   DETERMINISTIC
      BEGIN
          DECLARE v_nid, v_ex_seqid  INT(11);
          DECLARE v_name VARCHAR(128);
          DECLARE v_leaf INT(1);
          DECLARE v_fullpath TEXT;
          DECLARE done INT DEFAULT 0;
  
          DECLARE qry CURSOR FOR SELECT id, seqid, name  FROM _TREE_ 
                WHERE parent_id = i_parent ORDER BY seqid;
          DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND SET done = 1;
          OPEN qry;
  
          REPEAT
              FETCH qry INTO v_nid, v_ex_seqid, v_name;
  
              IF NOT done THEN
                  IF v_ex_seqid != i_seqid THEN 
                      UPDATE _TREE_ SET seqid = i_seqid, depth=i_depth WHERE id=v_nid;
                  END IF;
                  IF i_depth > 0 THEN 
                      SET v_fullpath = CONCAT(i_fullpath, i_sep, v_name);
                  ELSE 
                      SET v_fullpath = v_name;
                  END IF;
                  SET v_leaf =0;
                  SELECT COUNT(id) INTO v_leaf FROM _TREE_ where parent_id = v_nid;
  
                  UPDATE _TREE_ SET 
                      fullpath = v_fullpath,
                      leaf = IF (v_leaf > 0, 0 , 1)
                      WHERE id=v_nid;
  
                  SET i_seqid = i_seqid +1;
                  #// do the children..
                  CALL _TREE__resequence_sub(v_nid, i_depth+1, v_fullpath, i_sep, i_seqid);
              END IF;
          UNTIL done END REPEAT;
  
          CLOSE qry;
  
      END $$
  DELIMITER ;
  
  

  This does the hard work of iterating through the tree, and updating the sequence number, depth, leaf field and filling in the fullpath field
  
  Now our simple add node code just adds the node in the correct place, bumps the seqid along, so that you can then regenerate the tree.
  
  
  

  
  DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS _TREE__add_node;
  
  DELIMITER $$
  CREATE FUNCTION _TREE__add_node(
      i_parent INT(11),
      i_after INT(11),
      i_name VARCHAR(128)
      ) RETURNS INT(11) DETERMINISTIC
      BEGIN
  
          DECLARE v_depth INT(11);
          DECLARE v_seqid INT(11);
          DECLARE v_ret INT(11);
          DECLARE v_tmp INT(11);
  
          SET v_depth = 0;
          SET v_seqid = 0;
          SET

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 3410 bytes)

• 

  Ready for PHP & MySQL Week at SitePoint?

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 10:35pm MDT by SitePoint » PHP

  To celebrate the release of the new edition of well-loved SitePoint book Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL, 4th Edition — by Kevin Yank, we’re publishing a chapter a day next week, beginning Tuesday the 7th of July.

  Today, we’ve published the beginning of the series: the Introduction and directly from the book, Chapter 1: Installation. Over the weekend you can read chapter 1 and make sure your newly installed software is working properly, in readiness for next week’s chapters. At the end of the week you’ll have 4 complete chapters from the book and one bonus article, comprising another book excerpt.

  Here’s what you’ll be receiving:

  Chapter 2: Introducing MySQL

  An introduction to databases in general, and the MySQL relational database management system in particular. If you’ve never worked with a relational database before, you’ll find this enlightening, whetting your appetite for what’s to come! In the process, you’ll build up a simple database to be used in later chapters.

  Chapter 3: Introducing PHP

  Here’s where the fun really starts. In this chapter, Kevin will introduce you to the PHP scripting language, which you can use to build dynamic web pages that present up-to-the-moment information to your visitors.

  Chapter 4: Publishing MySQL Data on the Web

  In this chapter you’ll bring together PHP and MySQL to create some of your first database driven web pages. You’ll explore the basic techniques of using PHP to retrieve information from a database and display it on the Web in real time. Kevin will also show you how to use PHP to create web-based forms for adding new entries to, and modifying existing information in, a MySQL database on the fly.

  Bonus: How to Handle File Uploads with PHP
  In this bonus excerpt from Chapter 12, you’ll learn how to accept file uploads from your web site visitors securely and store them.

  Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL, 4th Edition is one of the most popular PHP books for beginners, and SitePoint’s first ever book. This shiny new 4th edition has been completely updated using only best-practice PHP. It’s essential reading for all budding PHP & MySQL developers. For more information, see the book page.

  If you prefer to read the Adobe Acrobat PDF version of these first four chapters, you can download the first four chapters FREE.

  <script src="http://ads.aws.sitepoint.com/adjs.php?region=136&did=adz&adtype=vertical" type="text/javascript">
  
  
• 

  Let me fire up the DeLorean

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 8:10pm MDT by Adam Harvey

  Found and reported a couple of PHP 5.3 bugs yesterday. That isn’t such a surprise; it’s a new release, after all, and we’re currently in the midst of developing code for the first time against 5.3 here at work. One of them is a crasher, but an obscure one reliant on the new-in-5.3 INI_SCANNER_RAW mode in parse_ini_file and a rather odd configuration file, so as these things go, it’s pretty minor, and scottmac has jumped on it very promptly indeed (thanks!). The response from Jani was interesting, though:

  Thanks for not reporting this before release..

  Now, Jani does a tremendous amount of work triaging PHP bugs and I — and every other PHP developer (particularly those of us who does this for a living) — owe him a huge debt for that. But frankly, I resent the implication that I’ve somehow sat on a crasher since before 5.3.0 was released and only submitted it now as some sort of weird vendetta against the PHP internals team. Funnily enough, I only found it while I was reducing the other, more trivial bug down to a minimal test case.

  I get far worse things implied in my direction when I’m out on a Saturday night in Northbridge, so really, I’m not that fussed. (I’m obviously a bit fussed, though, since I’m writing this.) I do wonder how somebody new to the PHP community would feel, though — my guess is that you could forget about future bug reports in some cases, and that just isn’t a win for anyone.

• 

  URL Shorteners

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 4:57pm MDT by Florian Anderiasch

  Yes, it's the new hype - URL shorteners (mostly for use in Twitter).
  Some use the classic tinyurl, then there's is.gd and bit.ly and a fair bunch of others.
  
  As some people already wrote, and I feel no different here, broken links are baaad, mkay?
  So the easiest way would be to get a short domain for yourself and run your own url shortener.
  I am happy enough to have secured myself a not yet publicly announced 3-char .de domain which I'm planning to use for that. This and being bored for 2h led me to roll out my own shortening service.
  
  Enter Shortcore - 259 lines of php code, working already.
  It needs PHP 5.2.0+ (I think :P) and sqlite and I've put it up on github - it's BSD licenced and comments and patches are very much appreciated.
  
  How to use it when it's installed:
  

  • http://example.org/_[uniqueid] redirects to what you saved.
  • http://example.org/_[uniqueid]_ shows a preview
  • So I have "xxx.de/_ab" - as low as 10 chars for an url (excluding [),] that's not less than a bit.ly url (currently at 5+ chars after the /) and I can still put normal content (not starting with a "_") on the domain - fair deal I think
  • there's a bookmarklet for easy saving, either provide the [uniqueid] or let it be generated automatically
  • it's not meant as a public shortening service, so probably some basic auth has to be added
• 

  Status Codes for Web Services

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 8:44am MDT by Lorna Mitchell

  This the last entry in a mini series on points to consider when designing and building web services. So far there have been posts on error feedback for web services, auth mechanisms for web services, saving state in web services and using version parameters with web services.
  
  Unlike the other posts in this series, this one is quite specific to one type of service - REST - since it deals with status codes, specifically HTTP ones. The ideas are transferrable however and other types of service can return statuses in a similar way.
  
  There's a few key things to think about when returning status codes. In earlier posts in this series these was discussion of using existing application framework to serve pages and changing the output mechanism accordingly. Usually a web page will return a status 200 for OK or also 302 for found, so this is fine when things are working normally. But when things aren't going quite so well, its useful to give alternative feedback that can be easily picked up by a client application.
  
  When things go wrong there are a couple of different schools of thought of how the service should respond. One is that if, for example, the user supplies data which fails validation, the service could provide the OK response and a message to the user to let them know what needs validating - exactly as we'd return information messages to a user filling in a form. To be considered restful however, the service should more correctly return one of the "400" status codes, which means that the client made an error. Interesting and useful codes* in this series are:
  

  
  
  • 401 Unauthorized
  
  
  • 403 Forbidden
  
  
  • 404 Not Found
  
  
  • 405 Method Not Allowed
  
  
  • 406 Not Acceptable
  
  
  • 408 Request Timeout
  
  
  • 417 Expectation Failed
  
  
  • 418 I'm a teapot
  
  

  
  * I didn't say they were both useful and interesting
  
  Using descriptive status codes allows the client to get the headline of the problem without having to parse a whole request to find out whether it is good or not. HTTP already has this feature built-in, and so we make use of it (HTTP is pretty cool really, makes a great protocol for services!).
  
  Where an error occurs on the server side - it is usual to return a 500 error or another in the 500 series. This lets the client know there is a problem outside of their control; it is useful to include information about whether the client should retry and when. Having a defined protocol for retries helps avoid the situation where a system comes back up only to fall over again with all the traffic from people retrying every minute (or other interval) - this is a real concern for systems that are under heavy load.
  
  Status codes are like a headline to the calling entity about what happened, and are a valuable tool in the web service toolkit. For bonus points, leave me a comment and tell me which is your favourite status code :)
• 

  OSS projects a Liip

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 7:07am MDT by Lukas Smith

  Yesterday we had an entire day at Liip dedicated to various talks, workshops and hanging out together. It really reminded me again what an amazing company Liip is. Its really what I wished m company back in Berlin should have been. Fun, smart, successful, productive, agile, good. At any rate I wanted to mention the stuff we are working on in terms of OSS. Obviously Chregu and myself are active on PHP. Jordi is also an active member of the PHP.net community. But we have other less known stuff that should also get noted, like Jackalope, Mahara, Picok, GottaGo and Okapi.

  Jackalope is an implementation of the client side JCR standard for PHP. This will enable us making happy agile frontends that are managed with all the various Enterprise features like versioning, ACL's etc. Liip created this project but is looking for others to join. We are already sharing the interfaces with the typo3 guys.

  Mahara is a social networking platform that has spawned out of the Moodle e-learning community. Penny recently joined Liip and she was actually one of the original founders of the project.

  Picok is a one of my babies. Its sort of an OSS iGoogle. So it allows you to easily create new so called portlets, that can aggregate content from various internal and external data sources and present them in a user customizable interface. Originally created for one of our clients the Raiffeisen Bank here in Switzerland. They were kind enough to let us open source the code. In return we won them a couple prizes at the Swiss Web Awards :)

  GottaGo actually took the Swiss Web Awards by storm. It won the grand prize along with a few other category prizes. Its an iPhone app that basically finds the fasted route via public transportation from point A to B here in Switzerland. Oh and I should stop referring to it as GottaGo, since its now called "Transport".

  Okapi is our super lightweight framework. Recently Chregu and I have started working on version 2. Basically we took various Symfony2 components and integrated them into our code. Currently its still in proof of concept stage, but it looks quite promising. I am really seeing a lot of potential in the service container and event dispatcher. I also think it could become a very useful addition to the Symfony eco-system as it seems quite feasible to migrate from Okapi2 to Symfony2 or vice versa. Meaning it will be able to choose if you want something simple and lean or you need something full features, without having to need to learn two totally different frameworks. Chregu has ported liip.to to this proof of concept, so check it out!

• 

  OSS projects at Liip

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 7:07am MDT by Lukas Smith

  Yesterday we had an entire day at Liip dedicated to various talks, workshops and hanging out together. It really reminded me again what an amazing company Liip is. Its really what I wished m company back in Berlin should have been. Fun, smart, successful, productive, agile, good. At any rate I wanted to mention the stuff we are working on in terms of OSS. Obviously Chregu and myself are active on PHP. Jordi is also an active member of the PHP.net community. But we have other less known stuff that should also get noted, like Jackalope, Mahara, Picok, GottaGo and Okapi.

  Jackalope is an implementation of the client side JCR standard for PHP. This will enable us making happy agile frontends that are managed with all the various Enterprise features like versioning, ACL's etc. Liip created this project but is looking for others to join. We are already sharing the interfaces with the typo3 guys.

  Mahara is a social networking platform that has spawned out of the Moodle e-learning community. Penny recently joined Liip and she was actually one of the original founders of the project.

  Picok is a one of my babies. Its sort of an OSS iGoogle. So it allows you to easily create new so called portlets, that can aggregate content from various internal and external data sources and present them in a user customizable interface. Originally created for one of our clients the Raiffeisen Bank here in Switzerland. They were kind enough to let us open source the code. In return we won them a couple prizes at the Swiss Web Awards :)

  GottaGo actually took the Swiss Web Awards by storm. It won the grand prize along with a few other category prizes. Its an iPhone app that basically finds the fasted route via public transportation from point A to B here in Switzerland. Oh and I should stop referring to it as GottaGo, since its now called "Transport".

  Okapi is our super lightweight framework. Recently Chregu and I have started working on version 2. Basically we took various Symfony2 components and integrated them into our code. Currently its still in proof of concept stage, but it looks quite promising. I am really seeing a lot of potential in the service container and event dispatcher. I also think it could become a very useful addition to the Symfony eco-system as it seems quite feasible to migrate from Okapi2 to Symfony2 or vice versa. Meaning it will be able to choose if you want something simple and lean or you need something full features, without having to need to learn two totally different frameworks. Chregu has ported liip.to to this proof of concept, so check it out!

• 

  Learn PHP The Easy Way

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 4:48am MDT by SitePoint » PHP

  
  With over 40,000 copies sold of the three previous editions, I’m very pleased to announce the latest title hot off the SitePoint production line:

  Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL (4th Edition) — by Kevin Yank

  One of the most popular PHP books for beginners, this shiny new 4th edition has been completely updated using only best-practice PHP.

  In this book you’ll learn how to:

  • install PHP 5 and MySQL 5 on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X
  • gain a thorough understanding of PHP syntax
  • master database design principles and SQL
  • build a working content management system
  • add, edit, and delete web content without using html
  • create an ecommerce shopping cart
  • utilize sessions and cookies to track site visitors
  • craft SEO-friendly and memorable URLs

  And a whole lot more …

  At around 480 pages, this book is an easy read. As you move through the book you’ll quickly notice that it’s written in a clear tutorial format that’s easy to understand, and illustrated with plenty of screenshots and diagrams, providing quick visual cues. If you hate wading through dry, academic-style “how to” texts, this book will be a breath of fresh air to you.

  If you’ve never built a database driven web site and you’re looking to go beyond the limitations of a static site, this book will start you off in no time.

  And if you have built database driven web sites before, the extensive PHP/MySQL reference guides included will ensure this book remains an extremely handy desk reference.

  Check out the free sample chapters or order a copy today.

  <script src="http://ads.aws.sitepoint.com/adjs.php?region=136&did=adz&adtype=vertical" type="text/javascript">
  
  
• 

  Software patents are silly

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 4:13am MDT by Henri Bergius

  Dave Neary summed this up well:

  ...I fundamentally disagree with discouraging someone from pursuing a technology choice because of the threat of patents. In this particular case, the law is an ass. The patent system in the United States is out of control and dysfunctional, and it is bringing the rest of the world down with it. The time has come to take a stand and say “We don’t care about patents. We’re just not going to think about them. Sue us if you want.”

  With Midgard we have prior art on some software patents. Software patents only promote big multinational monopolies, and therefore are against the interests of both Europe and the Free Software movement. They're silly, don't apply here, and therefore the only rational response is to ignore them.

  Technorati Tags: softwarepatents

• 

  Scalar type hints in PHP

  Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 2:29am MDT by Tobias Schlitt

  Ilia recently brought up the topic of scalar type hints again. I would love scalar type hints, but a sensible implementation is not easy. I summarize some approaches in this post and talk about the problems they raise.
• 

  ORMs vs. Query Builders: Database portability

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 9:59pm MDT by Larry Garfield

  There has been some discussion in recent days regarding Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs), Drupal, and why the latter doesn't use the former. There are, actually, many reasons for that, and for why Drupal doesn't do more with the Active Record pattern.

  Rather than tuck such discussion away in an issue queue, I figured it better to document a bit more widely.

  read more

• 

  Get a Free iPhone: Help SitePoint Recruit a PHP Developer

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 9:23pm MDT by SitePoint » PHP

  

  SitePoint is looking for two experienced PHP developers (one with a sysadmin twist) to join the team here at SitePoint HQ in Melbourne, Australia. Help us find the right person for either of these positions, and we’ll buy you a shiny, new iPhone 3GS!

  Know someone with “mad PHP skillz” who either lives in Melbourne or would move here for the opportunity to work on one of the Web’s major destination sites for web developers and designers? Drop me an email with the details at kevin(at)sitepoint.com.

  Of course, if you would just like to apply for the position yourself, the complete position descriptions are in our jobs section.

  
  
  
• 

  My favorite language (code)

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 5:21pm MDT by Terry Chay

  Internationalizing the a website, you run into a problem where you don’t know what strings you’ve parsed out for localization or not.

  For these tasks, my favorite language is “zxx.” I use that code to replace all strings with some XX’s. Now any strings (or images) I missed are immediately evident.

  

  Keeping the zxx localization file up to date is easy to update…

  // {{{ l10n_upgrader($pofile,$callback)
  /**
   * Allows you to upgrade a PO file automatically.
   *
   * Search for all "" (two double quotes) and translate these.
   *
   * @param string $pofile the messages.po file to upgrade
   * @param string $callback the callback function that does the string lookup
   * @return array
   */
  function l10n_upgrader($pofile,$callback='')
  {
      if ($callback) {
          $data = file_get_contents($pofile);
          $matches = array();
          $data = preg_replace_callback("!^msgid \"(.+?)\"\nmsgstr \"\"!m", $callback, $data); // if I add s it matches too aggressively
          //unlink($pofile);
          file_put_contents($pofile,$data);
      }
      // generate output
      //msgfmt message.po
      $exec = sprintf(
          'cd %s;msgfmt %s',
          escapeshellarg(dirname($pofile)),
          escapeshellarg('messages.po')
      );
     pass($exec); //erroring out this is an exec function
  }
  // }}}
  // {{{ l10n_ZXXer($matches)
  /**
   * Add a bunch of XXXX's to a string
   *
   * @param array $matches
   * @return string
   */
  function l10n_ZXXer($matches)
  {
      return sprintf(
          "msgid \"%s\"\nmsgstr \"%s\"",
          $matches[1],
          str_pad('',strlen($matches[1]),'XXXX ')
      );
  }
  // }}}
  l10n_upgrader($gt_dird.'zxx_XX/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po', 'l10n_ZXXer');
  

  You may have some trouble getting things working, so remember that gettext uses your system to set the language. If your system doesn’t have zxx installed, you can’t just flip your locale over and expect it to work. As a quick hack for develement, just symlink the directory in your dev machine over to a language you aren’t using. I’m currently using “zu_ZA” which will be okay until Tagged localizes for Zulu.

  Also remember that your web server caches gettext strings, so be sure to shut down the webserver to free the file lock before updating your .pot file.

  Improving your linguisticness

  l10n_ZXXer() above is not that clever. It won’t handle the cases where you have nested sprintf() substitutions. But you can imagine improving it. Here are some ideas of different fake languages:

  • Multiply strlen() computation by 1.2 in order to handle spacing issues for localizing to German.
  • Replace many of the letters with the letters in the cyrillic alphabet. This way you know unicode is correctly supported. Don’t replace all of them so your pattern replace can be easier and strings don’t get smashed.
  • Replace the code to run it through a filter so it’s linguistically recognizable. Maybe turn your site into 133t-speak. Personally, I used ebonics from my Plaxo days. Careful though, while it is amusing to see your website littered with argot, fo’ shizzle. Apparently, I was committing a lot of cuss words into the code base. It’s times like that you’re grateful for the symlink trick above preventing your users from stumbling on these fake languages.

  Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1347 bytes)

• 

  Yes, PHP 5.3 is here. What does that mean?

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 1:06pm MDT by Christopher Jones

  Yesterday PHP 5.3 was released. It can be downloaded from the PHP site. This release has been the product of combined efforts from all areas of the community. While core PHP language developers may have the public profile of soccer...
• 

  Type hinting for PHP 5.3

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 10:16am MDT by Ilia Alshanetsky

  For a few years now at work we've been using a patched version of PHP, one those patching featuring type hinting. Over time this proved to be a very handy feature that allows for a much more readable code and introduces a language based validation layer to ensure that the right data types are getting to your functions and methods. It also caught numerous bugs due to functions returning or passing un-expected values. Best of all this feature does not require any changes on the part of opcode caches (essential component for PHP performance) and allows for simple deployment.
  
  I and other people have tried a number of times in the past to introduce type hinting into stock PHP, but unfortunately have never been successful. On a general level most people agree it would be a good idea to have, since it is an optional feature and does not introduce any regressions, heck you can even mix type hinted code with the non-type hinted one. The "PROBLEM" has always been combining of PHP's typeless nature with type hinting, which is where the consensus has been difficult (impossible) to reach. To illustrate the problem let's consider the following:
  
  function foo(int $bar) {}
  
  Some people would expect that passing "1" (string containing number 1) would be accepted by function foo() and not raise any type errors, since in PHP typically, numbers within strings are considered to be perfectly valid numbers ("1" + "1" == 2). Hence the conflict, some people (I am a part of that group) think that type hinting should be strict, while others think it should be more permissive to be inline with PHP's fluid nature.
  
  With introduction of PHP 5.3 and free day in the middle of the week (Happy Canada Day to all Canucks) I've decided to port my internal patch to 5.3 and introduce a new 'feature' to it to hopefully bridge the divide. I've added a IS_NUMERIC (numeric) type hint that allows the script author to designate a parameter as having to be number, meaning input of type boolean, long or float as well as strings containing purely numbers will be accepted. This means if were to rewrite my previous function as:
  
  function foo(numeric $bar) {}
  
  Then calling foo("112"); would perfectly valid. To further extend basic type hinting support I've also added IS_SCALAR (scalar) type hint that allows a parameter to be designated as scalar, which means it'll accept any boolean, float, string or integer value.
  
  The patch is available here: [ia.gd]
  
  I've also posted it to the internals list in the hope of gathering enough support on the part of PHP developers and users to have it added to 5.3 and future releases of PHP.
  
  It should be noted that this is not the first idea for type hints, that credit goes to Hannes Magnusson who had posted a similar patch on the internals list back in 2006. Also, back in 2008 Felipe Pena wrote a complete RFC on type hinting with patches and even test.
• 

  PHP 5.3 from a development manager's perspective

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 8:58am MDT by Ibuildings Blog

  Yesterday, the PHP community proudly announced that they have released PHP 5.3. While only the minor version number went up, this is still a significant release containing many new features. Maybe even more important than these new features are several features that have been deprecated. These are features that have been in PHP for legacy reasons, but best practices generally already advised against using them, and now the features are formally deprecated. In a future PHP version they will disappear entirely.
  
  At our Techportal Cal Evans gave an overview of the important changes, to make migration easier for developers. In this post,I'm going to look at the migration from a less technical angle, and explain when migration to PHP 5.3 is a good idea and when not.
  
  
  Continue reading "PHP 5.3 from a development manager's perspective"
• 

  PHP 5.3 Windows and PEAR

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 6:22am MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

  Some users reported that the windows builds of PHP 5.3 are not able to open the shipped go-pear.phar file. As a workaround, use the official pear.php.net/go-pear non-pharred version.

• 

  PHP 5.3 Windows and PEAR (go-pear.phar)

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 6:22am MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

  Some users have reported that the windows builds of PHP 5.3 are not able to open the shipped go-pear.phar file.

  As a workaround, users can run the distributed phar with php -d phar.require_hash=0 go-pear.phar or download and use the [pear.php.net] non-pharred version.

• 

  MySQLi result set iteration - recursive

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 3:56am MDT by Johannes Schlüter

  PHP 5.3 is released and after the release stress is over my mind is open for new ideas. While relaxing yesterday I thought about many things, among them was the Resultset iterator I recently discussed.

  Now I wondered where to go next with this and had the idea that an individual Resultset is a child of the whole result and this might be wrapped in an Recursive Iterator. For doing so we don't implement the Iterator interface but RecursiveIterator. RecursiveIterator extends a typical Iterator with two methods: hasChildren() and getChildren(). But now we have a problem: The Iterator returned by getChildren() has to be a RecursiveIterator, too, which makes sense, in general. But I want to return a MySQLi Resultset which isn't recursive - so making this a RecursiveIterator is wrong. My solution now is to introduce yet another Iterator which goes by the name of MySQLi_PseudoRecursiveResultIterator and is implemented by extending IteratorIterator which will wrap the MySQLi_Result and implements RecursiveIterator telling the caller that there are no children.

  As a sidenote: In our experimental tree Andrey made MySQLi_Result an iterator but that's not yet in php.net's CVS (might need some more testing, and probably we might change the design there...) so I'm emulating this with MySQLi_Result::fetch_all() combined with an ArrayIterator, using the experimental code the constructor can be dropped.

  So let's finally look at the code of these two classes:

  <?php
  class MySQLi_ResultsetIterator implements RecursiveIterator
  {
      private $mysqli;
      private $counter = 0;
      private $current = null;
      private $rewinded = false;
  
      public function __construct(mysqli $mysqli) {
          $this->mysqli = $mysqli;
      }
      private function freeCurrent() {
          if ($this->current) {
              $this->current->free();
              $this->current = null;
          }
      }
      public function rewind() {
          if ($this->rewinded) {
              throw new Exception("Already rewinded");
          }
          $this->freeCurrent();
          $this->counter = 0;
          $this->rewinded = true;
      }
      public function valid() {
          $this->current = $this->mysqli->store_result();
          return (bool)$this->current;
      }
      public function next() {
          $this->freeCurrent();
          $this->counter++;
          $this->mysqli->next_result();
      }
      public function key() {
          return $this->counter;
      }
      public function current() {
          if (!$this->current) {
              throw new Exception("valid() not called");
          }
          return $this->current;
      }
  
      public function hasChildren() {
          return true;
      }
      public function getChildren() {
          return new MySQLi_PseudoRecursiveResultIterator($this->current);
      }
  }
  
  class MySQLi_PseudoRecursiveResultIterator
       extends IteratorIterator
       implements RecursiveIterator
  {
      public function __construct(MySQLi_Result $result) {
          // This ctor can be dropped with the experimental bzr sources
          // as IteratorIterator::__construct() directly works with
          // MySQLi_Result
          parent::__construct(new ArrayIterator($result->fetch_all()));
      }
      public function hasChildren() {
          return false;
      }
      public function getChildren() {
          throw new Exception("This should never be called");
      }    
  }
  ?>

  Now we can use this code. For properly using a RecursiveIterator one should use a RecursiveIteratorIterator (RII). To get some nice labels I'm extending the RII and then have a single foreach:

  <?php
  class MyRecursive_IteratorIterator
       extends RecursiveIteratorIterator
  {
      public function __construct(MySQLi $mysqli, $flags = 0) {
          parent::__construct(
                  new Mysqli_ResultSetIterator($mysqli),
                  $flags | RecursiveIteratorIterator::LEAVES_ONLY);
      }
  
      public function beginChildren() {
          echo "Next ResultSet:\n";
      }
  }
  
  $mysqli = new MySQLi("localhost", "root", "", "test");
  
  $query  = "SELECT 1,2 UNION SELECT 3, 4;".
            "SELECT 'hi world' UNION SELECT 'foobar'";
  if ($mysqli->multi_query($query)) {
      foreach (new MyRecursive_IteratorIterator($mysqli) as $key => $row) {
          printf("    %s\n", $row[0]);
      }
  }
  ?>
  

  Now calling this code gives us a result similar to the following:

  Next ResultSet:
      1
      3
  Next ResultSet:
      hi world
      foobar

  Isn't that nice? - I think that's a cool API! What do you think? Do you have use cases for such an API? Should we implement this in C and bundle it with PHP? Any feedback welcome!

• 

  PHP 5.3 Released

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 2:29am MDT by Kevin Waterson

  Today marks the release of the much awaited 5.3.0 version of PHP. The release contains many of the features that the development community have been requesting for some time, along with a plethora of bug fixes and optimizations to boost reliablity and performance.