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Zynga hiring PHP developers

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 4:24pm MDT by Terry Chay

As someone who worked at Tagged, I can say that profit-sharing with game developers like Zynga have been instrumental to make our revenue numbers. If they make this much off us, I shudder to think how much they’re pulling in from open API networks like Facebook and MySpace.

(Not to mention way to many hours wasted on Mafia Wars and Poker. ;-) )

In any case, another PHP job posting…

Zynga is looking for a commando team of strong PHP Developers to join their growing team! You’ll be responsible for owning the development and architecture of our up-and-coming games. Are you ready to put your ideas into our games that will be viewed instantly by millions?

We are committed to developing high quality casual and multi player games! Come join us … we’re having a ball!

Contact: Stephanie Lonn. slonn [at] here.

Responsibilities:

The best candidates will have solid experience developing web applications utilizing Web 2.0 technologies. You will be joining a team who’s committed to working on high quality code in a PHP/LAMP.

You must have experience with database-driven web technologies to work on high-volume, high-availability, large-scale lamp system.

This candidate will be instrumental for designing features and addressing critical issues on some of our biggest game titles, which have several million users across multiple social networks. You must be able to write coherent, organized code and be comfortable working on a complicated code-base with high levels of abstraction.

Required Skills:

Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or equivalent
2-6 years software development experience
1+ years in PHP web development
Passion for software development and OO Design
Familiarity a plus in one or more of the following: Linux, Apache, MySQL
Excellent teamwork skills, flexibility, and ability to handle multiple tasks
Experience with version control systems such as Subversion or CVS
Facebook and/or MySpace platform experience

About Zynga

Zynga was founded in July 2007 with the vision of connecting the world through games. Since then we’ve dedicated ourselves to making fun and social games for people to play with their friends and became the largest developer of social games on the web in the process. Zynga games provide a platform for players to express themselves and form deep social connections with their friends. With a catalogue that ranges from casino to role playing games, our games can be found on most social networks, and the iPhone. Zynga is looking for people who thrive in a fast paced, entrepreneurial, technology-driven culture and are tenacious about achieving results. Our games are produced by our talented team of developers & designers with an audience of 25 million daily active users. The company has its own building in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco that has a high-energy buzz and yummy amenities (we provide lunch and dinner every day!). In June 2009 Zynga was listed in BusinessWeek’s “Fifty Best Tech Startups.” We also won a People’s Choice Webby Award for one of our most popular games, Mafia Wars. Find more information at our website, or follow us on Twitter.

This position is located in our corporate office in San Francisco
Competitive salary, stock options & 401k
We provide full benefits: dental, vision, healthcare, and even free gym membership
Delicious lunch & dinner every day!

Extending objects with new methods at runtime

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 3:39pm MDT by Stubblog - Planet PHP

While the title of this blog entry might sound rather scary to straight OO evangelists it might attract other developers - e.g. those that played around with runkit or had a look into the Ruby world where the language supports adding new methods to a class or just to an instance of a class at runtime (see singleton methods, and this blog article; for those not familiar with Ruby: Fixnum is a class already defined by Ruby core.)

With the advent of PHP 5.3 adding new methods to an instance of a class at runtime becomes possible with PHP as well, using anonymous functions and a little bit of __call() magic. First, let's define a new class (boring old foo, bar, baz example for lack of fantasy):


class Foo
{
    public function bar()
    {
        echo "This is Foo::bar()\n";
    }
}

As you surely already know you can add public properties to an instance at any time:


$foo = new Foo();
$foo->baz = 'Hello World.'`;

We can use this to store an anonymous function:


$foo = new Foo();
$foo->baz = function () { echo "This is Foo::\$baz()\n"; };

Unfortunately, we are not able to call this as a method:


$foo->baz();

This will blow up with a fatal error saying "Call to undefined method Foo::baz()". Of course we could do


$func = $foo->baz;
$func();

but that is not what we wanted to achieve. Let's add some __call() magic to our Foo class:


class Foo
{
    // method bar() omitted

    public function __call($method, $args)
    {
        if (isset($this->$method) === true) {
            $func = $this->$method;
            $func();
        }
    }
}

Now we can safely call $foo->baz() with the desired result. However, compared to Ruby you can not redefine existing methods. Therefore,


$foo->bar = function () { echo "This is Foo::\$bar()\n"; };
$foo->bar();

will still call the method Foo::bar() defined earlier and ignore the redefinition due to the nature of how __call() works.

What can you do with it? If you use duck typing this might be useful as it reduces the amount of code required for the Adapter design pattern as you just extend the instance you want to use instead of creating a separate adapter class. The result is the same, both a full fledged adapter class and the closure can only access the public properties and methods of the instance to adapt. Problem is, the class to adapt most likely does not have the required __call() implementation.

Another use case could be a simplified version of the extension methods mechanism where you want to add a method locally without the need to have it available globally in the application.

If you have another good idea of what this can be used for please feel free to comment - just wanted to write my thoughts down.

Enums in PHP

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 12:10pm MDT by Benjamin Eberlei

A colleague of mine complained about the missing support for Enums in PHP and how one often wants to have a variable that is constant and has one of several specific values. We came up with an elegant solution that we want to share, maybe its even helpful to you.

If you want to implement Enum behaviour with a simple string or int value you end up with having to validate the values at several different locations in the code rather than being able to strictly enforce the Enum structure by using typehints.

We discussed several approaches to this problem that all seemed a bit ugly in one or another way. For example the SplEnum class is a step in the right direction, however you can only use a type hint for "SplEnum" or add another inheritance layer. Also you have to implement different classes for each enum type, which requires you to implement a factory method for your enum to help with creation of the different types.

We came up with a very simple Enum concept. It uses reflection in the constructor to check if the given value is a valid Enum value by checking it against all the defined constants of the implementing class and throws an Exception if it is not. The __toString() magic method is implemented to allow for simple checks of the enums value. Strict type-checks are not possible with this construct, however in our opinion it is a very elegant solution to enforce a limited set of specific values throughout your code-base.

Here is the code plus a small example:

abstract class MyEnum
{
    final public function __construct($value)
    {
        $c = new ReflectionClass($this);
        if(!in_array($value, $c->getConstants())) {
            throw IllegalArgumentException();
        }
        $this->value = $value;
    }

    final public function __toString()
    {
        return $this->value;
    }
}

class Foo extends MyEnum
{
    const FOO = "foo";
    const BAR = "bar";
}

$a = new Foo(Foo::FOO);
$b = new Foo(Foo::BAR);
$c = new Foo(Foo::BAR);

if($a == Foo::FOO) {
    echo "My value is Foo::FOO\n";
} else {
    echo "I dont match!\n";
}

if($a == $b) {
    echo "a value equals b value!\n";
}
if($b == $c) {
    echo "b value equals c value!\n";
}

Now you could nice things such as:

function doStuff(Foo $foo) {
    switch($foo) {
        case Foo::FOO:
            echo "do more here!\n";
            break;
        case Foo::BAR;
            echo "evil stop!\n";
            break;
    }
}

doStuff($a);

What are your thoughts?

Cloning the ZF SVN repository in Git

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 10:54am MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

I've been using Git for around a year now. My interest in it originally was to act as a replacement for SVK, with which I'd had some bad experiences (when things go wrong with svk, they go very wrong). Why was I using a distributed version control system, though?

Continue reading "Cloning the ZF SVN repository in Git"

Long live (forked) PHP!

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 9:39am MDT by Thomas Koch

For one project (crawler) we needed many parallel PHP processes to execute a job queue. This led to the creation of some classes I'd like to present here and ask, whether they would be useful to be included somewhere else, e.g. eZ Components. Possible applications of these classes are all areas, where many background tasks need to be run, e.g. gearman tasks, search engine indexing, processing of images and videos, workflow execution, continuous integration or mail sending. Does anybody have an idea, what could be a name (theme) of a component holding these classes?

Batch Runner
The batch runner is nothing more then a sophisticated, while loop. It's given a callback to execute and before every execution it checks, whether a maximum execution time has passed, the PHP internal memory limit is near to exceed or whether the system has enough free memory left. The callback itself can return a boolean to indicate whether more jobs need to be executed or whether the while loop should take a break and sleep for a while.

Signal handler
The signal handler helps with registering and reacting on POSIX Signals. For every signal one can register multiple callbacks to be executed. The user can then decide, when to call the dispatch method, which executes the callbacks. Our use case is, to register the SIGKILL signal and call the dispatch method before every iteration of the batch runner. This ensures, that the PHP process can safely be terminated between two job executions.

Forks
A fork is represented by an object, which holds the fork callback, it's parameters and the start and stop time of the fork. This object is passed to the fork runner to either simply run it or to run multiple clones of it. After all forks have been set up, the supervise method of the fork is run, which takes care of the forks and restarts terminated forks if necessary. Since the fork runner is the place where all children are registered, it's also responsible to forward signals like SIGKILL to all children.

Administration interface
As a simple administrative interface I've implemented a server in which I can login via telnet to issue status requests and which could in the future also be used to start and stop forks. The server class is called from the fork runner loop to check for new connections or new commands.

Callback
This is actually not implemented yet, but I'm thinking about a dedicated class to represent a callback. This class should check, whether a callback is valid, provides a __toString method for the callback for log messages and can be used as interface for methods that require a callback parameter.

daemonization
To run the actual PHP binary, I use the wonderful daemon tool. So the PHP process can stopp after it has leaked enough memory and daemon will restart it. It also takes care of creating a pid file, the actual daemonization and can be configured to pause for a while before attempting a restart.

Update: The code is available on github. It's ment as a proof of concept only for now!

Update: Another neat trick is to include all classes the children may need already in the parent process. This reduces execution time and memory.

Create a video preview as animated GIF with FFmpeg and PHP SPL

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 8:21am MDT by Lorenzo Alberton

Extract frames from a movie and create a preview as animated GIF, using PHP, SPL, Imagick and FFmpeg.

BEPHPUG: PHP in schnell

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 7:00am MDT by till

German content ahead!

Neu, neu, neu: Die Berliner PHP Usergroup trifft sich im September bereits am Dienstag, 1. September (morgen!), 19 Uhr im NewThinking Store Berlin. Der NewThinking Store ist in der Tucholskystrasse 48 (Berlin-Mitte).

Aktuelles Thema: PHP in schnell (Optimierung, Fallstricke, etc.)

View Larger Map

In English: For this month's user group meeting, we meet on the 1st September, 2009, 7 PM at NewThinking Store in Berlin-Mitte. The topic is "Faster PHP" (Do's and Do not's in optimization.)

Peer Review: Looking At Abstraction – Redux

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 4:30am MDT by Brandon Savage

This entry is part of an ongoing series involving the review of a code sample and it’s refactoring. For the original code sample, see here.

Editor’s Note: The response of the community to this series has been great, and I’ve been given a large number of suggestions. I’ve incorporated some of those suggestions into the code and into this article. Thanks to Jeff Carouth, Greg Beaver and Daniel O’Connor for their help and suggestions.

This entry will focus on our use of the database, and specifically on the already_tweeted() method. This method has a number of problems, and while we’re focusing on the implementation of the database, it’s important to note that we will also need to address some of the logic (which will be the next part of the series).

In our last entry, we focused on abstracting the HTTP request out to a seperate class. Lots of people wrote comments with suggestions of HTTP handlers, including pecl_http">[http">pecl_http] , the PEAR HTTP class, HTTP_Request2 and the PEAR Log class for logging. These are all great suggestions, and all will help abstract out the class without causing us to have to write our own implementation of common problems (the Not Invented Here (N-I-H) syndrome).

In focusing on the already_tweeted method, one thing becomes immediately apparent: it is private. This suggestion, provided by Greg Beaver relates to our first discussion of coding standards and we will change the class to a protected class for extendability later on.

Let’s take a look at the function and dive in to some of the mistakes in it:

/**
* Check to see if this tweet has already been posted and add it to the DB
* if it has.
* @param string $message The tweet
* @return bool
*/
protected function already_tweeted($message)
{
$text     = mysql_real_escape_string(trim($message));
$date     = date('Y-m-d');
$code     = md5($text . $date);
$sql      = "SELECT id FROM twitterLog WHERE thash = \"$code\" ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1";
if (!$res = mysql_query($sql))
{
die(mysql_error());
}
$num      = mysql_num_rows($res);
if ($num)
{
return TRUE;
}
$sql      = "INSERT INTO twitterLog (tdate, thash, tweet) VALUES ( \"$date\", \"$code\", \"$text \" )";
if (!$res = mysql_query($sql))
{
die(mysql_error());
}
return FALSE;
}

Let’s talk first about assumptions. This function assumes that a database connection has already been established for us. And it also assumes that we’re going to use MySQL. What if we want to use another database type (like Postgres, SQLite, or MSSQL)? These are both assumptions that I’d prefer not to make.

We have a few choices with regards to database interactions. We could refactor this using PDO, which would allow us many benefits: PDO is object-oriented, supports multiple databases with the same function calls and structure (meaning that changing database backends wouldn’t break our code), and is relatively easy to learn and understand. We could certainly refactor this using PDO.

The problem is, however, that using PDO doesn’t abstract out the development of our SQL queries. We still have raw SQL in our class. This is less than optimal.

Instead, I want to make use of an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) framework. My preference is Propel, as I’ve worked with it before, but you can use one of the many PHP-based ORMs (like Doctrine). This provides many benefits:

We don’t assume that a connection exists; one will be automatically created if it doesn’t.
We don’t have to spend lots of time filtering the data, as it will be handled for us.
If the database structure changes, most of the schema changes are handled by the framework, meaning our code doesn’t probably have to change all that much. Propel, for example, generates its objects automatically.
Most ORM frameworks create a model layer for our MVC frameworks for us, and make use of PDO so that we can change the backend database server with little or no effort.

This isn’t to say that utilizing an ORM

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2098 bytes)

Presentation Zen Vortrag@Mayflower-Würzburg

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 12:52am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

Am kommenden Donnerstag, den 03.09.2009 findet wieder ein öffentlicher Vortrag im Mayflower-Büro in Würzburg statt (Pleichertorstraße 2, 97070 Würzburg, Straßenbahn Congress Centrum). Beginn ist um 18:00 Uhr, Thema des Vortrags ist Presentation ZEN " und wird von Johann-Peter Hartmann gehalten.

"...Vorträge von Entwicklern sind einfach. Die Fachthemen werden priorisiert und hierarchisch geordnet. Die Hierarchie wird "Agenda" genannt, und jedes Thema ergibt eine Folie, die alle Stichworte als Bulletpoints auflistet - welcome to the PowerPoint Hell. Genau 5 Minuten nach Beginn des Vortrags werden die Mails gechecked, nach 7 Facebook, und die Schnarchgeräusche ab Minute 10 lassen sich auch durch lautes Sprechen nicht mehr übertönen. Zwei Wochen kann sich der Zuhörer noch genau an den Titel der Präsentation erinnern, der Inhalt ist vollständig vergessen.

Um das zu verhindern hat Garr Reynolds Presentation ZEN entwickelt. Mit ZEN meint er "Zurückhaltung, Einfachheit und Natürlichkeit" und verspricht, dass am Ende mehr hängenbleibt - und es auch mehr Spaß macht. Scheint zu klappen: Er ist der Typ, der mit den coolen Apple-Präsentationen angefangen hat..."

Die Donnerstags-Vorträge werden sowohl in Würzburg als auch in München gehalten. Bei Interesse einfach das Blog beobachten, um auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben!

Wir freuen uns auf viele Teilnehmer!

Design-Patterns in PHP Vortrag@Mayflower-München

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 12:44am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

Am kommenden Donnerstag, den 03.09.2009 findet wieder ein öffentlicher Vortrag im Mayflower-Büro in München statt (Mannhardtstraße 6, S-Bahn Isartor).
Beginn ist um 18:00 Uhr, Thema des Vortrags ist Design-Patterns in PHP.

Sebastian Springer wird Argumente und Hintergründe für den Einsatz von Design-Patterns bei der Entwicklung von PHP-Applikationen präsentieren. Eine Auswahl der gebräuchlichsten Design Patterns, deren Hintergrund und Beispiele aus der praktischen Anwendung werden vorgestellt.

Die Donnerstags-Vorträge werden sowohl in München als auch in Würzburg gehalten. Bei Interesse einfach das Blog beobachten, um auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben!
Wir freuen uns auf viele Teilnehmer!

Euer Weg zu uns

Fixing ZDE 5.5 in Snow Leopard

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 9:01pm MDT by Davey Shafik

If you are still using Zend Studio 5.5, and recently upgrade to Snow Leopard, you will have spotted pretty quickly there is a pretty severe display bug when selecting text.

The reason for this, is that Snow Leopard only ships with Java 1.6 and 1.3 (wtf?)

$ ls -al
total 47
drwxr-xr-x  12 root   wheel  408 Aug 30 22:08 .
drwxr-xr-x  11 root   wheel  374 Aug 29 10:27 ..
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   wheel    5 Aug 29 10:26 1.3 → 1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x   3 root   wheel  102 Jul 20 19:35 1.3.1
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   wheel   10 Aug 29 10:26 1.5 → CurrentJDK
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   wheel   10 Aug 29 10:26 1.5.0 → CurrentJDK
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   wheel    5 Aug 29 10:26 1.6 → 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x   7 root   wheel  238 Aug 29 10:26 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x   8 root   wheel  272 Aug 29 10:27 A
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   wheel    1 Aug 29 10:27 Current → A
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   wheel    3 Aug 29 10:26 CurrentJDK → 1.6

As you can see, except for the 1.3 JDK, everything else symlinks to 1.6.0. Now, ZDE will not run with 1.3, and is broken in 1.6, so how do you fix this?

The answer, can be found here: [wiki.oneswarm.org]

I am replicating it here, as it looks like it’ll be a temporary problem for them and is likely to disappear.

It essentially comes down to this: Grab the Java 1.5 JDK from Leopard (original) and then tell OSX to use the 32bit version by default.

This is all done through the Terminal.

So, first, grab the 1.5.0 leopard tarball and unpack (if the link below stops working, contact me for a mirror):

cd /tmp/
wget [www.cs.washington.edu] tar -xvzf java.1.5.0-leopard.tar.gz

Next, move the folder to the standard JVM location on OSX (this will require your user password):

sudo mv 1.5.0 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0-leopard

Then remove the current 1.5.0 symlink and point a new one to our new 1.5.0-leopard directory.

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/
sudo rm 1.5.0
sudo ln -s 1.5.0-leopard 1.5.0

Next (and this isn’t in the original document), set permissions:

sudo chown -R root:wheel ./1.5.0-leopard

Finally, open up the Java Preferences app in /Applications/Utilities, and in the Java Applications section, drag the “J2S2 5.0 32bit” version to the top.

After doing all this, restart ZDE and the selection bug is gone!

- Davey

Holiday is over!

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 7:58am MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

After a nice summer, last week was the kick-off for the new season for the phpBenelux user group. Two events were planned, one in The Netherlands and one in Belgium, and I attended both. Let's have a look at what we got...

Still Alive

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 3:28am MDT by Stuart Herbert

It’s been a busy few months since I had to drop out of the Dutch PHP Conference’s PHP-on-Windows competition due to work pressures. At work, we’ve finished rebranding, launched a new corporate website, and are now starting on a review-and-polish cycle. We’ve also been kept busy finishing off the next version of our VoIP platform, migrating all of our customers onto it (just two more weeks to go!) and coping with a growth rate of 26% during the worst recession in living memory.

Outside work, my wife and I were involved in a car crash at the end of July. We’re both recovering well, although my wife won’t be back at work until at least mid-September. This has meant we’ve had to take things very easy for the summer, but I’m hoping to be back online and blogging regularly again shortly.

Useful Plugins for your bbpress Forum

Posted: August 29th, 2009, 8:01am MDT by Web Development Blog Â» PHP scripts

bbpress is a great peace of software and is based on the code from Wordpress. Since the core version is very basic you need some plugins to change bbpress into a mature forum. This article, written by a experienced bbpress user, gives advice which plugins are very powerful and useful for most bbpress user.

First Glance: Apple’s Snow Leopard

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 6:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

For those who like the newest in development tools, Apple has surely delivered with the Snow Leopard operating system upgrade.

Apple has compiled PHP 5.3, including many of the extensions they forgot in the PHP 5.2.x version included with Leopard. This includes GD, and the MySQL Native Driver (mysqlnd) that is available in PHP 5.3. They’ve also compiled Subversion 1.6.2, and Apache 2 is included as well (2.2.11).

It does not appear that MySQL is included with Snow Leopard, though. PHP also does not have a configuration file, resulting in a warning being emitted by PHP about the timezone not being set. These are relatively easy problems to correct, though I have not tested the full MAMP stack for compatibility with products such as Wordpress or web2project.

Here’s a copy of the Apple ./configure line for PHP:

Taking my show on the road

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 2:11pm MDT by John Mertic

Move That Bus!

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 12:22pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

Jason Austin & Garrison Locke have a story to tell. They attended the 2nd Annual ZendCon, thinking that they knew PHP really well. They were on top of things, and would be on par, or even more knowledgeable than the average attendee. Once they sat in their first session, by Matthew Weier O’Phinney, they realized that they were sorely lacking and that their world was changing out from under them. This is their story.

ZendCon UnCon Announcements

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 11:16am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

The Chair of this year’s ZendCon UnCon (Keith Casey) has published details about how the UnConference will be run this year, and how to start submitting papers!

ZDE 5.5 On OSX

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 11:06am MDT by Davey Shafik

Even though I am in the process of trying to replace it, Zend Studio 5.5 is still my day-to-day IDE for development. However, on OSX Leopard, it has seemed for a while, like the app was decaying — growing progressively crashier the more I used it. Literally, to the point where I could use it.

I think, however, I have solved the issue.

Simply edit /Applications/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.1/bin/runStudio_mac.sh and make the following change:

java -Xms16m -Xmx256m -cp ZendIDE.jar:MRJToolkitStubs.zip:sftp.jar:axis.jar:commons-discovery-0.2.jar:commons-logging-1.0.4.jar:javaxzombie.jar:jaxrpc.jar:saaj.jar:wsdl4j-1.5.1.jar:jhall.jar:../docs/help.zip com.zend.ide.desktop.Main

becomes:

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Home/bin/java -Xms16m -Xmx256m -cp ZendIDE.jar:MRJToolkitStubs.zip:sftp.jar:axis.jar:commons-discovery-0.2.jar:commons-logging-1.0.4.jar:javaxzombie.jar:jaxrpc.jar:saaj.jar:wsdl4j-1.5.1.jar:jhall.jar:../docs/help.zip com.zend.ide.desktop.Main

This just explicitly makes it use JVM 1.5, which is, after all, what it was built for.

Once I did this, it became snappy again, and seems to be far less crash-prone, hurrah!

- Davey

FIEO: Filtering Input with PHP’s Filter Functions

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 4:30am MDT by Brandon Savage

Brand-new PHP developers have drilled into their heads the concept of Filter Input, Escape Output (FIEO). This concept essentially insists that all user-provided content be filtered or escaped, without exception. With the delivery of PHP 5.2.0, this got a lot easier, because PHP included, by default, the Filter library.

Before the Filter library, doing something such as validating an email address often required an ugly regular expression along the lines of this:

<?php
$email = 'firstname.lastname@aaa.bbb.com';
$regexp = "/^[^0-9][A-z0-9_]+([.][A-z0-9_]+)*[@][A-z0-9_]+([.][A-z0-9_]+)*[.][A-z]{2,4}$/";

if (preg_match($regexp, $email)) {
    echo "Email address is valid.";
} else {
    echo "Email address is invalid";
}
?>

The filtering protocol makes this easy for us by providing a built-in filter that we can use to validate an email address:

<?php

$email = 'firstname.lastname@aaa.bbb.com';

if(filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) !== false)
{
    echo "Email address is valid."
}
else
{
    echo "Email address is invalid.";
}

This way has a number of benefits: first, it makes the code more readable. You don’t have to know regular expressions to see what it is we’re validating. Second it reduces the likelihood of errors. Since the same filter is applied each and every time, and has had the benefit of being reviewed by other core developers, you can feel confident that PHP has a working validation function.

There are a number of other validation and filtering functions you can use, including checking to make sure something is a string, applying addslashes(), checking for an integer or a boolean or the like. These filtering functions will always be faster than any custom function you might write (being part of the PHP C code), and provide a fantastic amount of benefit to the filtering and validating of data. Check them out today!

Fixing “unsupported protocol”

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 1:53am MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

Some PEAR installations on PHP 5.2.9 and 5.2.10 seem to be corrupted. When trying to install something, you will get the error:

pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocal – This should never happen. install failed

This problem comes from corrupted channel files. Go into your PEAR php directory and backup .channels directory:

cd `pear config-get php_dir` mv .channels .channels-broken pear update-channels

This means you lost all your channels except for the default ones (pear, pecl, doc and __uri) – but at least you do not have to re-install PEAR.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

PHPNW: Schedule and Crowd-Sourcing

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 12:57am MDT by Lorna Mitchell

Plans for the second annual PHP North West conference (Manchester, 10th October) are coming along rather nicely, so I thought I'd share an update and some headline news. First of all - tickets cost 50 GBP + VAT. This is about 57 euros or 81 dollars. I don't know where else you can buy conference attendance for that kind of money, we even have concessionary prices for students, OAPs, anyone else who can persuade us they deserve it. So - buy your tickets and come join in the fun!

Since I last posted here we also published the schedule. We were overwhelmed by the quality of the call for papers and there are some cracking sessions, excellent speakers, and lots of overlap between the two! Already grumbling can be heard about good sessions which clash with one another ... which is rather a wonderful problem to have :)

Finally, this year PHPNW is expanding and has added an informal schedule on the Sunday morning since we know lots of people will be staying over. This will run from 9 til 1 and we've put out a call to ask what people would like to see on the schedule. So far a few regulars have already made themselves heard and we're looking forward to seeing the outcome of crowd-sourcing a schedule in this way! The Sunday event is at Museum of Science and Industry, which a fun place to go for geeks and, like the morning event, is free entry!

Hoping to see lots of you there at the conference this year - last year's event was brilliant with an excellent atmosphere, and this year looks to be better again. I can't wait :)

ZendCon 2009 Updates

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 1:25pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

Preparations for ZendCon 2009 are moving along and it’s less than 2 months away! Plus the Early Bird registration discount ends tomorrow, (Friday, 8/28). Read on to learn about some of the sessions and keynotes we have planned, as well as how to keep in touch with other ZendCon attendees.

Extension Terror?

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 5:48am MDT by Lars Jankowfsky

When I first saw the posting about ‘bad’ code in OXID over at phpterror I wondered if I could ignore this - but now I’ve realized that this article was published on Planet-PHP and even more - other people start to copy the content of the article.

As I am the guy who introduced the disliked functionality many years ago ( actually years before ZF popped up) I feel the need for a statement to put the things into the right order. Please note that I did work for OXID in the past (years ago) but I do not nowadays.

Arno criticised the way modules == classes are instantiated in OXID eShop. Actually I do believe that exactly this feature is the most coolest in OXID and should be implemented in more OSS.

Let’s start with the “why the fuck did the guy implement this”?

If you do run a website out there you know how important it is to keep it up-to-date with the latest patches due to security reasons. Now imagine - we are in eCommerce area. You deal with payments, credit card data and sensitive information about what people ordered from your shop. Not only Creditcard data is sensitive - imagine it would leak that you ordered the extra-big-boobs doll? You see - especially in this area you need to make absolutly sure that your servers and the software is safe.

Unfortunately you can’t start an eCommerce business out-of-the-box. You need to adopt the software to your needs and processes. Think of payment, ERP, delivery notifications, link to your stock, uploads to price-comparison sites etc. Some of the functionality you might need to develop yourself - for other stuff you might find already existing modules out there.

Therefore you need to change code, and/or install external modules which modify the functionality. In former days you simply edited the source code (as we are talking about OSS) and made manually sure that the modules you install are compatible. Don’t forget - each of them will work with the out-of-the-box shop - but they still should work after you added your changes and - also need to work after you installed some other external modules which might overwrite/change the same classes/functionality which your new module also want to change.

You end up with a highly customized shop, many changes, a lot of work to dig through the sourcecode of the installed modules to make sure that they don’t harm themself and… you lost the possibility to automatically appply patches/releases. Upon each patch or new release you need to manually redo/check your changes.

This sucks. It sucks a lot. And this is exactly why I’ve introduced the criticised module functionality.

So what did I do?

As Arno already copy&pasted the source I won’t repeat it here. But let me explain the main idea behind the concept.

As OXID is fully OOP you can change all the functionality by inheriting your class from any base class you might want to change. You add your changes and - et voila - you still can overwrite the bases classes with new releases/patches and your changes will work. This is called object oriented programming.

Let’s assume you want to change the method “getPrice” in the class “oxarticle”. You simply overwrite oxArticle::getPrice and… it would work if the system would know that your class exists. Therefore you need to register your class and let the OXID Framework know about it so that it automatically will instantiate your class instead of oxArticle each time the object is needed.

So far, so good, so what?

What happens if you install some other module ( e.g. from here) which will change the same method in same class? It would screw your changes and you would end up with manual changes again. To avoid this, the OXID Framework supports “chaining” of inheritance… and the order is set in the config. So you can define that the modules oxArticle implementation is executed before your class or after.

I do believe that by overriding the classes you do get the most flexible option to change everything without loosing the functionality to update the shop whenever you want. For sure this could be solved differently. Events or Hooks would have been a way to go - but this would involve a lot of additional coding == lines of code and therefore introduce new vectors for bugs. And - it is by far n

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1262 bytes)

Free Zend Framework-based code generator from UML2 models

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 12:13pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

You are looking for a way to quickly setup the Zend Framework? You are tired of wasting time in writing repetitive sections of code over and over again? You are looking for improvement in the development time? You would like to have a rapid prototyping tool for very early system demonstration? Make the switch to the BOZA Framework – the faster, easier, better way to generate your Zend® based PHP application.

XSLCache in PECL

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 9:50am MDT by Alexey Zakhlestins blog » php

XSLCache extension for PHP, originally developed by NYTimes started its second life in PECL’s repository and I am proud to announce first PECL-release.

The XSL Cache extension is a modification of PHP’s standard XSL extension that caches the parsed XSL stylesheet representation between sessions for 2.5x boost in performance for sites that repeatedly apply the same transform. API-wise it is compatible with usual XSL extension with two small exceptions:

instead of XSLTProcessor class you should use XSLTCache class.
importStyleshet method has another “signature”: void importStylesheet(string $path, bool $cachesheet=true);

Installation, from now on, should be as simple as “pecl install xslcache“

oxid esales – show me your 94% Unit Test coverage!

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 2:54am MDT by Arno Schneider

PHPterror on OXID eShop

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 1:21am MDT by Demian Turner

puremvc-patterns I can’t believe Zend is publishing articles on OXID eShop, this is definitely some of the worst code I have seen in ages.

As “the PHP company” I think Zend ought to at least select projects that have some merit in terms of software design, as surely beginner PHP devs look to Zend for good examples and copy/emulate whatever they showcase.

PHPterror took a closer look at some of the OXID code, really jaw-dropping stuff.

oxid esales – The extend parade!

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 12:04am MDT by Arno Schneider

Peer Review: Looking Into Abstraction

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 11:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

This entry is part of an ongoing series involving the review of a code sample and it’s refactoring. For the original code sample, see here.

There are a number of fundamental concepts in object-oriented design that we should take notice of. One of these concepts is abstraction. This is what we will focus on today and in the next entry.

This article will focus on the constructor method. There are a couple of problems, namely that the constructor itself does a lot of actual work. Also, we have the cURL setup done in the constructor. This object is a Twitter object, not a cURL object; this means that we should decouple the cURL functionality and abstract it into a separate object of its own. This not only will make our object more true to it’s functionality as a Twitter object, but will allow for greater reuse (since we’ll be able to use the cURL object for more).

There’s some debate about whether or not you ought to write things like wrappers for native PHP functionality. One thing that is missed in the “don’t write a wrapper for cURL!” argument is that a good wrapper for HTTP requests shouldn’t be limited to cURL. In fact, it should make use of fopen(), file_get_contents(), etc. in the case that cURL doesn’t exist. A good object would test for this, and change its behavior based on preset rules. (strategy pattern, anyone?)

There are two things that we need to: first, we need to abstract the cURL tools out of the class. Second, we need to further encapsulate the class. The Constructor should not do the work of cURL setup; this should be handled elsewhere. We will do this by writing a new class (which I will not show) for HTTP requests, and then we will handle the HTTP request in the existing functions. Our constructor will now look like this:

 	/**
 	 * Constructor.
 	 * @param string $username The username of the Twitter user
 	 * @param string $password The password of the Twitter user
 	 * @param string $email Optional email address for testing
 	 * @return void
 	 */
    public function __construct($username, $password, $email = null)
    {
        $this->user = $username;
        $this->pass = $password;
        $this->you  = $email;

        $this->host = "http://twitter.com/";
        $this->done = FALSE; // DEFAULT - NOT ALREADY TWEETED
        $this->test = FALSE; // DEFAULT - THIS IS LIVE, NOT A TEST 

		$this->http = new [HTTPRequest();]     }

We will assume that the [HTTPRequest] class, which is not shown, will do error-handling, check to see the appropriate methods are available, and handle configuration items like timeout, host, and other settings.

The next entry in the series will focus on abstracting the database layer, which will be roughly similar to entry, but will contain more information about the reasons for abstraction and the process of abstracting the code.

Our class now looks as follows:

<?php
// class_Twitter.php - NPC TWITTER AUTO-FEED
error_reporting(E_ALL); 

// DO NOT RUN THIS SCRIPT STANDALONE (HAS PASSWORD)
if (count(get_included_files()) < 2) {
    header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: /"); exit;
} 

/**
 * Twitter Class
 * @author Anonymous
 *
 */
class Twitter
{
    /**
     * @var [HTTPRequest] HTTPRequest Object.
     */
    protected  [http;] 

    /**
     * @var string Email address for administrator/tester
     */
    protected $you; 

    /**
     * @var string The username for the Twitter account.
     */
    protected $user; 

    /**
     * @var string The password for the Twitter account.
     */
    protected $pass; 

    /**
     * @var bool The flag for test mode
     */
    protected $test; 

    /**
     * @var bool Flag for whether or not this tweet has been sent today
     */
    protected $done;

 	/**
 	 * Constructor.
 	 * @param string $username The username of the Twitter user
 	 * @param string $password The password of the Twitter user
 	 * @param string $email Optional email address for testing
 	 * @return void
 	 */
    public function __construct($username, $password, $email = null)
    {
        $this->user = $username;
        $this->pass = $password;
        $this->you  = $email;

        $this->baseHost = "http://twitter.com/";
        $this->done = FALSE; // DEFAULT - NOT ALREADY TWEETED
        $this->test = FALSE; // DEFAULT - THIS IS LIVE, NOT A TEST 

		$this->http = new [HTTPRequest();]

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2751 bytes)

South by Southwest

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 10:44am MDT by Chris Shiflett

I was in Austin for SXSW earlier this year to discuss Fontdeck with some of the Clearlefties and to socialize with friends. Because I was staying in a hotel room with Jon and Elliot (SXSW typography panelists), I was also hoping to gain some design talent through osmosis. I don't think my cunning plan worked, but I did walk away inspired, and I really enjoyed the positive, creative vibe of the conference.

Next year, I'm hoping to return as a panelist. As SXSW veterans know, part of the selection process involves voting via the PanelPicker, where you can vote for the panels you'd like to see. (Voting is open now and closes Fri, 04 Sep 2009.) I know getting a panel accepted is a long shot, but I want to try. I'd really appreciate you taking a moment to register (if you haven't already), and kindly voting for my panels if they sound interesting. Anyone can vote; you don't have to have been to SXSW before or even be planning to attend this year.

The first panel is entitled Travelog With Maps: When 1000 Photos Aren't Enough:

They say photos are worth a thousand words. Is that enough to describe a trip? We don't think so. Learn how a GPS device, a dash of code, and a bit of creativity combine to tell the story of your travels. We did it in the land of fire and ice, and so can you.

This panel includes my good friend Andrei and is inspired by our trip to Iceland with Helgi, where we spent a few hours every evening importing and interpreting GPS logs, geotagging and uploading photos, writing code, and aggregating various other assets, like videos and tweets. We wanted to create a travelog that our friends and family could use to follow along with our trip, and to tell our story to those who may be considering a similar trip of their own. In this panel, we want to share what we learned along the way and inspire others to share their own travel stories without having to overcome as many obstacles.

The other panel is entitled Social Web Security: From Psychology to Programming:

The user-generated, interconnected Social Web is ripe for the plucking by criminals and other malicious users. We'll demonstrate how psychology and user experience have as much to do with security as coding and sysadmin skills, and how to apply all of them to protect your users.

This panel includes Ed, Simon, and Alex, and explores the security implications of emerging trends in social apps as well as some innovative, nontraditional techniques you can use to help keep people and their data safe. This panel is one part web application security, one part design, and one part psychology. If you like my talk on security-centered design, I think you'll like this panel. I've been talking to Ed about this for quite some time, and we're really excited about it.

I appreciate you taking the time to vote. If you also want to be kind enough to share this on Twitter or elsewhere, I've created some short links you can use:

Here's hoping I see you in Austin. :-)

Posted Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:44:46 GMT in Chris Shiflett’s Blog

Zend Framework 1.9.2 Released

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 10:36am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

The Zend Framework team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the 1.9.2 release. This release is the second maintenance release in the 1.9 series. Over 40 issues have been resolved for this release, covering more than 15 different components. You may download it from the Zend Framework site .

Developers should be Artists

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 8:41am MDT by Fabien Potencier

During my holidays, I took the chance to step back a little and think about my day-to-day work. As the CEO of Sensio, I have the opportunity to do a lot of different jobs. But what I really like to do is hacking. By hacking, I mean developing software for the fun of it, software that is not for a "paying" customer. And as such, hacking cannot be a day job per se. Hacking is something you do on the side. It's a hobby, a passion. And Open-Source is probably the best way to share your hacks.

Why do I like hacking so much? Obviously because I'm free to do whatever I want, with the tools and the methodology I choose. But more important, because I have the freedom to do it iteratively with no schedule pressure. Building a software is a long iterative process. I love to be able to code something, forget about it for some time, and come back to it later on to enhance it, or throw it away altogether. But back to the artist side of things. How much time do you think Leonardo da Vinci took to paint the Mona Lisa? According to Wikipedia, he began painting the Mona Lisa in 1503 and he is thought to have finished it shortly before he died in 1519. What? 13 years for just one painting? That's insane. Perhaps, but that's the way it works for artists. I started developing symfony in 2004, and it still unfinished in 2009, and probably will never be (and the number of features has not raised that much in five years). Hacking is an art, and hackers should act as artists. Hackers and painters have a lot in common but I won't talk about the analogy too much as Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay and a whole book on this topic. I recommend you to read both of them if you are a hacker or a developer.

Hacking is about creating something by using the computer as a medium of expression. One of the best hacker and artist I know of is Why the lucky stiff. From the beautiful camping micro-framework, to the excellent "Poignant Guide to Ruby" book, he was very prolific and a real artist. I use the past tense, as he recently removed all his online presence.

Everyday, I try to learn new ways to write beautiful code in PHP (who's laughing at me?). You can easily follow my progress by watching the evolutions of the symfony code, and more recently the symfony components code.

If you are looking for more "programming art", I also did some attempts with Twitto and Twittee, my two Twitter experiments.

// Twitto
require __DIR__.'/c.php';
if (!is_callable($c = @$_GET['c'] ?: function() { echo 'Woah!'; }))
  throw new Exception('Error');
$c();

// Twittee
class Container {
 protected $s=array();
 function __set($k, $c) { $this->s[$k]=$c; }
 function __get($k) { return

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 895 bytes)

PHP Depends On You

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 11:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

Anyone who reads my frequent pleas to involve yourself in the community knows that I’m a big fan of community development of open source projects. PHP is one of the world’s largest open source projects. And if I haven’t convinced you yet that you need to contribute, perhaps this will help encourage you.

Professionals (those who make their living from open source) owe it to the open source communities they utilize to give back. Anything less is akin to stealing – be it time, talent or treasure – from the community that keeps them in business.

That may sound harsh but consider: people who write open source software generally aren’t paid to do it. There are a few exceptions (some people are paid to write Wordpress or the Zend Framework, for example). But the core of PHP is contributed by people who are solely interested in making PHP better for their professional endeavors. Not contributing to their efforts is like showing up at a potluck without bringing a dish. Not cool.

Contribution to the community doesn’t have to be in the form of writing a patch or a new extension for PHP, or releasing some massive open source project. No, it can be as simple as contributing to the documentation, or submitting a bug report. We all come across bugs – if we don’t report them, no one can fix them! Each of us has something to contribute, if only we choose to do so. And when we contribute, we owe it to the community to do so in a full, complete way – submitting usable bug reports or documentation, for example.

The community exists because people choose to contribute. Giving back isn’t a matter of charity, but a matter of the survival of the product or project you use every single day. It’s not really optional, but it is easy. I’m personally wary of those who opt not to give back, if only because it makes me question how genuinely they appreciate and understand the product they’re using.

So file a bug report or write some documentation today. You’ll feel good, the community will benefit, and the whole ecosystem gets healthier. Remember: PHP depends on people just like you.

Accepting Credit Card Payments with OXID eShop CE and AlertPay

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 10:16am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

OXID eShop CE is a modular, standards-compliant shopping cart system that can be modified to work with any payment gateway. This article follows up on a previous tutorial, explaining how to extend the OXID base classes and get them working with a redirection-based payment gateway named AlertPay.

Upcoming conferences

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 8:35am MDT by Fabien Potencier

I'm back from mostly six weeks of vacation. I really enjoyed being able to drop my laptop and spent time doing non-computer related stuff. Everything has to end, and as of today, I'm back to work... Well, mostly. I will travel a lot during fall for business reasons, and also to speak at several conferences.

First, I'm really excited to have been invited to speak at the 10th Japan PHP conference in Tokyo (4-5 September 2009). Being my first time there, I will speak about symfony of course, and how the framework help developing professional websites.

Then, I will speak at the Zend PHP Conference (19-22 October 2009 - San Jose CA, USA). This will be the first time I attend the Zend conference. I will talk about "Using Zend Framework and Symfony Together" and will participate at the "Framework Shootout".

Towards the end of the year, I will speak at the Forum PHP (12-13 November 2009 - Paris, France). This year, I will play with PHP 5.3 and show how to take advantage of the language new features (this one will be in French).

To end this year of conferences, I will eventually speak at the International PHP Conference (15-18 November 2009 - Karlsruhe, Germany), where I will have two sessions: "Symfony Components: What's in for you?", and "Dependency Injection in PHP 5.2 and 5.3".

If you attend any of these conferences, stop by and let's talk a bit.

Introducing PHPterror: bad PHP usage exposed

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 5:51am MDT by Demian Turner

unit-testing-webdesigner

A new look at how to create unit tests – using Photoshop! Sense of humour required …

PHPWomen Merchandise

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 2:23am MDT by Lorna Mitchell

A few weeks ago, phpwomen.org put out an announcement about merchandise. When we first started the group (almost 3 years ago, believe it or not) we printed t-shirts and gave them out at conferences. Once the various founder members and a few benefactors had paid for a set of t-shirts each it became clear that this wasn't a sustainable venture. So, after much happening in the background getting set up as a non-profit and getting a bank account (thanks mostly to lig!) and a bunch of time spent sorting out two spreadshirt shops (thanks Elizabeth!), it is now possible to buy merchandise online in both North America and Europe! The big problem with cafepress is the shipping costs for everyone outside of North America so spreadshirt seemed like a better option ... still not ideal for our members further afield however and perhaps we can work out some better alternatives over time.

So, with great excitement I ordered my new phpwomen shirt (in girl fit!) - and here it is:

Note: This is the large size ... I'm not small but I'm not really that large either so order a bigger size if you are ordering the girl fit shirts.

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to the announcement post and follow the links to order your shirt and support the organisation - just in time for the autumn conference season!

Git Pre-commit hooks for Symfony projects.

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 12:02am MDT by Vidyut Luther

Graham Christensen and I have been working together on a project for a little while, it’s using the Symfony Framework . Graham explains the problem really well with a good solution to it. I’d like to expand on the subject a little bit.

Even though we are writing PHP, command line scripts should use exit properly. This little hack of having to grep the log file, is just plain silly. We’re going to look into pushing a patch into the Symfony codebase, so the tasks give the proper error codes.
This doesn’t do a php lint check or a code sniffer check yet, that’s on the way
This hook needs to be added to each developer’s working copy manually, and the file needs to be made executable. To avoid emailing things back and forth, we’ve added a directory called ‘opt/githooks’, where the pre-commit file exists, on a fresh clone, we require developers to copy the file and make chmod +x it.

Installing a pre-commit hook in Git

This is a dead simple process, but just in case. Copy the code as shown on Graham’s Blog Post
and paste into a file called pre-commit.


cp pre-commit $WC/.git/hooks/
chmod +x $WC/.git/hooks

I’m curious to find out what other Symfony developers are doing as far as pre-commit hooks are concerned, how do you handle pre-commit hooks for entire teams?

Building PHP 5.3 packages on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) for Apache 2

Posted: August 23rd, 2009, 10:56pm MDT by Vidyut Luther

Goal: Build a PHP 5.3 package, that I can install and upgrade on new ubuntu slices as needed, without having to compile on each box.

This is an amalgamation of different blog posts that did certain things really well, but not everything I wanted. The post I refer to specifically Installing PHP 5.3 on Ubuntu by Brandon Savage .

Prep your system

Setup your development server to be able to compile things. By default, most installations will not come with compilers installed.

apt-get install checkinstall

Say yes, and let it follow the dependencies as needed.

Get the development headers for some of the extensions you’ll be compiling in.


apt-get 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

apt-get 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

Download PHP and Compile it


mkdir ~/srcs
cd ~/srcs

wget [us3.php.net] tar xvfz php-5-3-0.tar.gz
cd php-5.3.0

Now, you can either do the ./configure –help and pick your options, or you can use my configure options for PHP 5.3

make
make test

checkinstall

checkinstall will ask you some basic questions about the package, answer and let it build the package for you. You will run into an interesting issue at first, apxs2 will complain about a LoadModule not being in the [httpd.conf] file. This is an artifact of how Ubuntu/Debian likes to handle it’s configuration files. The simplest thing is to add a line at the bottom of your [httpd.conf] that loads a benign module. Mod Pony seems cute .

Configure your PHP like any normal apache server. Reload apache, put the handy phpinfo(); in your documentroot, and then have fun.
Be sure to remove the phpinfo(); from your production servers.

If you want MySQL 5.1, just do apt-get install mysql-server-5.1 , be sure to change the dev header packages to the same version as well.

PHPT: Writing tests for PHP

Posted: August 23rd, 2009, 6:30am MDT by Rafael Dohms

This year the PHP Community promoted the PHPTestFest in various places around the globe and it was a success. I participated in the event promoted by the PHPSP UG which ended up as the team with the most committed tests, after participating in the event I kept on going and have since obtained a SVN account and karma to be a official test commiter to PHP. So if you did not get the chance to learn how to write tests in your local TestFest I will now go over the steps taken so you can be ready for next year.

PHPT is a extremely simple test framework designed to test PHP. Its atomic nature and independent test execution make it perfect for the kind of tests needed, so tests can be really focused and test specific function and/or bugs.

What do I need to know?

The beauty about PHPT is that you need to know very little other than writing PHP code. A little knowledge into the inner workings of PHP will of course help you in finding areas of code that need testing, and how best to test them, but just knowing PHP is enough to start.

I have divided this post into 5 parts so we can get started:

Preparing the Environment
Choosing what to test
Writing a test
Executing a test
Submitting a test to PHP

1. Preparing the Environment

Your test environment needs the correct version of PHP and the ability to run tests, I’m going to focus on *nix/MacOS systems hereA as I have not had experience with tests on windows. The first step is to compile PHP from source, during the testfest we focused on 5.3 but you should head over to the PHP QA Page (qa.php.net) to see what version is being targeted or take you pick from the PHP SVN. Anyhow you need to download the source code for your system.

The basic compilation process means you need to run ./configure with your correct settings and run make. After running make you are already ready to run tests, using the make test command which will run all the current tests (9000+) and prompt you to send a report to the QA Team, you should do it. But before you begin writing your own tests i recommend that you also run make install so you can have a proper php executable of the version you are testing, it might be useful. Later on we will see how to use make test to target only the tests you wish to.

2. Choosing what to test

Before you begin writing a test you must decide on what you are writing a test for. You can usually pick from two points to write tests for, you will be either writing a test for a specific bug or to cover areas of PHP without “code coverage”. To figure out the bugs that have/need tests you should get on the QA mailing list or check out the correct path (Ex: For GD go to ext/gd/tests) for a filename with the bug-id.

To write tests to cover untouched areas of the source code your best bet is to head over to http://gcov.php.net where you should pick you branch/version and look for th areas with less code coverage. In this year’s testfest the PHPSP group focused on the GD extension, so we where basically looking at the coverage for the gd.c file, which i will use for examples in this article. To decide what to test took a little bit of bit-scrubbing, so this is where i commented that knowing the inner working of PHP would help, but after a few examples and tests you can easily pickup what needs to be done.

Let’s start by analyzing these lines of code from gd.c:

What we are looking for here are the red lines, which means that these lines were not executed. The main objective is to get all lines to either blue (executed) or white (non-executable code) as you can see above. First thing you should notice here is that this is the code for the imageclorallocatealpha function as displayed online 1848 by the PHP_FUNCTION construct.

Now you should look at the red lines, we can easily see that line 1856 is never executed, and judging by the IF construct before it we can state that this line is never executed because the zend_parse_parameters function (nevermind what it does for now) never returns the FAILURE state. As it happens, the zend_parse_parameters is responsible for parsing and validating the parameters passed to the function, so we can guess that this means that the current tests never pass an invalid parameter to the function, thus never testing if it actually returns a proper error message. This seems like good place to

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Getting starting on the un-informed.org backend

Posted: August 23rd, 2009, 5:59am MDT by Lukas Smith

A while back I blogged about helping out on the IT side of things or the un-informed.org project. A couple of people have replied and said they were interested in helping. In order to facilitate this, I have registered a project on google code and committed an initial version. Does not do much atm, but it features the current database schema concept and admin generator modules for the core entities. The step would be adding support for the various many to many relations. I hope I will have some time next week together with my co-worker Jordi to work on this. Check out the MySQL workbench schema file if you want to get a visual overview of the schema. That file should be fairly uptodate, though the definitive schema is defined the doctrine config file. Seems like there is even a MySQL workbench plugin to help in round-trip exporting/importing to this format. I have committed a little getting started file for anyone to wants to play with things, but for anyone experienced with Symfony, these should all be no brainers. I will be fairly liberal with giving people commit access. All that is required are a few sane patches or even just an email to the developers mailinglist with a detailed plan. There is also a #uninformed IRC channel on freenode now.

Talking to multiple databases with Symfony 1.2

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 7:59pm MDT by Vidyut Luther

Notes on using Symfony with multiple databases.

I’m building a new application in symfony, and I need to use some data from an existing application written by another developer.

I can’t just extend the existing application for reasons we don’t need to get into, but I do need to interface with the data, since the existing
app doesn’t really have a nice way to handle a SOA, or share data easily, my next best option is to talk to the original app’s db.

Things you need to think about.

No Hacks This is not a hack, symfony/propel support this out of the box, the documentation mentions it briefly but it’s definitely possible.
Permissions Should you share the same username/password? or different? In my case, I wanted to make sure symfony couldn’t write to the existing app, so I created a user with SELECT privileges only. (This will affect your ability to run symfony propel:insert-sql (it’ll give you an error))
You WILL need MULTIPLE Schema.yml files The docs specifically state this, Symfony will take into account every file ending with schema.yml or schema.xml in the config/ folder
Filesystem I want to keep as much of a separation between the two databases, not only is the user different, so is the location of the Models. This can be done easily with changing the package attribute in the schema.yml file.

Conventions / Background

Existing application is called, “earlyprototype”, and the database name is also “earlyprototype”.
New application is called, “newfunapp”, and the database is also called “newfunapp”

The How to Build your YAML files

Since you need a schema.yml or xml file, you can either generate one using a tool that will take your data defintion and create the YAML for you, or you can cheat and build a temp project, configure it to work with earlyprototype , and then do a symfony propel:build-schema . This will give you a schema.yml file in your config directory.

You will take this file and copy it to the newfunapp now, but you’ll give it a different name. For simplicity, you’ll call it earlyprototype.schema.yml.
So you’ll end up with something like.. ~/websites/newfunapp/config/earlyprototype.schema.yml .

For the purpose of this tutorial, take your schema.yml file for the newfunapp, and rename it to newfunapp.schema.yml

Edit your Schema YAML files

You now need to edit your YAML files. They need to look something like the following:

config/earlyprototype.schema.yml

earlyprototype:
  _attributes:
    package: lib.model.earlyprototype
    defaultIdMethod: native

config/newfunapp.schema.yml

newfunapp:
  _attributes:
    package: lib.model.newfunapp
    defaultIdMethod: native

What you’ve changed here is the name from “propel”, to earlyprototype and newfunapp, so now symfony won’t be confused. And, you’ve told symfony to put the models in their own directories inside the lib/model/ folder of your app.

Edit your database.yml file

Now, you need to tell symfony about the DSN for the different databases. Just like you can specify your original db in the environments, you can do the same for the different dbs. Keep the changes to the schema.yml we made above in mind.

config/databases.yml

dev:
  newfunapp:
    param:
      classname: DebugPDO
      username: newfunappexampleuser
      password: testingexample
      encoding: utf8
  earlyprototype:
    class: sfPropelDatabase
    param:
      classname: DebugPDO
      dsn: 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=earlyprototype'
      username: earlyprototypereadonlyuser
      password: testingexample
      encoding: utf8
  propel:
	 class: sfPropelDatabase
	 param:
	    dsn: 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=pearanalytics3'
	    username: thiscantpossiblywork
	    password: thisisnotevenarealpassword

Possible Bug: For some reason, I noticed I need to have the ‘propel’ connection here, just the name Buil

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(More) PHP Worst Practices

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 1:47pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

I got such a great response from my previous “worst practices” post (thanks for all the great feedback!) I thought I’d forge on ahead with a few more to add to the list. A few pointed out that most of the recommendations from the first post could apply to just about any language out there - that’s great news to me. That tells me that PHP developers are just like any other developer out there, regardless of the language they “speak”.

On to the next round! Here’s four more “worst practices” that, if you care about being any sort of good developer you’ll avoid like the plague.

Speed is King (except when it’s not)
Everyone wants their applications to perform well. It’s a well known fact that customers are wanting more and more each second and putting up with delays in a web app is almost unacceptable. They want it all and they want it now. Easy, right? All you have to do is make your apps work the best they can and do it as fast as possible. But which way is the fastest? We’re talking speed here, and you should do all you can to get those load times down and the customer satisfaction up. Optimize the hell out of those methods and cache whatever you can. Good planning (see “Unplanification“) from the start can make these kinds of decisions easy and smooth out the wrinkles that might pop up. Be careful, though…keep optimization in mind from the start, but don’t make every decision about shaving those seconds off. This can lead to some pretty bad code if you’re not careful. Good structure and standards should never be ousted by over-optimization.
While I’m on the topic, there’s also another so called “silver bullet” that a lot of blogs, tutorials and books set up as a good option for making your site run faster: micro-optimizations. I’m sorry, but most of the things they suggest are really only doing one thing - giving you a false sense that your application will get a huge speed jump from using them. Granted, there are special cases where shaving one billionth of a second off the execution time can be helpful, but in most applications, that’s just not that helpful. If you’re serious about optimizing your applications, look into things like memcache or other caching tools so you don’t have to go all the way out to those databases/resources and pull down that data each time. Your application will thank you for it.
Be a Hermit
Want a quick way to lose interest in a language? Don’t talk to anyone else that uses it. I know, I know - there’s lots of developers out there that have gotten very good at their language of choice, but there comes a point when they come across something even they don’t know. They get stuck on it for hours trying to figure out why changing the value of this one variable is breaking everything. What’re is options? He could keep trying, working for hours, even days on the issue before figuring it out. He could also take a look at the manual and see it shines any light on the problem - but that’s pretty limited. What’s the next step? Something that, sadly, a lot of developers just don’t do - ask!
I’m not even talking about real-time communication here, this can even be just hopping on a forum and posting your question. Remember, as much as you’d like to think it, you don’t know everything. There’s going to be issues you come across (sometimes even bugs in PHP itself) that someone else out there has come across in the past. The collective knowledge of the PHP community is so vast that, given the right place and time, I’d dare say that just about any question could be answered. There’s even people out there that are happy to help you figure out the answer even if they haven’t come across it before (bless them)! Trust me, you can only benefit from having more than one developer poking and prodding your code into submission. Forums are just one teeny tiny slice of the pie when it comes to resources for help. There’s even *gasp* “face-to-face” things like IRC, local user groups and conferences where you can hit up other developers for ideas and suggestions. Don’t limit yourself! Use the mass brain power of the community to your advantage….after all, they’ll do the same!
Slight the Newb
When was the last time you talked with someone just starting out with PHP? Last week? Last month? How did you treat them? Were you helpful and did you take the time to look at the

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FrOSCon Talk: jQuery Plugin Development (Resources)

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 4:22am MDT by Jakob Westhoff

I just gave my talk about "jQuery Plugin Development" at this years FrOSCon. I had much fun giving this talk as the audience was great. You can get the slides and example code here.

syntax I miss in PHP

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 7:03pm MDT by PHP 10.0 Blog

Status update

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 2:26pm MDT by Amir Mohammad Saied

A colleague reminded me that it's been over 5 months since the last time I posted something on this blog. I never really have been a blog person, and most likely never will be. Writing a blog post is hard enough in itself, let alone writing it in your non-native language, and things are not that much better in my other blog which is actually in my native language.

What kept me from writing something recently is by no means a secret. I bet most of you have heard about Iran's tenth presidential election which was held in June, and its aftermath. It's not something you want to be part of, or even to observe. In my childhood, Iran was in a war with Iraq ... I barely remember anything from that time, but I could tell what happened in recent months here in Iran (and mostly in Tehran) was worse than the war. War with Iraq ... it was sad, but it was all about militaries, about foreigners, but not compatriots killing each other. Let me tell you, nothing is worse than seeing a 16 years old plainclothes boy (which is of course authorized by governor) hitting people with a baton.

And I'd like to thank everyone in the community which I'm proud to be part of, the PHP community (and PEAR folks in particular). Great guys like Daniel O'Connor, Christian Weiske, Chuck Burgress, Brett Bieber (which unsurprisingly are all elected again to be part of PEAR group for 2009 and 2010) and ... I just could say, Thanks for showing concern and suggesting ways to support.

"Domain Driven Design" Vortrag@Mayflower-München

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 7:15am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

Am kommenden Donnerstag, den 27.08.2009 findet wieder ein öffentlicher Vortrag im Mayflower-Büro in München statt (Mannhardtstraße 6, S-Bahn Isartor).
Beginn ist um 18:00 Uhr, Thema des Vortrags ist Domain Driven Design: motivation, naming methods, tests.

Domain Driven Design (DDD) ist eine Methode, die in der Agilen Softwareentwicklung Anwendung findet. Hierbei wird das Hauptaugenmerk auf die Domäne selbst gelegt. Es steht also nicht die verwendete Technik zur Lösung eines Problems, sondern das softwaretechnisch zu lösende Problem selbst im Mittelpunkt.

Nina Schmitt wird bei dem Vortrag die Konzepte hinter DDD vermitteln sowie einige Methoden zu dessen Umsetzung vorstellen.

Die Donnerstags-Vorträge werden sowohl in München als auch in Würzburg gehalten. Bei Interesse einfach das Blog beobachten, um auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben!
Wir freuen uns auf viele Teilnehmer!

Euer Weg zu uns

Subversion 1.6 branching and merging, caveats, and how-to

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 1:40am MDT by Vidyut Luther

This is a quick reminder/note for myself more than anything else, but if you’re using Subversion 1.6, merging is a bit easier than it used to be, and all of Google’s search results will either tell you how to keep your branch in sync with trunk using methods in 1.0.

First of all, be sure to read the latest/greatest nightly version of the SVN book

The chapter about branching and merging is what we’re concerned with in this post.

Goal : I made a new branch in Subversion so I could work on a couple of new features without releasing them prematurely. In the mean time, I found some bugs in the core app, fixes for which, need to show up in the branch for testing as well. So, I need to keep my branch in sync with trunk.
Here’s how you keep your branch in sync

For the lazy folks
shellprompt#> cd /path/to/my/workingcopy-of-branch shellprompt#> svn merge ^/trunk

Caveat first make sure your working copy of the branch is “clean”—that it has no local modifications reported by svn status

My Essential Wordpress Plugins

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 11:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

Someone asked me a few days ago what the best plugins for Wordpress are. That’s not a question I can answer definitively; however, I can answer the question about what plugins I prefer and use every day. Here’s a list of the plugins I use.

Akismet This is a must-have plugin for spam protection. Written by the Automattic team (the same people responsible for Wordpress), it helps prevent you from ever having to deal with spam comments.

All in One SEO Pack This powerful plugin rewrites various aspects of your site to be more SEO-friendly (like the title bar). It also lets you add meta information for search engines. This one is updated frequently so you may run into update fatigue, but I personally think this is also an important plugin.

Exclude Pages If you want to exclude certain pages from your navigation, this plugin lets you do that with a simple checkbox. Why this isn’t part of the Wordpress core I don’t know; but this plugin will remove pages (and their children) from the nav menu, making it easy to create linked pages that aren’t part of the navigation.

Organize Series For the creation of a series, you need this plugin. This plugin automatically links all posts in a series together, and creates a widget you can use to show the series on your theme. This is a must-have for anyone who writes multiple-part blog entries.

Sociable One of the best ways to spread something around is to let people who like it talk about it. Sociable is a great widget for this. It shows up at the bottom of each entry, and you can customize what’s available by default for your users to use. This is a must-have for sharing your content.

Add Post Footer If you’ve ever had your content stolen in its entirety, you’ll want this plugin. This plugin allows you to add a footer to each and every entry, which can be invaluable for showing those thieves what-for. The interface is lacking, but the functionality is there, so give it a shot.

Subscribe To Comments For discussions this is an incredibly important plugin. When people write comments they can click a checkbox to be notified of updates to that set of comments. This facilitates discussion, and is a plugin that is quite heavily used on my blog.

Syntax Highlighter Plus Many of the code samples I use would be impossible without this versatile plugin. This is perhaps the best plugin I’ve ever found. It allows you to write in tons of languages, and give syntax-highlighted examples of all of them. Definitely recommended for technical bloggers.

WP Twitip ID I like to know when my commenters are on Twitter, so that I can follow and interact with them. This plugin allows people to leave their Twitter ID as a part of their comment. This takes some formatting on your part in the comments, but overall I think this is a great plugin to facilitate and improve the discussion.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin This plugin creates the “related posts” information at the bottom of each post. Not a must-have, but a fun and useful tool. It allows you to show readers what they might also be interested in. You can tune the logic to make the results more relevant, and the plugin does a great job without this of determining related posts on its own.

That’s my list of plugins that I use. Tell me in the comments what your favorite Wordpress plugins are.

PHP Worst Practices

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 8:17pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

We’ve all seen design patterns and heard about best practices in PHP development, but there’s a darker, more sinister side to the “practices” examples that is usually just the stuff of folklore and legend. Many a PHP developer brushes off their existence with a quick “oh, I’d never do that…” or “I’ve seen other people’s code like that…” What am I talking about? Why, only the very things that threaten to tear apart the language and the community as a whole! That’s right - PHP Worst Practices - and they’ll sneak into your development as quick as you can bat an eye. I’m here as a guide through some of these. The way I see it, if I can share as many as I can, you can see them coming a mile away and code around them.

So let’s get on with the list - the sooner the better:

Beware the Outsiders
This practice (”Not Invented Here”) can be particularly deadly if you don’t keep an eye out. As developers, we’re tempted to have a “I can write it better” mentality. Don’t try to deny it - you’ve looked at an application and thought it just the same as the rest of us. It’s even worse when you’re starting something new. There’s fresh clean horizion out there and who would want to muddle it with someone else’s code (SEC)? Our code would be more pristine (and probably work better) if you take out an unknown like that - our would it? Stop and think for a second about this one. Sure, you could cobble together your own library to add that feature and yes, it might integrate excellently with your code, but what does that gain you? One of the points of Open Source development is to share your knowledge with the rest of the community. One way to do this is via code - posting your library so other can use it and *gasp* contribute to it for future versions. Its this shared knowledge that you’ll miss out on if you block SEC from your application. Sure, it’s not all good code, but there are some great sources out there (PEAR, PHPClasses, Freshmeat) to pick up just what you need. Plus, it’s win-win…you get a quick solution to your issue and you don’t have to maintain that library in the future.
Unplanification
That’s right, I said unplainification. If you’ve ever charged into a project full force without taking even a single second to think about its structure, you know where I’m coming from. It’s that sinking feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you’re half way through the second library and you realize there’s a much better way to do things. This revelation is usually followed by a whispering in your ear….”I told you so.” This would be the combined voices of everyone in your past that tried to teach you the mantra: “Plan First, Code Later”. Sure, you can get away without planning for the small stuff - test scripts, little cheesy two-page websites - but when you start talking web applications a plan is a must. It doesn’t have to be much, even some scribbles on the back of a napkin counts. Just something to say you’ve thought through the structure and pieces that’ll make up the application. Obviously, larger applications call for larger plans and it may require a team of people to work on the resulting project. If you’re not familiar on how to work with a development team, you’d do well to read up on it a bit. There’s nothing quite like a good development team firing on all cylinders and drawing up a unified plan for the development to come. Planning is a good thing and, while it might seem to be a hassle when all you want to do is code, do yourself a favor and take a deep breath and plan before a single line of code is written.
The Documentation Wasteland
We’re all guilty of it. If you say you’re not, be prepared to be called a liar and to have ASP.NET stickers applied all over you and your computer. Scripting is just so much damn fun that writing the code is what it’s all about - make it work and make it awesome. Isn’t that what really matters in software development? I hate to break it to you, but that’s only half the story…really about three-fourths. If you’re writing your code without any sort of documentation, you’re dooming you and possibly future maintainers of the code into many a pointless search to try to figure out why method a() returns two completely different value types depending on which parameters it’s given. Sure, you can trace through the code and figure out what’s getting exec

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Blog Backlog

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 1:47pm MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Several people have pointed out to me recently that I haven't blogged since early May, prior to attending php|tek. Since then, I've built up a huge backlog of blog entries, but had zero time to write any of them.

The backlog and lack of time has an easy explanation: my change of roles from Architect to Project Lead on the Zend Framework team. While the change is a welcome one, it's also been much more demanding on my time than I could have possibly envisioned. Out of the gate, I had to finish up the 1.8 release, and move immediately into planning and execution of the 1.9 release -- while learning the ropes of my new position, and continuing some of my previous development duties. Add a couple of conferences (php|tek and DPC) into the mix, and you can begin to see the issues.

Continue reading "Blog Backlog"

Autoloading Doctrine and Doctrine entities from Zend Framework

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 1:17pm MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

A number of people on the mailing list and twitter recently have asked how to autoload Doctrine using Zend Framework's autoloader, as well as how to autoload Doctrine models you've created. Having done a few projects using Doctrine recently, I can actually give an answer.

The short answer: just attach it to Zend_Loader_Autoloader.

Now for the details.

Continue reading "Autoloading Doctrine and Doctrine entities from Zend Framework"

Announcing JSConf.eu

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 4:24am MDT by Jan Lehnardt

I’m very proud to announce JSConf.eu that I am co-organizing (with Malte & Holger) November 6th/7th here in Berlin.

From the official announcement:

JSConf in Washington, DC in April this year proved to be the homecoming of a JavaScript community that didn’t know it existed. The conference got top marks all around for content, community and fun. With JSConf.eu, we let that spirit live on and give JavaScript a home in Europe. (why let the americans have all the fun? :)

Mark November 7th/8th in your calendar, we’ll be presenting top speakers in the field and a relaxing atmosphere in Berlin, Germany’s pulsing capital. Join us for a two-day, community-focussed indie conference with top technical content around your favourite language and great opportunities to meet like-minded people.

Our speakers so far include:

Amy Hoy,

Thomas Fuchs,

John Resig,

Dion Almaer &

Ben Galbraith

I’m looking forward to announce even more great speakers in the next weeks & months. The call for papers is still open:

We’re concerned about diversity in our industry and would like to encourage more women to do talks.

See you in Berlin!

Permalink for 'Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End Book - Chapters 8 and 9 Published. Developing A Blog Application, and Implementing The Domain Model'

Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End Book - Chapters 8 and 9 Published. Developing A Blog Application, and Implementing The Domain Model

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 1:33pm MDT by Pádraic Brady

I'm pleased to announce that two additional chapters have been published online for Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End, a free Zend Framework book available online.

Chapter 8 is a quick chapter on planning the development of a blogging application.
Chapter 9 is a concerete implementation if this application's Domain Model, specifically Entries and Authors. Its purpose is to write a Data Mapper using Zend_Db_Table in the background.

A third appendix, "Unit Testing And Test Driven Design (TDD)", is additionally scheduled for release over the weekend.

Remember that all comments are welcome through the book's paragraph by paragraph commenting system. You may also make comments at the end of each chapter.

Voting opens for my SXSW panel

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 12:11pm MDT by Andrei Zmievski

I have not yet been to South by Southwest festivals. And every time I mention this to friends and colleagues, they make big eyes and say, “You have to go!”. Well, I finally cracked and submitted a panel proposal for the 2010 SXSW Interactive portion. The panel is titled “Travelog with Maps: When 1,000 Photos Aren’t Enough” and will present and discuss ways to preserve the memories and tell the stories of your trips using latest geolocation tools, social data, and a bit of code. Chris Shiflett will be my co-panelist. We decided to do this panel after trying to share our Iceland trip in real-time and discovering what is and isn’t there to support it.

If you like this idea, please vote for this panel. Thank you!

Indexing Email Messages with PHP, Zend Lucene and Sphinx

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 10:58am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

The Zend Framework provides an implementation of the Lucene search engine that can be used for full-text search. And there's also Sphinx, the standalone (and very fast) full-text indexer for MySQL, PostgreSQL and XML content. This article looks at these two implementations, comparing and contrasting them and illustrating how they can be used to add full-text search to an application.

Long time no blog

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 7:02am MDT by Ivo Jansch

Somebody just kindly reminded me that it's been over 3 months since I last posted on my blog. Oh my.

What kept me busy mostly the past months is my new home. I moved to Utrecht (which is more in the center of The Netherlands, so I can get around more easily) with Leoni, and as developers say, the house is "90% done". So it'll keep us busy for a few months.

Things at Ibuildings are hectic as always. Our UK office is growing like crazy and is nearly half the size of our NL operation already. And we're working hard to get our Italian office up and running. Behind the scenes we're already working on things there, so if you're looking for a cool PHP job in Italy, drop me an email (ivo at ibuildings dot com). (Actually Ibuildings NL and UK are looking for senior developers too, if you're interested). After a succesful DPC back in June, we're planning a few more events so keep an eye on the Ibuildings website for news on those.

Another thing that has kept me busy is one of my personal pet projects, Flackr, a twitter based breaking news aggregation site. It has fairly basic functionality at this point (we've been mainly working on the news aggregation and event detection algorithms), but will eventually grow into a 'newsroom 2.0' type application with pro features for journalists. Here's an example of how it tracks tweets related to the Hurricane Bill including pictures. Contrary to many twitter aggregators, it doesn't follow the masses, but trusted sources only.

Finally, I'm happy to announce that I've started work on a new book. Enterprise PHP sold very well and it's not outdated yet, but writing it was addictive and now I just feel like writing another one. The book will be about PHP and Cloud Computing. This time around I'm not working on it alone, I'm co-authoring it with Vito Chin, author of the GMagick PHP extension, among many other things. The expected publication date is early 2010.

That's it for now; I hope to pick up blogging with more actual content after summer.

PHPUnit 3.4.0RC1

Posted: August 18th, 2009, 4:30am MDT by Sebastian Bergmann

The first release candidate of PHPUnit 3.4 is now available.

Among the many new features introduced in this new version, the most notable are the support for test dependencies and fixture reuse as well as the possibility to run tests in separate PHP processes for increased test isolation. Please have a look at the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes.

You can help make PHPUnit 3.4 a "good release" by running your test suites with it and report any problems or regressions that you may encounter. You help is much appreciated!

First impressions of SilverStripe CMS

Posted: August 18th, 2009, 1:42am MDT by Christopher Kunz - PHP

I have recently installed SilverStripe to test if it fits into our shared hosting concept. Read after the break about my impressions.

Continue reading "First impressions of SilverStripe CMS"

Quick Tasks in Nag, Horde's task manager

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 8:27pm MDT by Chuck Hagenbuch

Introducing Horde_Date_Parser and quick tasks in Nag

A quick look at the Tokyo Tyrant extension for PHP

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 2:23pm MDT by Vito Chin

Here's a quick, rough look at the speed of the Tokyo Tyrant extension for PHP released by Mikko 2 days ago. I am using it as an on-memory hash. Profiling done with xdebug on PHP 5.3.0:

Here's the collateral userspace costs of an alternative PHP implementation by Bertrand Mansion (dependent on the sockets extension to PHP):

Message to all swiss open source developers

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 12:46pm MDT by Lukas Smith

I am on the board for this years CH Open Source Awards. All the other guys on the board seem to be more into Java and other languages which so far have gotten way more submissions. So all you swiss open source developers (not only PHP developers), submit your work, get recognition, prizes and most importantly show off what kind of great open source applications are being created here in Switzerland. We are especially keen on seeing projects coming out of schools and universities. Should also help boost visibility for your project and its not all that much work to submit your project. We will look at all submissions in a fair bit of detail, so most of the work is on our side :)

FrOSCon Talk: jQuery Plugin Development

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 11:14am MDT by Jakob Westhoff

This years FrOSCon I will not only be one of the organizers of the PHP-Room, I will furthermore give a talk in the FrOSCon main track about Plugin development with jQuery.

Adding PUT variables to Request Object in Zend Framework

Posted: August 16th, 2009, 11:34pm MDT by Lorna Mitchell

When I wrote recently about testing web services within Zend Framework, I missed out a really key piece of information! I didn't explain how I was reading the PUT vars in my controller code in the first place - so I'll rectify that omission now.

Its very simple: I have extended Zend_Controller_Action with my own, and all controllers inherit from here. This has a routeAction() which grabs the incoming variables from a PUT request and sets them as parameters within the usual $this->getRequest() scope, then forwards on the request. Here is my class:

class My_Controller_Action extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
public function routeAction()
{
// handle grabbing PUT vars
if($this->getRequest()->isPut()) {
parse_str($this->getRequest()->getRawBody(), $params);
foreach($params as $key => $value) {
$this->getRequest()->setParam($key, $value);
}
}
$this->_forward(strtolower($this->getRequest()->getMethod()));
}
}

So in my controller code, I simply call out to $this->getRequest()->getParam('name') or whatever, and in my tests I can set those parameters as I showed in my other article.

I hope this makes sense, its one of those things I set up once and use a lot (and now I'll be able to refer to how I did it!), if you have any queries, comments, improvements or if this helps you then please leave a comment - I haven't come across anyone else doing anything similar but I know there must be, so let me know!

Peer Review: Managing Coding Standards

Posted: August 16th, 2009, 10:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

If you need a sample of the code, please visit here.

One of the first things I look for when I check out code is how is the code organized? Is it laid out well? Is it coded to a particular standard?

In our code sample, the first thing we should address is how does the code look. There are a number of suggestions I would make immediately. Let’s dive in.

There are no DocBlocks or clear coding standards.

No clear coding standard jumps out at you right away when you read this code. There’s a lack of consistency, but beyond that, code completion is hindered by a lack of standards. Also, there’s no DocBlocks, which would help improve the documentation of the code.

There are lots of coding standards out there: PEAR, Wordpress, Drupal and Zend Framework all have a coding standard in place that you can adopt in your own code. I highly recommend it.

The first thing I might do is add some DocBlocks. It will help us understand the code better.

Examining The Properties

The next thing I want to examine is the list of properties. Each property is private, with the exclusion of the public $res property. The $res property is actually unnecessary (it isn’t called by more than one method). From a style standpoint, most private properties are prefixed with an underscore (”_”) to demonstrate that they are, in fact, private. Let’s go ahead and make this code change:

<?php
class Twitter
{
    /**
     * @var resource Curl connection
     */
    private $_ch; 

    /**
     * @_var string Email address for administrator/tester
     */
    private $_you; 

    /**
     * @var string The username for the Twitter account.
     */
    private $_user; 

    /**
     * @var string The password for the Twitter account.
     */
    private $_pass; 

    /**
     * @var bool The flag for test mode
     */
    private $_test; 

    /**
     * @var string The URL for the API call
     */
    private $_host; 

    /**
     * @var bool Flag for whether or not this tweet has been sent today
     */
    private $_done;

    /**
     * @var mixed Response of the cURL queries
     */
    public  $res;

We will, of course, need to make that change throughout the code.

But there’s something else about the properties that we need to examine. Because the properties are private, this class cannot be extended. This might be an intentional architectural choice; however, it is more likely that the author just didn’t consider the possibility of extension.

I prefer t make my properties protected. I also prefer to make ALL of my properties protected. I prefer to access properties through methods, rather than directly from outside the object. Also, since the $res property is unnecessary, we’ll go ahead and drop it. Our properties list now looks like this:

class Twitter
{
    /**
     * @var resource Curl connection
     */
    protected $ch; 

    /**
     * @var string Email address for administrator/tester
     */
    protected $you; 

    /**
     * @var string The username for the Twitter account.
     */
    protected $user; 

    /**
     * @var string The password for the Twitter account.
     */
    protected $pass; 

    /**
     * @var bool The flag for test mode
     */
    protected $test; 

    /**
     * @var string The URL for the API call
     */
    protected $host; 

    /**
     * @var bool Flag for whether or not this tweet has been sent today
     */
    protected $done;

Conditionals

One thing I noticed about this code as well is that it has a number of conditionals that are not wrapped in curly braces. While this is syntactically correct, it creates some issues for debugging later, and I generally prefer not to rely on it.

Take this for example (from the code):

        if ($this->already_tweeted($message)) $this->done = TRUE;

If we ever decide we need to debug by, say, outputting the message, and we change the code to this:

        if ($this->already_tweeted($message))
        	var_dump($message);
        	$this->done = TRUE;

…then we always are marking the tweet as being sent previously. This is clearly not optimal.

Let’s go ahead and wrap all of the “i

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 6606 bytes)

Mom Always Said to Share

Posted: August 15th, 2009, 8:54pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

There’s something that most people’s parents taught them from the beginning - to share. You’re supposed to share your toys and be nice to the other kids and they’ll share with you. So, you’re all grown up now - do you still share?

I’m talking about knowledge in this case (of course. though sharing toys could be fun too) and how you share it with those around you. As a developer, you have two charges in your professional life - to make the best damn software you can with the time given you and to spread what you’ve learned through out the rest of the community. No one person can know everything - sure, lots try - and so they have to stand on the shoulders of giants and glean what they can from those around them. Thankfully, the web is flowing over with tutorials, articles and comments in general about the development methods and languages of your choice.

I want to focus on the PHP community here - I know it best. So, what can you, a member of either the general web or PHP community do to help the cause? Here’s a few suggestions:

Share a tutorial - just learned something awesomely cool as a part of the work you’re doing? share it! Trust me, you don’t have to be eloquent to make a good tutorial author. All you have to do is be willing to copy and paste a bit of code and explain it. No, really - it’s that easy, I promise. Post it and they will come, especially since Google Finds All. The best part about sharing knowledge is that it keeps it from dying. If you keep all the cool stuff to yourself, the community as a whole suffers. What to make the community flourish? Spread the word!
Share the code - this one’s pretty obvious…write some code and share it with the world. This can go hand-in-hand with my first example, but doesn’t always have to. To coders, sometimes how the code all works together is more interesting than reading an article about it. They’re the ones that immediately download the source of a new, cool application just to see the pieces mesh. The comments in the code are enough for them to know what’s going on (you do comment your code, right?) and they like it that way. Put your code out there for the world to see - it doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it’s usually better if it isn’t…more room for contribution!
Be a mentor - believe it or not, there’s a little bit of a mentor inside each developer out there just begging to get out. The second you switch from writing the code to showing someone else how to use it, you’re being a mentor. Most people think that mentors have to be experts in their field and know-it-alls. The real truth is that anyone - and I do mean anyone - can be a mentor. This goes hand-in-hand with the two previous points in my list and can provide the human connection between them. Write the code, write the tutorial and be there when others have questions - either via email, in-person or on something like IRC. Everyone has something to give back because everyone has different experiences. You may know the best practices for combining Oracle and PHP while another developer might know the ins and outs of your PHP-based content management system. Join forces! All of a sudden the knowledge grows and you both are learning from each other. Thankfully there’s groups like the PHP Women that have forged the way and have set up formal mentoring programs to help spread the knowledge around.
Share yourself - Don’t feel like you’re qualified to be a mentor? Think your code isn’t quite where it needs to be to release it? You can still contribute! Trust me, there’s a lot of developers out there that can do some good works just by being there and being themselves. It takes all kinds to make up a community and not everyone can be all about the code. Yes, I know that PHP is a language and that it’s really all about the code (or is it?) but there’s plenty of room for those members of the community that focus on the community. They’re some of the glue that holds things together and can most easily be identified by keeping an eye out at conferences and other social gatherings (like your friendly neighborhood PHP user group) for the social butterflies. They know their code and they know the community - they’re just happy to bring the two together. Becoming one of these sort of people is easy…don’t try to. Just meet people, talk with them and enjoy being around them. All it takes is one “hello” and you’re on your way…

These are just four points out of a long list of ways that you can give back. There’s a huge list (maybe I’ll add another list in the future), but this’ll give you a good place to start. Don’t be afraid to put you and your code out there!

Peer Review: Taking Code And Making It Better

Posted: August 15th, 2009, 5:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

On Wednesday, August 12th, we had a meeting of the DC PHP Developer’s Group. Keith Casey of Blue Parabola led a code review of a member-submitted sample. The review was informative, educational, and helpful. With the permission of that member, I’ve decided to write a series on the tools for reviewing code and re-factoring it.

The code sample (included below) isn’t perfect. It needs work, and we’ll be working on it over the next few articles. Along the way, we’ll talk about strategies for identifying weaknesses, candidates for refactoring, and methods for writing better code before you get to the review stage. We’ll also refactor this into something more usable, and end up with a finished product that’s better than when we started.

The knowledge gained is based off the DC PHP Developer’s Group, as well as many notes that I put together. The refactoring process requires a lot of thought, and so this series will contain six more entries, starting with the first one on Monday. But before we begin, here’s the code sample we’ll be working with:

Warning: This code should not be used in production and is for demonstration purposes only!

<?php // class_Twitter.php - NPC TWITTER AUTO-FEED
error_reporting(E_ALL); 

// SEND AN AUTOMATED TWEET
// USAGE EXAMPLE
//   require_once('class_Twitter.php');
//   $status = 'Hello World';
//   $t      = new Twitter;
//   $t->tweet($status);
//   unset($t); 

// DO NOT RUN THIS SCRIPT STANDALONE (HAS PASSWORD)
if (count(get_included_files()) < 2) {
    header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: /"); exit;
} 

class Twitter
{
    private $ch;
    private $you;
    private $user;
    private $pass;
    private $test;
    private $host;
    private $done; // ALREADY TWEETED?
    public  $res; 

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->user = "??? TWITTER USERNAME";
        $this->pass = "??? TWITTER PASSWORD";
        $this->you  = "??? YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS"; 

        $this->host = "http://twitter.com/";
        $this->done = FALSE; // DEFAULT - NOT ALREADY TWEETED
        $this->test = FALSE; // DEFAULT - THIS IS LIVE, NOT A TEST 

        $this->ch   = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$this->user:$this->pass");
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT [HTTP_VERSION,] CURL [HTTP_VERSION_1_1);]         curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    } 

    public function __destruct()
    {
        curl_close($this->ch);
    } 

// SET AN INDICATOR THAT THIS IS NOT A LIVE TWEET
    public function test()
    {
        $this->test = TRUE;
    } 

// DETERMINE IF THE MESSAGE HAS ALREADY BEEN SEND
    private function already_tweeted($message)
    {
        $text     = mysql_real_escape_string(trim($message));
        $date     = date('Y-m-d');
        $code     = md5($text . $date);
        $sql      = "SELECT id FROM twitterLog WHERE thash = \"$code\" ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1";
        if (!$res = mysql_query($sql)) die(mysql_error());
        $num      = mysql_num_rows($res);
        if ($num) return TRUE;
        $sql      = "INSERT INTO twitterLog (tdate, thash, tweet) VALUES ( \"$date\", \"$code\", \"$text \" )";
        if (!$res = mysql_query($sql)) die(mysql_error());
        return FALSE;
    } 

// POST A MESSAGE TO TWITTER
    public function tweet($message)
    {
        if(strlen($message) < 1) return FALSE;
        if ($this->already_tweeted($message)) $this->done = TRUE; 

// IF ONLY A TEST, JUST EMAIL THE INFORMATION - DO NOT TWEET
        if ($this->test)
        {
            $msg = '';
            if ($this->done) $msg .= "ALREADY DONE ";
            $msg .= "TWEET: $message";
            mail($this->you, 'What We Would Have Tweeted', $msg);
            return TRUE;
        } 

// DO NOT REPEAT YOURSELF
        if ($this->done) return TRUE; 

// STATUS UPDATE ON TWITTER
        $this->host .= "statuses/update.xml?status=".urlencode( stripslashes( urldecode($message )));
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_URL, $this->host);
        $xxx       = curl_exec($this->ch);
        $this->res = curl_getinfo($this->ch);
        if ($this->res['http_code'] == 0)   return TRUE;
        if ($this->res['http_code'] == 200) return TRUE;
        return FALSE;
    }
}
?>

Book review: Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1

Posted: August 15th, 2009, 4:54am MDT by Michelangelo van Dam

A couple of weeks ago I received a book from PACKT Publishing titled "Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management " written by Marc Delisle, with the request if I could read it and write a review about it. Why not ? I haven't used phpMyAdmin in whole my career so I might as well read about the tool everyone around me is using. And since phpMyAdmin is also bundled with Zend Server, it can only benefit my day-to-day job.

On the front cover it states "Increase your MySQL productivity and control by discovering the real power of phpMyAdmin 3.1", so the book challenged me from the start. I have been using the MySQL command-line tool since forever so I was really curious about how this book could convince me to use phpMyAdmin from now on.

The first two chapters of this book are explaining what phpMyAdmin is all about and how you should install it, along with a very detailed security configuration part. A remarkable feature is that you can install it for multi-user hosting purposes, giving each user it's own MySQL toolset using just one installation.

Chapter 3 covers a very detailed explanation of each panel you see in the phpMyAdmin interface. Not only a mere statement that explains what each panel is used for, but also how you can modify this panel's behavior by modifying the configuration settings.

A hands-on example is covered in chapters 4, 5 and 6, where Marc takes you on a journey through all the steps of creating, inserting, browsing, modifying and removing tables and data. Although I was already familiar with MySQL's capabilities, I have to admit that by using a tool like phpMyAdmin your whole data management becomes more visible and gives you a certain amount of joy browsing through your data.

With MySQL on command line I could import/export my data and table structures in native SQL and XML, but with phpMyAdmin you can choose between 14 different export types. Although I believe that SQL will remain the main type used by many, it's good to know you have a tool available that can export data anyway you want.

Another cool feature I discovered by reading this book is that phpMyAdmin offers you the ability to manage relations between tables easily using the interface, but you can also create graphical relation diagrams that you can export into PDF.

With it's MySQL 5.0 and MySQL 5.1 support you also have the ability to manage the advanced MySQL toolset like triggers, stored procedures, functions and views. Having the ability to use these advanced MySQL capabilities in a graphical interface can only benefit it's usage amongst many developers.

But the best feature of phpMyAdmin is that you could have in-table MIME-type based transformations. So if you work often with BLOB data, you can now have it appear right in your interface as a download link or as a clickable thumbnail.

If you're new to phpMyAdmin or you just start using MySQL databases, this book gives you step-by-step instructions on how to use the interface to manage your data. But I think this book has even more value to the professional where this book is the perfect reference guide for all those advanced MySQL capabilities. I will certainly use phpMyAdmin more, having this book besides me to guide me the way.

Slides of recent talks online

Posted: August 15th, 2009, 3:45am MDT by Horde news

The slides from my talks in Brazil are available on the Horde website now.

Batch-generating SSL certificates

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 2:07pm MDT by Lars Strojny

I had an itch to scratch this day: generate a huge amount of SSL-certificates for a set of whitelabels. Every whitelabel has it’s own domain and needs it’s own SSL certificate. I don’t want to spend n ⋅ x ¤ to buy them just for testing purpose (generating a huge number would have been an issue too if I bought them but …). So I needed a script to do it. We had one before to generate a single one with the typical user interactions. While hacking it down I found out a few neat things about OpenSSL which I didn’t know before and which I think are worth sharing.

Disclaimer: the script is not hacked together with security in mind. It simply doesn’t matter for me in this specific case.

So after alot of chit-chatting, there we go:

#!/bin/bash
DOMAIN="$1"
if [ -z "$DOMAIN" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $(basename $0) "
    exit 11
fi

Obvious: we need to call the script with a domain as a parameter. Next is a simple to fail when a certain condition matches:

fail_if_error() {
    [ $1 != 0 ] &}
export PASSPHRASE=$(head -c 128 /dev/random  | uuencode - | grep -v "^end" | tr "\n" "d")

We generate a passphrase by reading 128 byte from /dev/random, encoding it with base64 and joining the lines. A simple trick if you can’t rely on pwgen or makepasswd. Next is to define the subject string. But we’ll talk about that later:

subj="
C=
ST=
O=
localityName=
commonName=$DOMAIN
organizationalUnitName=
emailAddress=
"

Of all things generating a fresh RSA key comes first. The neat trick to avoid user interaction here is to use -passout option. This option takes an protocol argument similar to PHPs stream wrappers. env: for environment variables, pass: if you like to pass the string directly, file: to read from a file, fd: to read from a file descriptor and stdin – well – to read from the standard input. Of course we fail on error.

openssl genrsa -des3 -out $DOMAIN.key -passout env:PASSPHRASE 2048
fail_if_error $?

Now we generate a certificate request (.csr). -batch simply supresses user interaction. And here comes the $subj variable into play which allows us to override our certificate requests defaults specified in our openssl.conf. Most of the time the OpenSSL configuration file should be located in /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf but if you are on Mac OS X it is located in /System/Library/OpenSSL/openssl.cnf. The subject variables you can override are defined in this configuration. It’s an INI file, just search for the section [ req ] and look at the keys distinguished_name and req_attributes. There values redirect to the section name we are searching for: here you can find the candidates you might want to override in your subject string. Just extend the $subj variable according to your needs. The $subj variable lines are joined with a slash as a seperator – this is how OpenSSL likes it.

openssl req \
    -new \
    -batch \
    -subj "$(echo -n "$subj" | tr "\n" "/")" \
    -key $DOMAIN.key \
    -out $DOMAIN.csr \
    -passin env:PASSPHRASE
fail_if_error $?
cp $DOMAIN.key $DOMAIN.key.org
fail_if_error $?

Strip the passphrase from our RSA-key to not get prompted when Apache (or any other webserver) starts:

openssl rsa -in $DOMAIN.key.org -out $DOMAIN.key -passin env:PASSPHRASE
fail_if_error $?

Last step, create the certificate file:

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in $DOMAIN.csr -signkey $DOMAIN.key -out $DOMAIN.crt
fail_if_error $?

Now: deploy the .key and .crt file to your webserver and set up your configuration.

We are all watching with blood on our hands

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 4:35am MDT by Lukas Smith

I am still quite in shock over the recent news about the assassinations of family members of suspected terrorists executed by US military drones under the supervision of the CIA. What confuses me the most is the lack of a real public outcry. For some time now we seem to have accepted that the CIA uses these drones outside of warzones to kill people that are suspected terrorists in areas where at least officially the local governments oppose such actions. We have also accepted "human collateral damage" during these attacks. To me the recent attack however have a new level as now it is apparently also legit to kill the family members of suspected terrorists outside of warzones in countries that officially oppose such attacks. What level of wrong do we need to reached before we realize that we have nothing left to be proud of our western democracies and legal system?

So lets go through this, tell me when you think its enough:
- executing a death penalty?
- executing a death penalty without a trial?
- executing a death penalty without a trial on foreign soil?
- executing a death penalty without a trial on foreign soil outside of a warzone?
- executing a death penalty without a trial on foreign soil outside of a warzone of foreign nationals?
- executing a death penalty without a trial on foreign soil outside of a warzone of foreign nationals where the local government does not want you to do this?
- executing a death penalty on family members without a trial on foreign soil outside of a warzone of foreign nationals where the local government does not want you to do this?

We do not need to worry about our freedom anymore. Because we have long given up our freedom and handed it to our secret services. Until this stops, we all have blood on our hands and I wonder how we can ever imagine to be able to wash it off again?

I keep hearing people talk with so much hope in regards to Barrack Obama and then I tell them, I have seen some nice gestures, but so far nothing concret that I would consider a real success. Well it seems like things have gotten worse now instead. Or is it his success that maybe these days they ask Pakistan beforehand?

I am not laying this on the US in its entirety of course. Our governments are all quite happy to let the Americans do their dirty work on the pay check of the US tax payer. Nobody is doing enough to make it clear that too many lines of been crossed, that there is no "end" left due to the "means" being used.

That being said, like I said I am in shock over all of this. I do not know how this can happen. How can someone somewhere think this is legitimate? How can I not just drop everything that I am doing and fully dedicate myself to stopping this? I do not want to drop everything, I like my life and its convenience. What is wrong with me? Should the gravity of this situation motivate me to stop thinking about myself? Would writing a blog post like this not be sufficient? I mean I generally think that we all worry too much about what other people do around the world instead of just living our lives in exemplary ways to show the people in my direct neighborhood what we believe is just. Is this not enough? Is it no longer enough?

Now if any "terrorist" or "terrorist sympathisers" are reading this and just to make it clear: I think they are equally wrong and I will not let myself be terrorized. I love my freedom more than my safety, because safety is worth nothing without freedom. But whatever I may feel about the actions of others, killing others is not a legitimate answers, ever (with the exception of self defense in the heat of the moment and when all alternatives have been ruled out)!

Changing my Brand, thanks to Brandstack™

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 2:47pm MDT by Vidyut Luther

I’d like to announce some changes to The PHP Cult.

New Domain: The name will be changing to Third Party Code, if you’ve known me for a while, that’s the name under which I’ve been conducting business, yet almost everything about me and quite a bit of my work shows up on phpcult.com.
Technical Competence: I’ll stop making rants, and personal political opinions on this site, instead I’ll focus more on technical , business policy, and general business topics.
New Logo: Right now, if you go to thirdpartycode.com, you’ll see an older logo, the logo has been updated, and so will the website, thanks to the wonderful designers I’ve found at Brandstack. It’s been 9 years, and I never was able to find a logo I liked for PHP Cult, it took me a few hours to find one for the new Brand. What’s even cooler, is that I didn’t have to pay an exhorbitant fee, for it.

I’d really like to take the time, and thank the designer at Brandstack , I found a logo that I wanted to work with, the site allowed me to talk to the designer directly, and have her modify it until it was perfect.

The designer who designed the logo for my brand, was very responsive and made some changes of her own, once I told her what the company was about. Brandstack allowed me to communicate and preview the changes until I was happy, and then I made the payment, so I knew exactly what I was getting.

I’m working with the designer to design the new site, and I hope to reveal it to everyone very soon.

Gender in IT, OSS, & PHP, and How it Affects Us All

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 11:21am MDT by Elizabeth Naramore

I started looking into the state of women in the IT industry, open source and PHP for purely selfish reasons. I wanted to satisfy my own curiosity so I decided to do some research. What I found was not only interesting, it shed some light into where we stand, how we got here, why we should even care in the first place, and what we can potentially do about it.

I did want to add a caveat before I go further; much of the data and research I discuss below makes sweeping generalizations about men, women, and our interactions with each other. This is not to say that we all fit these generalizations, or fall into these behavioral patterns... we are not robots, after all, and of course there will be those of you that will say "oh, I never felt that way," or "this never happened to me." Please don't think I mean to offend or offer up stereotypes; I'm only aggregating the data and putting it out there.

A Personal Experience

I have been extremely fortunate in my web development career, in that I have not experienced true gender discrimination firsthand. I know there are countless women out there that have; I think I've just been really lucky. That being said, I'd like to share with you one of the reasons why this topic piques my interest.

My first PHP conference was ZendCon 2005. By that time, I had been working with PHP for a few years, I was an active member of PHPBuilder.com, and had co-authored my first PHP book. I was sent to the conference by PHPBuilder, in fact, because I had been doing weekly news summaries for them, and they wanted a write-up of the conference. I felt a bit nervous going in, only because I don't travel much and it was the first time leaving my husband and 15 month old baby. Plus, I'd not been to a PHP conference before, so I really wasn't sure what to expect. Even still, I walked into the opening keynote a little nervous, but very excited and optimistic.

I was shocked to realize that I was one out of a handful of women there, and I was even more surprised by my own reaction. I immediately felt apprehensive and self-conscious, even to the point of being almost immobile. I think I barely spoke to anyone, and tried meekly to fade into the scenery with those around me. I felt like running out of that room, and I probably would have, if I wouldn't have been so mortified to do so. Thankfully by the end of the conference, I'd been befriended by a few core devs (thanks Wez, Andrei and Marcus!) and a few other PHP devs (which I've unfortunately lost contact with since), and I felt a little more comfortable. Even though I made some new friends, I was still completely out of my comfort zone, and I was quite thankful to get the hell out of there and get home.

Truth be told, I felt the same way at my first few local user group meetings that same year. As the only female in a room of roughly 20 people, I felt incredibly self-conscious, out of place, and like everyone was watching me (which, of course, they weren't). Afraid to open my mouth for fear of looking like an idiot, I think I said maybe two words (which is really funny if you know me personally, because you usually can't shut me up).

Logically, I should have felt right at home. I'm a relatively self-confident individual, I felt comfortable with the language, and I'd been an active member of the PHPBuilder community for years. I'd not had bad experiences with my fellow co-workers or other PHP developers. So what was it about this face-to-face interaction that made me so uncomfortable? Why did I care that I was overwhelmingly in the minority? Interestingly, I felt much the same way Sara J. Chipps did in her blog post about the matter.

Even though I ended up sticking around the PHP community and some of those feelings of self-consciousness have since faded away, I still think about those first meetings I attended. I know many women don't get that far to make it to a conference or user group meeting. For one reason or another, they choose to skip the community bonding, leave an open source project after contributing, or maybe even leave the industry altogether. In fact, we're leaving in droves. I couldn't help but wonder to myself what those reasons were, so I embarked on my own little research project.

IT Job Market is Growing

Initially, I was curious to see if the IT industry was growing and how much potential opportunity was out there. Even with the tenuous state of the economy, I don't think we could be in a better position with regard to job opportunities.
The IT industry is one of the fastest growing industries. According to the Monthly Labor Review (MLR 2004), between 2002-2012, we can expect an incredible growth rate in the U.S. (and presumably other countries) in the following categories:

Computer Software Enginee

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 24809 bytes)

Suhosin Patch 0.9.8 for PHP 5.3.0 BETA - Please Test

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 10:49am MDT by Stefan Esser

It has been several weeks between the release of PHP 5.3.0 and now and I haven’t released a stable Suhosin Patch for PHP 5.3.0 yet. The reason for this was that I was away from my development machine with a half ready new generation of Suhosin Patch waiting to be fixed.

With PHP 5.3.0 the need for a realpath() protection is gone, because PHP 5.3.0 has a far better implementation by default now. Therefore the code for the realpath() protection was completely removed from Suhosin 0.9.8. Another problem people often ran into was that Suhosin’s memory manager canary protection was alerting them of memory corruptions that did no visible harm to PHP installations without the Suhosin Patch. Because of this I decided to add support for environment variables that will be evaluated when PHP starts and allow to configure how Suhosin Patch works. To protect the settings they are stored in a memory page that is set to read-only after it has been initialized.

The following environment variables are supported by now:

SUHOSIN_MM_USE_CANARY_PROTECTION
- default: 1
- Set to 0 to disable canary protection. A copy of the MM will be used that does not have canaries. This is nearly the same as the MM of vanilla PHP.
SUHOSIN_MM_DESTROY_FREE_MEMORY
- default: 0
- Set to 1 to enable free memory destruction. Every piece of free memory will be overwritten. This allows debugging e.g. use after free memory corruption bugs easier without using a debug PHP.
SUHOSIN_MM_IGNORE_CANARY_VIOLATION
- default: 0
- Set to 1 stops Suhosin from aborting the process when it detects canary violations. The violations will be logged and the canary restored. It is strongly recommended to NOT use this feature. But it is more secure to use this feature instead of disabling Suhosin completely which happend in the past when people saw canary violation error messages
SUHOSIN_HT_IGNORE_INVALID_DESTRUCTOR
- default: 0
- Set to 1 stops Suhosin from aborting the process when it detects an invalid Hashtable destructor. It is strongly recommended to NOT use this feature.
SUHOSIN_LL_IGNORE_INVALID_DESTRUCTOR
- default: 0
- Set to 1 stops Suhosin from aborting the process when it detects an invalid LinkedList destructor. It is strongly recommended to NOT use this feature.

Because the new features of Suhosin Patch contains new code and some hacks I release the BETA version of the new Suhosin Patch to the public and hope people will test it in different OS/CPU/… and mail me the results to <stefan.esser@sektioneins.de>.

The patch can be downloaded here.

Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End Book - Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7 and Appendix A Released Online

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 9:04am MDT by Pádraic Brady

The Free Zend Framework book has returned! It's back! Finally...

In case you forgot...

The [Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End] book was written to guide readers through the metaphorical "Deep End". It's the place you find yourself in when you complete a few tutorials and scan through the Reference Guide, where you are buried in knowledge up to your neck but without a clue about how to bind it all together effectively into an application. This take on the Zend Framework offers a survival guide, boosting your understanding of the framework and how it all fits together by following the development of a single application from start to finish. I'll even throw in a few bad jokes for free.

In fact the entire book (to date since it's a work in progress) is available for free online in html form. And it always will be.

To celebrate the mini relaunch of the website (read on) and free html version of the book, I have published a bumper pack of four chapters and an additional appendix. This brings the total to seven chapters of Zend Framework goodness (and that's only Part 1 of the book) and two appendices. In terms of pages, that's 70 pages of reading material in PDF form at US Letter page size. No, the text in PDFs is not gigantic... ;-)

. The new entries include:

Chapter 4: Installing The Zend Framework
Chapter 5: A Not So Simple Hello World Tutorial
Chapter 6: Standardise The Bootstrap Class With Zend_Application
Chapter 7: Handling Application Errors Gracefully
Appendix A: Creating A Local Domain Using Apache Virtual Hosts

With the future addition of Appendix C, which is testing related, this will complete Part 1 of the book. Onwards to Part 2, Doing Something Useful With The Zend Framework.

It's been a bit of a long road to this point as many know, and I hope everyone is happy with the...eventual...result.

The website has also been updated quite a bit though my impressive (not so much) attempt at web design remains. Behind the scenes howevers scores of bugs have been exterminated, a symptom of a quickly developed app that needed way more time in an IDE than the few hours I gave it.

The major improvements:

1. Chapter level commenting has been added!
2. The comment systems "remember me" feature actually works
3. The book's font has been enlarged since spending too much time reading tiny letters is hard on the eyes
4. Code examples now render correctly and fit within the page (where possible)
5. Nearly all reader comments have been integrated in earlier chapters/references
6. The mysterious hovering Google advert has been blackmailed into cooperating

Writing a book is a massive undertaking, one not to be underestimated. Every chapters went through draft after endless draft until it said something worthwhile. That does not mean any chapter is perfect. The entire point of the intricate commenting system is get feedback from readers about any flaws, improvements, suggestions, debates or outright criticism they wish to raise. The more the merrier! The other side of the undertaking is my intention to maintain the book as a solid volume applicable to the current Zend Framework version. There is no version freeze here - there is no final Edition heading to a printing house. It's a live book. The advantage of the self publishing/wheedling of donations route is that I am free to rewrite an entire chapter whenever I choose. And I will.

There are also a number of translations in progress by volunteer translators, and I hope to publish these during September as they become available. For those who get edgy around the conflicting terms "volunteer" and "Macbook Pro for the author", I have already informed the volunteer translators that I will refuse any cash/donations/profits for personal use from these derived translated works. Translators may elect to take any future profit arising from their work, or donate it to a worthy cause of their choice. That's assuming we ever see a profit - it's not that big a priority if it wasn't obvious already.

For those who have made donations in the past (to keep the server switched on and the monkey cranking the generator supplied with peanuts), I am also happy to announce that the non-free PDF versions of the book will be made available to you for free, and forever. I have all your email addresses. This is my thanks for the early support, and also a form of apology for the delay in getting back to the book.

For everyone else, PDF copies (among other forms) will be sold online at a fu

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Of Lies, Damned Lies, And Benchmarks – Redux!

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 9:04am MDT by Brandon Savage

Upon request of the PHP community, Joe Stagner conducted additional tests of PHP, using both PHP 5.3 and APC. In his article he also revisits the questions raised by myself and Andi Gutmans about the fairness of his tests.

The new tests reveal that APC doesn’t do much to improve the performance of his applications. This wasn’t a significant surprise to me; after reviewing his code I realized that the script wouldn’t be called again and thus APC wouldn’t provide a benefit. And though some of his tests (MySQL, file system tests, and Postgres) are dependent on external factors (like how well MySQL performs on Linux versus Windows), I think they paint a fair picture. Joe’s tests were fair.

The only thing left to evaluate is the engines that power the core of PHP versus ASP.NET.

One thing that no one brought up is that in his tests, the “for” loop performed more poorly than the “while” and, in some cases, “do-while”. Wait, what? Check out his test results and you’ll see that in each and every test, “for” is outperformed by “while”, and in many cases, even outperformed by “do-while”.

If you ask Sara Golemon, she’ll tell you that shouldn’t be. But it is. PHP’s nature as an open-source project means that contributions can be made by lots of different people, and sometimes you’re going to have performance suffer for it. But almost always you get a better product.

For those who are upset or incensed by Joe’s test results, I offer you this challenge: make PHP better. PHP is only as good as the people who contribute to it. Those who contribute to the core are hard-working volunteers. No one gets paid to write core PHP components or extensions. It’s all volunteerism. Those who work on it now are class acts who should be rewarded. And they should be aided, too.

We can’t examine the ASP.NET core to determine why it’s faster (and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were certain shortcuts in the way Windows and IIS handles requests), but we can examine the core of PHP and find ways to boost performance. And that’s the one thing about PHP that makes it different than ASP.NET: if you find a bug, you can patch it yourself. You don’t have to wait for the next release, and you don’t have to get some Microsoft engineer to care about it. You, yourself, can fix it.

The difference in PHP is you. Go make it better.

Dynamic Assertions for Zend_Acl in ZF

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 8:19am MDT by Ralph Schindler

In Zend Framework 1.9.1, Zend_Acl gets two major issues resolved and a simple API change that now make it possible to create a more robust, more expressive ACL definition with less code. ZF issues ZF-1721 and ZF-1722, each nearly two years old, have both been solved. Over the last two years, I’ve seen a variety of duplicate issues come into the issue tracker, which stem from two fundamental flaws in Zend_Acl – “Zend_Acl::isAllowed does not support Role/Resource Inheritance down to Assertions” and “Zend_Acl assertions breaks when inheritance is required (ie DepthFirstSearch)”. In this article, we’ll explore the API changes that alleviate these two problems, and we’ll demonstrate how to leverage the Zend_Acl assertion system to create expressive, dynamic assertions that work with your applications models.

Backwards Compatible API Changes

Before discussing the issues, let’s go over the API change and how that affects the component. Previously, the two methods for setting up an ACL that were used by a developer were add() and addRole(). Interestingly, add() was intended to imply addResource(). Since add() implied that you were adding a resource, its clear that this component was created from the perspective of resources as a primary actor, and then roles and assertions as secondary actors.

The new API allows for the creation of an ACL by using strings instead of having to use Zend_Acl_Role and Zend_Acl_Resource objects explicitly. To me, this is a pretty important step towards what I’d like to see in 2.0. In 2.0, I would ideally like to see addRole() and addResource() accept strings for types of roles and resources to query against, and accept objects for explicit role and resource objects to query against (even if they match an already registered type). To put simply, I would expect addRole('user') and addRole($userObjectForRalph) to have different behaviors if different permissions were registered for each. This would allow me to specify specific access for the user object ‘ralph’ separately from the ACL’s for objects of role type ‘user’. The behavior can be further defined to either inherit from the type, or override type ACL’s depending on the desired effect. Ultimately, this would allow for a more dynamic experience with Zend_Acl.

Dynamic Assertions Example

In the following example, we’ll have a look at a common use case that is now possible in Zend_Acl. In plain English, what developers want to be able to do is be able to design assertions that can accept application models that implement the Resource or Role interface, and be able to apply some dynamic or custom logic to assess whether or not the given role has access to the given resource. As mentioned previously, this was not possible because in the process of checking the ACL tree, using a depth-first search, the calling resource and roles was lost, and only the original registered objects was being persisted into the assertions. Well, that’s fixed now.

For the purposes of this example, we’ll take a simple concept: a user needs to be able to only edit their own blog post. The user in this case, would be our applications model for users. The actual class will implement the Zend_Acl_Role_Interface. We will also have a BlogPost model which will serve as the resource in question, thus implementing the Zend_Acl_Resource_Interface. Naturally, our system will be able to handle users of different role ‘types’, but our BlogPost will only be of a single resource type ‘blogPost’.

Note: the following code is demonstration only. As such, some coding standards or conventions are not necessarily what you’d expect in proper object-oriented code or even a Zend Framework MVC based application. Some of the code might contain rouge ‘echo’ statements so that the demonstration below will be more expressive of what its actually doing.

class User implements Zend_Acl_Role_Interface
{
    // using public members here for brevity in this article
	public $id = null;
    public $role = 'guest';

    public function getRoleId()
    {
        return $this->role;
    }
}

class BlogPost implements Zend_Acl_Resource_Interface
{
	public $id          = null;
    public $ownerUserId = null;

    public function getResourceId()
    {
        return 'blogPost';
    }
}

Next, we’ll create the dynamic assertion. We generally would expect this as

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PHP is the Future

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 8:09pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

Catchy title, eh? I have to admit, I used a bit of an inflammatory title to pull you into the rest of the post, but I think you’ll like what I have to say. The title is true, but probably not in teh way you think. No, PHP is not going to be the language that comes out on top, not the “one language to rule them all” sort of thing. Instead, I’m proposing that PHP, the flexible and powerful language that it is, has a very large roll to fill in the future of the web.

There’s lots of little things that the language has done along its life to help make the world wide web a better place to live. Most importantly it’s given the world an Open Source alternative to some of the other closed languages that some of the major companies of the world offer (okay, so I’m pretty transparent). PHP packs a lot of power in a little package, and the general developer community has definitely taken notice. This plucky little language that started as a handy tool for Rasmus to keep track of things in his personal pages has evolved into something that major companies around the world are implementing into their core software. Hear that? *Core* software. PHP isn’t some fly-by-night language that’s the latest fad being passed around like so many YouTube videos. PHP is strong, its powerful and it is most definitely here to stay.

But I digress…let’s get back to the point that the title of this post was trying to make. PHP is the future. No really, it is - trust me on this. Of course, there’s a difference between being the only path to the future and one of many means to getting there, but we’ll toss that aside for now. We want to focus on PHP and what it can do to make all three Ws in the WWW a better place to develop.

So, lets talk a little bit about what PHP has to offer to the world at large.

From its humblest of beginnings, one of the core values of the PHP project has been to provide the most power in the best code possible. Sure, it has its quirks and it can be a little rough around the edges, but line of code for code, PHP packs some serious features into a neat little package. There’s even the extension system that makes it super easy to add in new bits of functionality without even having to recompile the main engine. Oh, and did I mention it’s free? Open Source, well supported and very very popular among both the usual Open Source crowd and among other certain large entities (even those that might live in Redmond)

Every time I look the future of the web (linking services, making things seamless, integrating technologies), I can see PHP at every major crossroads. Its the flexibility of the language that does it. Sure, there’s still a bit of a niche that PHP fits into, but once you take a step out of that safe little shell, you really start to realize what the language has to offer and where it fits in the world. PHP has the potential for being the glue that binds the web together. There’ll always be other languages out there - to dismiss them would just be silly - but PHP, with its flexibility and power really has the feature set to help propel Open Source web development into the spotlight and shine for what it is.

The web needs a language that’s quick to adapt, easy to configure, comes in at a low cost and is popular enough to find good, talented developers for (yup, that’s a big point too). If you ask me, PHP fits all the above and more.

I believe that PHP can be the future of the web and be a key player in the web applications to come.

Ethics For Programmers?

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 3:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

Doctors, lawyers and engineers are required by their professions to receive certifications and follow certain ethical guidelines. These rules exist to protect those who rely on their services. These professions often have access to sensitive information, or could wreck lives if they are remiss in their responsibilities. Business schools teach ethics, and despite the lapses in those ethics throughout the private sector, there still seems to be an emphasis placed on professional conduct in the business world.

Software development is a skill, and an increasingly important one, but one that is not governed by any licensing or ethical rules. It’s a Wild West of ethical and legal conduct. Sure, organizations like the Association of Computing Machinery have put together their list of ethical standards, but these are voluntary and not binding.

As programming becomes more and more in depth and important to the society of the world, we have an obligation to defend and protect the data of our customers and their customers to the best of our abilities. We have an obligation to develop to high standards, to promptly report and repair security bugs, and to warranty our work. Surely I don’t propose a system like engineers must follow, where they certify that they completed the work they are signing off on, and accept the consequences if that work is faulty; but I also think that the vast amount of personal, credit, financial, medical, and other data that programmers manage on a daily basis comes with a responsibility level that is crucial.

There are real legal consequences, too. A quick search of Craigslist will reveal hundreds of “programmers” looking for work and offering “the best price.” But how many of them adhere to best practices? When programmers work, and deliver a product, they are promising that the product has been built to an industry standard. Making mistakes like insecure passwords, writing in security holes, or baking in bugs that undermine the system’s reliability and security only serves to expose the developer to litigation. This is not a good situation.

We need to take concrete steps to incorporating ethics in our community. Computer scientists should be trained in ethics as a part of their training, if they’re not already. Ethics should be talked about at developer groups and conferences. People should write about (and debate on) the ethical standards for the programming world. And ethical behavior should be a cornerstone of programming. Ethical programmers should be rewarded, and those who are unethical should be ostracized.

Two new meetings in one week!

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 2:35pm MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

PhpBenelux, the PHP usergroup for Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg is on a roll! At the end of the month there's two cool meetings you can attend! So if you're in the area (mid-west of Germany is also "in the area" ;) ) then you should definitely come by!

Zend Framework 1.9.1 Released

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 1:49pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

From Zend Framework Team Member Alexander Veremyev: "The Zend Framework team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the 1.9.1 release, the first maintenance release in the 1.9 series. Over 30 issues have been resolved for this release, covering 17 different components."

Are PHP Namespaces Really So Bad?

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 10:52am MDT by SitePoint Â» PHP

PHP namespaces PHP developers have been demanding namespaces for some time. As PHP applications have grown larger and more complex, namespaces have become essential to prevent code clashes.

My recent tutorials received a number of comments complaining about namespace implementation in PHP. The main issues were the syntax and the backslash character. Before I tackle those issues, let’s take a quick look back at the history of PHP.

PHP is a Mess

Languages such as C# and Java were designed and follow rigorous syntax standards. PHP has evolved. The original version was released in 1995 and, by version 3, it was a popular procedural programming language. Version 4 introduced rudimentary object orientation and version 5 provides a reasonably standard OOP model. Namespaces have now been added to version 5.3.

PHP critics will argue that the language is a mess. Function names are inconsistent (e.g. strpos, str_split, substr), object handling has been tagged on, and some of the syntax is different — if not bizarre — when compared with other languages.

However, PHP remains the most widely-used server-side development language. Its versatility is one of its primary strengths:

Novice developers can start with simple procedural programming. They need never touch OOP techniques and can still be productive.
Code written 10 years ago in PHP 3 still works today in PHP 5.3. A few minor tweaks may be required, but major rewrites are rarely necessary.

PHP code may not always be pretty, logical, or elegant, but development is rapid and often easier to comprehend than the alternatives.

PHP Namespace Implementation

Unlike C# and Java, PHP has to retain compatibility with non-namespaced code. That has been achieved and you can choose whether to use namespaces or not. However, if you’re using PHP 5.3 (or above), I would recommend them — even if you simply use the same name throughout the whole of your project.

The choice of namespace and use as namespace operators seems logical. Some developers may disagree, but that would have been the case no matter what they’d been named.

Finally, we come to the backslash character. Most critics complain that it’s ugly, difficult to read, and awkward to type on a Mac. However, I still consider it preferable to the double-colon that was originally proposed. Examine the following static method call:


// PHP 5.3 beta static method call
echo ::App::Lib1::MyClass::WhoAmI();

// PHP 5.3 final static method call
echo \App\Lib1\MyClass::WhoAmI();

The second line is quicker to type, less error-prone, easier to read, and simpler to understand. If you see a backslash outside of a string, you know namespacing must be involved.

Of course, it would be great if PHP used a ‘.’ period for public methods, static methods, and namespaces. That would make it consistent with Java, C#, JavaScript, Python and many other languages. Unfortunately, PHP’s history and backwards compatibility makes that difficult to achieve.

No language is perfect, and PHP is far from it! However, namespacing has been implemented well, especially when you consider the restrictions and problems it could have caused. I’m sure you’ll learn to love that backslash!

State of the Art Post Exploitation in Hardened PHP Environments

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 4:25am MDT by Stefan Esser

I am finally back in germany after several weeks in foreign countries like singapore, taiwan and the USA. In all three countries I gave a presentation titled “State of the Art Post Exploitation in Hardened PHP Environments” that discusses a certain flaw in the design of the Zend Engine that allows the development of very stable local exploits against PHP. Within the presentation two (no longer) 0 day exploits are discussed and it is demonstrated how they can be used to get arbitrary read and write access to the memory of PHP, which enables a PHP script to break out of some of the common protections you will see on hardened PHP installations. Find below the slides and the whitepaper sent to Blackhat.

Wordpress: Automatic update and chrooted FTP accounts

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 1:26am MDT by Christopher Kunz - PHP

The automatic updater for WordPress uses FTP to upload data (which is generally a good idea because of safe mode). However, it fails if the FTP account is chrooted (i.e. you cannot change to directories below your home directory).

This is bad, because most, if not all shared hosting servers have chrooted ftp accounts. There is, however, an easy fix. You just recreate the root directory structure within your home directory.

If your home directory has the physical directory “/www/12345/mydomain.com/” and your wordpress is in the “./wordpress” subdirectory, you can just log in with ftp and do this

mkdir /www; 

cd /www; 

mkdir 12345; 

cd 12345; 

mkdir mydomain.com

Then you can use a PHP one-liner to create a symlink to your wordpress subdirectory:

<?php symlink(“/wordpress”, “wordpress”); ?>

After this, you should verify the directory is created OK and can be changed into via ftp:

cd /www/12345/mydomain.com/wordpress

After this, the automatic update worked, at least for me.

Of Lies, Damned Lies, and Benchmarks

Posted: August 11th, 2009, 6:03am MDT by Brandon Savage

It’s no secret that we like statistics. Human beings like being able to compare two things, apples to apples. We like the ability to say “this thing is better because…” and being able to back it up with a seemingly solid fact, rather than just our opinion. We build charts to show how things stack up side-by-side, and we even build software to make those charts, which are then compared using the charts, and on we go.

But benchmarks, for all their decision-making aid, fail under the best of circumstances for one simple reason: they’re not real life.

Never more is this true than in Joe Stagner’s blog post on whether Windows or Linux, and PHP or ASP was faster. It should really come as no surprise that a Microsoft employee would write an article that would conclude that Windows was faster, and that ASP was faster (I’m pretty sure if he’d found the other way and published it that Ballmer would have canned him).

Benchmarks come loaded with all sorts of problems. It doesn’t matter if it’s Microsoft doing them or Apple doing them; they don’t mimic real-world conditions, and any number of factors affect how the benchmarks are rendered (e.g. other processes running, configuration, installed modules, CLI or web, how the interpreter reads the code, etc).

Some of the problems I found with his benchmarks: there’s no discussion of configuration. Did he use the defaults? What extensions did he install alongside the core installation? ~~The code he used isn’t published.~~ Update: It appears that he did include his code, though I don’t know when the links were added. They were not in the original draft of the article. How was the server configured? How does the engine render each loop? ASP.NET is closed-source; that’s to say, there’s no way for us to know if the interpreter sees an empty loop or function and decides to bail rather than actually execute it. What version of PHP are you using? Why isn’t there a Ubuntu test for PHP 5.3 (I actually know the answer to that question)?

I don’t think that Mr. Stagner is trying to insult anyone or assert that ASP is 2900% faster than PHP at every task. I do think that the benchmarks provided show that ASP is faster at the given tasks and that’s it.

So, if you need to iterate over 20 million empty for loops, ASP.NET is your language.

Update: After a conversation with Cal Evans and a read about ASP.NET it appears that ASP.NET comes with a built-in byte code cache that cannot be diabled. However, Mr. Stagner conducted his tests WITHOUT APC installed on PHP. While APC is not part of the PHP core (and bytecode caching appears to be part of the ASP.NET core), PHP without APC is a poor configuration choice.

The new Group has been elected!

Posted: August 10th, 2009, 12:42pm MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

I am more than glad to announce the arrival, the announcement of the new PEAR Group for 2009 and 2010.

With a few fresh faces in the Group, this year looks very promising with the mix of both new blood and experienced PEAR Group members.

Congratulations to the elected 7s (In no particular order):

Christian Weiske
Chuck Burgress
Daniel O’Connor
Ken Guest
Bill Shupp
Michael Gauthier
Brett Bieber

I can’t wait to have our first meeting and get the year kicking!

Thanks to everyone who voted!

Most PHP releases in August!

Posted: August 10th, 2009, 12:15pm MDT by bjori doesn't blog

Since PHP 3.0.18 (released October 2000) (no, php.net doesn't keep release records before that for some reason) 60 PHP releases have been made. August and May are the most common months for PHP releases, with 9 releases each.

PHP5.3.1 and PHP5.2.11 are in the works these days.. Judging by the August release "frenzy" I bet both will be out by the end of the month!

Other useless stats?

26 PHP releases have been on Thursdays
1 On Saturday
There have only been 2 releases in 2009 so far
2004 had 10 releases
January, April and October have only had 3 releases (each)
There has never been a release on Sunday
The 89th, 121st, 122nd, 194th, 228th, 241st and the 349th day of the year have had 2 releases each
The 3rd day of the month is most likely to be a release day, with total of 6 releases
The 9th, 16th, 18th and 21st (of any month) have never been release days...
The 18th week of the year is most likely to have an release, whole 8 releases have been made in that week!

Want more?


php -r '
function fetch($arg) {
  static $mirror = "http://no2.php.net/releases/index.php";
  return unserialize(file_get_contents("$mirror?$arg"));
}
foreach(fetch("serialize=1") as $major => $unused) {
  foreach(fetch("serialize=1&max=-1&version=$major") as $version => $data) {
      echo $version, " - ", $data["date"], "\n";
             $foo[date("l", strtotime($data["date"]))]++;
  }
}
arsort($foo); print_r($foo);
'

ext/dom and libxml2 charset and entities behaviors

Posted: August 10th, 2009, 10:02am MDT by Davey Shafik

In case you are unaware, there is [as of PHP 5.1.0] a second argument to the DomDocument->SaveXML() method.

This argument currently only supports one value which is the constant LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAGS. This option makes sure that you do not end up with <tag /> but instead, <tag></tag>. This can make things easier if you need more predictable text to perform other changes on later.

However, in playing around with the option, I noticed that my markup changed somewhat significantly in size (it’s a large document). Some further playing yields that the following six uses of DomDocument->SaveXML() yield different results:

is a non-breaking space character (in html ). ext/dom Defaults to UTF-8

<?php
$dom = DOMDocument::loadXML("<xml><test /> </xml>");

echo   $dom->saveXML();
/*
Default behavior, entities stay as entities, no encoding added to the XML prolog
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xml><test/> </xml>
*/

echo $dom->saveXML($dom->documentElement);
/*
Entities are transformed to output charset, no XML prolog
<xml><test/>[nbsp char]</xml>
*/

echo $dom->saveXML($dom);
/*
Entities are transformed to output charset, encoding added to the XML prolog
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xml><test/>[nbsp char]</xml>
*/

echo $dom->saveXML($dom->documentElement, LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG);
/*
Entities are transformed to output charset, no XML prolog, tags expanded
<xml><test></test>[nbsp char]</xml>
*/

echo $dom->saveXML($dom, LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG);
/*
Entities are transformed to output charset, encoding added to the XML prolog, tags expanded
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xml><test></test>[nbsp char]</xml>
*/

echo $dom->saveXML(null, LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG);
/*
Entities stay as entities, no encoding added to the XML prolog, tags expanded
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xml><test></test> </xml>
*/
?>

Just something to keep in mind next time you’re fooling around with the DOM.

- Davey

Wordcraft 0.10 available

Posted: August 9th, 2009, 11:12pm MDT by Brian Moon

The latest package of Wordcraft, the PHP/MySQL based blog software that runs this site, is available for download from Google Code. Just some minor bug fixes and cosmetic stuff. Its getting a little use in the wild. That is always fun to see.

AWS PHP5 Libraries as svn:externals

Posted: August 8th, 2009, 6:56pm MDT by Clay Loveless

Many of Amazon’s official PHP5 libraries for Amazon Web Services are now available (unofficially) for use as Subversion svn:externals.

To add to your SVN-managed project, just do something like this:

svn propedit svn:externals library

And add:

Amazon [killersoft.googlecode.com]

This assumes, of course, that you’re keeping your external libraries in a directory called “library” (many Zend Framework-based projects are laid out like this). Adjust to suit your own needs if necessary.

I’m not wild about the code layout of Amazon’s official libraries. They’re more verbose and cumbersome than a many other wrappers that have been created around Amazon services. However, in the end I choose to use them despite that, for one reason: they’re the official libraries.

They’re updated more often than any other set of PHP libraries for AWS. In fact, they’re often updated on the same day that API changes are released for the underlying services. And, they’re comprehensive; many AWS libraries wrap “the easy stuff” or “the commonly used” stuff, but leave you on your own if you actually need to do something non-easy or uncommon.

So, my suggestion is to use these. Hopefully having them in all in a single, easy-to-include place will make life easier for you. It has for me!

My plan for keeping these current is to create a new “update-[date]” tag whenever any of the libraries are updated, with the date of the most recently updated library as part of the directory name. Details about what’s actually changed within the update tag will be documented in a README.txt file in the top level.

You can find the “ground zero” update for the AWS libraries in update-2009-05-15, browseable here.

What Firefly/Serenity Can Teach Us About PHP

Posted: August 8th, 2009, 6:49pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

At the risk of alienating some of my readers out there…who am I kidding - most of you liked Firefly, didn’t you? Having just watched Serenity yet again and recently seeing several episodes of the canceled-before-its-time series Firefly, I noticed that there’s some similarities between it and PHP as a whole. So, here’a quick list of a few I’ve noticed - feel free to add some of your own in the comments:

Just because it’s not the latest and greatest version, it doesn’t mean it’s not good. Sure, everyone wants to run on PHP 5.3 - we all love the thought of late static binding, namespaces and the whole list of lovely enhancements that come with this latest PHP version, but for some it’s just not a reality. Most of use are using a ship…er, code that’s been around for a while (except the fortunate enough to be doing new development each time) and has been coasting along in the land of PHP 5.2.x series. It’s not the latest model and it’s probably going to take a little doing to get up to the sort of things PHP 5.3 has to offer, but that’s not an excuse to abandon the code and not try to get as much out of it as you can. Squeeze that last boost that caching that data gives you, refactor that part of the code you just found a better method for - but don’t forget where the code came from and all that you’ve been through to make it exactly what it is
Just because you don’t understand something, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t embrace it. Sometimes the real power of something sits just under the surface and without really getting to know it, you might miss out. Much like the skills of a certain female in the TV/movie, only the right situation brought out the real value of her skills. There’s features in PHP that you might now be using, but don’t dismiss them just because you haven’t used them before. Sometimes there’s a hidden gem in there that you might not see unless you took the time to check it out. So you’ve been using simplexml for a while? Why not see what kind of things XMLReader can do for you. Never checked into the Standard PHP Library? You should! You might never know what you’re missing out on unless you look around and find the right PHP pieces for the right situation.
There’s nothing stronger than a bond between those who care. Much like the crew of the Serentity, there’s nothing more powerful than people helping others when they really care about the outcome. A lone PHP developers is only as good as his own skill level. As soon as he reaches out to other developers, he interacts with a whole new skillbase and a whole world of new people. It can be posts on a forum, chatting in IRC or even attending a conference - as long as the bonds are formed, that developer has something more than they did before. Before long, they’ve made connections with other developers with other skillsets that can help to broaden their knowledge and make them stronger as developers.
It takes all kinds to make the ‘verse go ’round. Despite what those hiring PHP developers lately want to think, there’s divisions in PHP developers in the same way there are in any other social group. Some developers focus on how the language works and adding features the entire web will enjoy. Others look at the current feature set and think of ways to to squeeze every drop of performance out of it. Still others are working their way up, trying to do their best with the code they’ve been given. PHP developers are as varied as population in general, and it’s definitely a good thing. The PHP language will only develop into something even more robust with a panel of varied developers at the helm.
Use only what you need. Just because there’s something out there that’s shiny and looks good to use, it doesn’t mean your application really needs it. Remember, the real key to applications is the performance - that’s what the world tests it on. Don’t worry about the latest and greatest if it’d not going to help. Features shouldn’t be included if they’re not needed - they’ll only cause trouble otherwise.
A good team is nothing without good leaders. The PHP community has some excellent “captains” at the helm - people like Cal Evans, Keith Casey, Eli White, Derick Rethans,

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 887 bytes)

Suhosin patch for PHP 5.3

Posted: August 8th, 2009, 11:05am MDT by Arnold Daniels

The hardened-php project has yet to release a suhosin patch for PHP 5.3.0. We’re already using PHP 5.3, therefore I’ve modified the 0.9.7 patch for 5.2.10 to work with 5.3.0.

-> Download Suhosin patch for PHP 5.3

Making the Hang: My Story

Posted: August 7th, 2009, 4:48pm MDT by Travis Swicegood

I just finished reading Chad Fowler's Passionate Programmer book. It quickly earned a spot as one of my favorite books on the topic of programming and careers. I highly recommend it, and have been tweaking a book review that I'll post up soon, but I wanted to talk about want chapter that stuck out at me. Making the Hang.

The chapter talks about one of Chad's high school jazz buddies, Chris. Chris was a good musician, but he made sure he hung around with all of the guys who were better than he was and would pepper them with questions every chance he got. He called it making the hang. For some reason, this stuck out at me. I couldn't put my finger on it for a few days, and then it hit me. I've been doing this for a long time.

The first hang I made wasn't in the music scene or the technology scene, it was cycling. In particular, competitive mountain bike racing. A few years back I started riding more and more, wound up a regular at the weekly group rides, and finally decided to try my luck at racing. To this day there are few things I enjoy as much as that adrenaline rush you get as you pull up the line at the start of a race.

Starting out, I asked questions of anyone who would humor me. Looking back on it, I can see how Chad thought Chris might be annoying the musicians and I'm surprised I didn't annoy more people with my constant questions about racing. How do you prepare? What's your training like? Do you really think two-a-days work? What about road cycling? Is there any crossover benefit for mountain biking? Maybe we can go for a ride some time?

I was like a walking 20 questions game. But it worked. I not only finished the first race I ever entered, a 100 kilometer race in Juarez, Mexico, I surpassed my goal by over 50 places (was shooting for a top 250 out of more than 1,000 that would finish, and got inside the top 200). I know it's because I was prepared for the race. I'd asked enough questions of enough different people that I knew what to expect. I didn't have to learn the hard way, all I had to do was get my skill up to par.

I kept it up, and the next year I was 46 in a field that was won by the sitting Mexican national champion including winning a personal race within the race, I beat one of the guys who I'd been asking questions of the whole past year at the final sprint. I still had legs after 62 miles of racing to sprint for the line and he couldn't contest it.

It's happened in other parts of my life. When I took up road cycling, I literally learned to make the hang. The first group road ride I ever went on involved me with a group for about 30 minutes of a 90 minute ride followed by a long, solo trip back after I got dropped. By the end of that summer I was hanging with the group the entire ride and even making challenges at some of the sprints along the route.

When I got serious about moving from a hacker to a programmer, I made the hang by joining an open source project. Marcus Baker always had more time than I could expect to answer silly questions and help shape my view on what a programmer ought to do. I'm a TDD guy today explicitly because of those interactions with him.

So what's the moral of this story? I guess "get out there!" Talk to people. Hone those people skills and above all, don't be afraid to be annoying. 9 times out of 10, the person you're "annoying" (in your mind at least) is going to be so flattered that you respect their opinion that they'll spend hours talking to you and answering every last question you have. Don't believe me? Try it some time and tell me if you didn't get anything out it.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Content repository talk in FrOSCon

Posted: August 7th, 2009, 1:57pm MDT by Henri Bergius

Content repositories can be useful for your application. In the PHP track of FrOSCon on Aug 22nd there will be a talk about this: Midgard2: Content repository for your PHP application

Content repositories allow you to separate the actual front-end of your application from background processing tools. More than just their underlying databases, they impose common rules for data access, and keep multiple applications up-to-date on data changes through signaling. Midgard2 provides a flexible content repository that avoids the restrictions of the traditional ORM approach. And not only your PHP web application, but also to possible Python, Objective-C and C# tools you use.

This enables you to split applications into smaller, easily maintainable and scalable pieces that can be run on different systems and platforms as needed. In addition to web, the Midgard2 library can be used for desktop and mobile application development, building software that synchronizes with web services. It is based and engineered fully on the top of the desktop (GNOME) software stack. Being highly modular and having very little dependencies it scales from a note taking application to a full-blown CMS system. Combined with advanced replication capabilities it allows you to synchronize data between offline and online instances of your service.

Unlike shown in the program, the talk will be given by Arttu Manninen this time, as I will be off motorcycling somewhere around Asia Minor. Arttu? Yep, this guy:

Technorati Tags: froscon, midgard, php

FrOSCon upcoming

Posted: August 7th, 2009, 11:45am MDT by Kore Nordmann

The schedule for the PHP room at the upcoming FrOSCon 2009 is now available. We got an amazing list of talks and speakers again, read more for details…

visibility and inheritance.

Posted: August 7th, 2009, 9:16am MDT by Chance Garcia

An interesting topic came up in #phpc today. It revolved around some issues I've been encountering in my latest code designs/structures. It also leads into some side topics that I will attempt to explore.

From my point of view, the discussion centered around what is the best 'default' visibility to use for methods. Another thing touched upon is the Open/Closed principle, which I think I subscribe to or may subscribe to(this depends on my ability to determine what half of the words in the entry mean).

Out of the whole discussion, here is the points I got (aka understood) out of it. Please correct me in the comments if I'm off base in any way.

Methods should only be public when necessary. This is to help reduce the amount of side-effects that can occur because of method overrides.

K, I can accept that and in thinking about my past code, I use to use protected more than private. I used public very sparingly.
Now I find, since I started unit testing, that I have a large amount of public functions than I've had in the past. That is because I can't figure out how to test private methods. One way that I can think of is to create public methods that allow you to test the private ones. Unfortunately, this makes me wonder why the method isn't public to begin with since it seems redundant and wasteful to have these public methods to access private methods.
Please note the key word methods, property accessors are a different story.
The best solution (I can think of) to testing private methods is Mock Objects. Unfortunately, even though I've started to use mocks/doubles more, I'm unsure if my implementation is correct. Until I'm confident in my understanding of mocks/doubles, I worry about having false positives in test results.

Another assertion that was made in the discussion was that private methods allow you to preserve the class' core functionality.
Unfortunately, no matter what the visibility of the method is, you're able to override it (and potentially mess with the core functionality you were trying to preserve).
Example:

class foo{
    private function foobar() {
        echo "foo\n";
        return "foo foo\n";
    }

    public function bar() {
        echo "w00t ";
        return $this->foobar();
    }
}

class bar extends foo{
    private function foobar() {
        return "bar\n";
    }

    public function baz() {
        echo $this->bar();
    }

    public function wut() {
        echo $this->foobar();
    }
}

$f=new bar();
$f->baz();
$f->wut();

By running the above code, you get:

w00t foo
foo foo
bar

If preservation of core functionality is your main concern, then you're better off using final.

So after all that rambling, you're probably wondering what I'm trying to get to. It still comes down to visibility's effect on inheritance. The way I see it, unless you declare the method as final, you can't lock down the parent functionality because private methods can still be overridden. Trying to figure out what level of visibility for a method is a situational call. There is no correct 'default' visibility. Sure private is safer because of least privilege but it makes testing a bear (or at least a bear at my current skill level in testing). Public potentially opens you up for abuse or misuse.

What I would still like to know is, how do you do class method visibility? How does that affect your testing methodology? Can someone give me an example (that isn't a singleton) where private is a better choice over protected? I like protected because it seems less limiting to me and my current coding style appreciates that degree of flexibility.

Count The Costs

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 10:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

Imagine that you’ve just been offered a brand new job. That’s fantastic! Now, make sure you do the math and find out what it will cost you.

“Cost me?” you ask. Yes. Accepting a new job is exciting and often beneficial, but there are costs associated with it that you must consider before you sign the offer and tell off your present employer. Some of these costs are obvious, but others are less obvious. These costs are rarely fully explored, because we have a tendency to see the grass as greener someplace else, and if the offer we receive is substantially better than our current one, we are more inclined to accept it. But not counting the costs would be a huge mistake.

Here are some of the costs you should consider when deciding whether you should accept a new position:

Can You Afford No Salary For A While?

Finding a new job before you leave the old one is the preferred strategy for changing positions, but doesn’t necessarily mean your paycheck will be uninterrupted. Sometimes you get lucky, but most of the time there’s some lag time. That lag time might mean going without a paycheck for up to two months.

Make sure that you can afford to do this without adding debt or defaulting on existing obligations. If you’ve built an emergency fund, this may be the sort of thing it calls for; you might consider also negotiating a signing bonus with your new company that will cover some of the lost income. Consider timing as well: you may be able to work with your new employer to time your departure close to the beginning of their new pay period and the end of your current company’s pay period to help ease the transition.

For those who think asking a potential new employer about their pay schedule, I’ve had this discussion with my friends before: they think it’s rude to ask your new employer about their pay schedule. I disagree – I think it’s a matter of financial security and prudence. As you’re considering whether to accept a position, understanding how it will affect your budget is a primary key factor. You should ask – but only after they’ve issued you a signed, formal offer.

Consider Required Repayments To The Previous Employer

Many employers have great benefits, like tuition reimbursement and continued training. Some employers even allow you to borrow against your vacation time before you’ve accrued it. Many companies offer a Section 125 plan, which allows you to pay for medical benefits over the course of the year (but makes the money available upfront). I encourage use of these benefits, but many of them come with attachments or agreements to repay them if you depart the company within a certain amount of time. Be very careful to understand these agreements and consider any that you may be under before you resign.

It can be expensive to get a large bill from your employer for benefits that you used but now have to repay, and this may affect your decision to leave. Of course, you can’t very well ask human resources for this information without drawing suspicion, so it is vitally important that you keep track of every piece of paperwork you sign for a company before you need it.

Consider The Effects On Retirement Savings

When you leave a company chances are good that you’ll either need to roll over your 401(k) account or continue paying for it out of your own pocket. The fees that the company paid on your behalf will stop, and you’ll become responsible for them. Depending on the amount in your account you may not be allowed to keep it where it is; check with your provider to see.

There is another hidden danger in leaving a company: the matching funds the company puts in along with your contribution may not vest for a certain period of time. So, if the company matches you dollar-for-dollar and you’ve accrued $10,000 in your 401(k), that may drop to $5,000 if half of those funds are not yet vested.

Be sure and also consider the tax implications, especially if you have them distribute any portion of your 401(k) money. Besides paying standard taxes, if you’re below the retirement age, you’ll pay a hefty penalty (typically around 10%) to the IRS. You do have options, though: you may be able to roll over your 401(k) to the new company, or roll it into a low-cost IRA without tax liabilities. Check with your accountant or tax professional.

Be Sure You Understand Insurance Implications

Something I always want to account for is insurance – health, life, dental, vision. You’ll want to consider a number of things when switching employers.

First, you want to know when their coverage kicks in, and when your existing coverage will expire. Obviously you want to avoid as much of a gap as possible, and most emplo

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 4467 bytes)

Search or Settle?

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 8:34pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

Let me start by posing a question to all of you other groups looking for PHP developers right now - should we just settle?

Sure, I’d love for that perfect candidate to come walking through the door, shiny resume in had that fits close to what we need (no, I’m not naive enough to think they’ll be perfect). We could sit there in the interview and he or she could give all the right answers in all the right places. The choice would be easy and, with a few shaking of hands, the deal would be sealed.

If that’s your impression of hiring a developer, you’re in for a serious kick in the shins by the software development industry. Right now (and it seems especially right now) finding good developers is even harder than the needle in the haystack trick. I’d go so far as to say that, for the parameters that most companies can afford, there’s almost no good, skilled developers out there - the real problem there being that pesky S-word.

If you’re not at all concerned about code quality or serious development, by all means hire the next interviewee that walks through your door. Don’t check his criteria, don’t look at his experience and by no means ask him any questions about how many years he’s been developing PHP. Now, a skilled developer, on the other hand, is something that should be sought after and held onto as long as possible. They’re the ones that will think about the structure of the code they’re writing and continuously look for ways to improve the application. As I explained it to a coworker of mine:

“You want a developer, not a hobbyist.”

I’m not saying that kids fresh out of school (or whatever) are to be discounted because they don’t have much development experience. I will say to be careful with them, though. As anyone that’s worked in development can tell you, there’s just that “something” you can see in the eyes of a developer when they talk about the technology they work with.

So, back to my dilemma - how to find a good developer in a wasteland of good talent. After a few interviews with widely varying candidates, I’ve been getting a bit more discouraged, but I just have to keep reminding myself of a few things:

Don’t be too picky (except on the important stuff)
No matter what the resume makes you think, don’t assume
Remember your roots, assess them based on theirs
Don’t settle.

Yes, I know I’m sort of answering my own question, but that doesn’t stop me from asking it. You go through enough applicants and your have to start wondering…

PHP Quick Reference

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 4:03pm MDT by Chris Shiflett

While cleaning out my desk, I found an old copy of a PHP Quick Reference I helped make a few years ago. On the front page are a few performance and security tips that I thought I'd share. (Performance tips are from George Schlossnagle.)

Top 5 Performance Tips

Use a Compiler Cache. Completely transparent to your application, a compiler cache is the closest you'll get to a fast = true ini setting.
Profile Early; Profile Often. Big and small systems alike can behave in unexpected ways. Quantitative tools help you understand where your bottlenecks are. This is critical for targeting your tuning efforts.
Cache Whenever Possible. The vast majority of performance optimizations involve caching data in one form or another. Whether caching content or just intermediate data during complex procedures, intelligent use of caching techniques can dramatically improve your performance.
Be Mindful of Using External Data Sources. The top performance bottleneck in almost every application we analyze is making too many (or too complex) database queries. Always optimize your queries, and structure your most frequently accessed data to be efficiently fetched.
Don't Over-Optimize. As Donald Knuth said, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Optimization is (at least after the initial stages) a matter of trading flexibility for performance. By over-optimizing your code, you can render it brittle to future functionality changes.

Top 5 Security Tips

Trust Nothing. Most security vulnerabilities can be traced back to a misplaced trust in suspect data, primarily input provided by third parties. When in doubt, verify your assumptions to be sure.
Filter Input. Inspect any data you receive from a third party to be sure it meets your expectations, rejecting anything that doesn't. Don't try to massage input in order to be accommodating, and err on the side of caution by allowing only what you know is safe rather than rejecting only what you know is not.
Escape Output. When outputting data, be sure your data is represented in such a way that it is preserved in its new context. In PHP, we often mix data with html, SQL, and the like. Escaping helps preserve the distinction and prevent misinterpretation.
Use Prepared Statements. By using prepared statements, you can preserve the distinction between an SQL query and the data to be bound to it. This offers strong protection against SQL injection.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Use mature, existing solutions. Not only are they likely to be more thorough than your own, but you can also simplify your code, making it easier to understand and less error-prone.

Got anything you'd add to these lists? Please share in the comments. :-)

Posted Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:03:07 GMT in Chris Shiflett’s Blog

Two new jobs in one week!

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 12:53pm MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

On monday, I started my new job at Unet. And now, I am ready to announce another new job. I have been approached by Kris Wallsmith, the previous community manager of symfony, to see if I would take over that position, and I am excited to say that I have said yes to this job!

The ZendCon Sessions Episode 25: (In)secure Ajax-y Websites with PHP

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 12:24pm 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 Christian Wenz giving his talk: “(In)secure Ajax-y Websites with PHP ”

Magento with Facebook Connect

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 8:34am MDT by Michael Kimsal

My brother wrote a Magento module recently - the Facebook Connect Module. It’s pretty straightforward, and allows you to make it easier for shoppers to enter in their information in to your Magento store. When checking out, they can connect their Facebook info, using the Facebook Connect process, and their information will be imported in to your Magento store. It’s not free - there is a charge for this, but the source code is included, not obfuscated or encrypted, so if you need to extend it or make customizations, you can.

Possibly one of the more interesting things it does: “Alerts users via Facebook notifications to changes in their order.” This sort of social networking integration with ecommerce sites will possibly be more common in the future - perhaps some other sites are doing it already that I don’t know about?

You can also just sign up for the mailing list to be notified about new features and such over at [biz.metrofindings.com]

What other sorts of Magento tie ins to social networks would you like to see?

SVN error 200030 – It’s PHP’s fault!

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 12:50am MDT by Mark Karpeles

If you updated to SVN 1.6.x and created a new repository in the new SVN format (which uses SQLite), you probably found that you were getting an XML error that says:

<m:human-readable errcode="200030">
Could not open the requested SVN filesystem
</m:human-readable>

After some searches I found someone who had the same problem, and fixed it. Basically the problem is due to the SQLite version embed into PHP 5.2.x. PHP includes SQLite 3.3.7 while SVN will usually depend on 3.6.15 (or whatever you have on your system).

To fix this problem you have various solutions:

Disable PHP as did our japanese friend
Upgrade SQLite version provided with php, or tell php to use system’s SQLite with –with-sqlite=/usr
Create your svn repository with –pre-1.6-compatible

Hope this article will help all those who, like me, got the error 200030 with SVN without understanding much where it comes from.

PHP on Windows Azure

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 10:11pm MDT by PHP Classes

PHP on Windows Azure By Manuel Lemos PHP is now officially supported as a language for developing applications that can run on Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud operating system.

This article is an interview with Teoni Valois, an independent PHP and .NET expert that answered some questions to give an overview of the PHP support on Windows Azure.

He also talks about the advantages and disadvantages of running PHP applications on this environment when compared to regular Windows or Linux based hosting or other cloud computing environments.

Conference Speaking.. Works!

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 6:07pm MDT by James McLean

Well, some of you may remember I presented a talk at last years Open Source Developers Conference in Sydney called ‘Improving PHP Application Performance with APC‘ – it was my first presentation, I learned a lot about one of my favourite subjects and I enjoyed the experience immensely.

While I haven’t had the time this year to prepare another presentation for OSDC as I had planned due to the impending birth of my first child (it’s a girl!), endless renovations at home and all my other hobbies outside IT – Two months ago I was able to draw on the fact that I had presented at a conference on a specific subject while being interviewed for my current role. I can say without a shadow of a doubt – that having presented at a conference gave me a great leg up on my opposition for the role. The interviewers (who are now my managers) were very impressed that I had presented at a conference, and the subject material was of specific interest for our project.

So, if you’re not sure weather you should knock up a paper and presentation – don’t feel scared – in this current tough economic climate, experience in speaking at a conference may just give you the advantage you need to get your nose in front of the competition. You’ll make new friends and perhaps meet old ones face-to-face for the first time, increase your knowledge of a specific subject, and have a blast doing it. Don’t hold back, Do it!

Oh, and for my #phpc buddies – I really should drop in and say g’day sometime soon, I miss everyone

Comet Architektur (server push) Vortrag@Mayflower-München

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 9:25am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

Es geht weiter mit unseren Vorträgen! Am kommenden Donnerstag, den 06.08.2009 findet wieder ein öffentlicher Vortrag im Mayflower Büro in München statt (Mannhardtstrasse 6, S-Bahn Isartor).
Begin ist um 18:00 Uhr, Thema des Vortrags ist "Server Push: Ausliefern von Daten ohne Browser-Anfrage auf Basis einer Comet Architektur".

Martin Ruprecht wird, neben dem Aufbau und Nutzen, auch an einem Beispiel zeigen, wie Daten ohne Anfrage des Clients vom Server gesendet werden können.

Die "Donnerstags-Vorträge" werden sowohl in München als auch in Würzburg gehalten. Bei Interesse einfach das Blog beobachten, um auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben!
Wir freuen uns auf Euch!

Größere Kartenansicht

“Done done”

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 7:50am MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

As I’ve been reading through “The Art of Agile Development” (from O’Reilly, by James Shore & Shane Warden) there’s been a whole load of great suggestions for development practices and not all of them are restricted to an “Agile Only kind of world. One of the major ones that’s stuck in my head (and is repeated quite a bit in the book) is the idea of being “done done” in your development.

The average PHP developer seems to say they’re “done” when the code works from their simple testing, usually just entering values to ensure that things work correctly. I hate to break it to them, but this shouldn’t be considered done. Getting the code working correctly is only the tip of the iceberg - there’s so much more to do to get everything ready to deploy. Besides the code being complete, “done done” also means:

Having documentation, both in the code and about the code. If future generations of developers were to come around and need to update your code, good documentation is a must. One line comments aren’t going to cut it…at the very least use something like the formatting for phpDocumentor to provide some automated docs
Making those unit tests pass every time is essential. (You do unit test, don’t you?) Writing tests for all the bits and pieces of your application may be a pain, but it can save you in the long run. Imagine being able to fire off a test suite and being confident that those changes you just made haven’t broken anything.
The code has to work in the build for your project. Some projects are small enough to where they don’t really need a build, but if your project is much more than a simple site with a database backend, you could benefit from a build[1]. Developers should be able to do local builds to check their work prior to a commit and push.
I must fulfill what the customer wants in the update or new feature. Sometimes, it just happens - you get to writing your code and you think about “this one cool feature” or “that other fun thing” that PHP makes so easy. You wonder why the customer didn’t want that in the first place. Be very careful with thinking like this, it could lead to some pretty random stuff in the end. In the end, the customer needs to be happy with what you give them - be sure it’s what they asked for (user acceptance testing).

Being “done done” means that, if you handed over your code to the testers or even the end customer, you’d be confident that it works and is ready to be integrated. Sure, it’s about the code being tested and correct, but its also about making it behave as a part of the larger whole. Your code (code ownership is a whole new can of worms) shouldn’t be viewed as “this part that does this” but more of a piece to the larger puzzle of you/your team’s application.

[1] What’s a build? A build lets you automate several things you might currently do by hand to get your code ready for production. This can include things like: building out databases, minifying code, running unit tests and checking syntax on all files to be pushed.

PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 45: Travis Swicegood on Git

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 1:04am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

And PHP Abstract is on a role. 3 weeks in a row! In this episode I chat (in a noisy bar) with Travis Swicegood about Git. He gives a number of compelling reasons as he tries to sway everyone away from CVS and SVN .

Pake: PHP5 project build system

Posted: August 4th, 2009, 8:03am MDT by Alexey Zakhlestins blog » php

Sometimes, there are pieces of software, which are unfairly forgotten. Let’s talk about one these.

Often, while working on software projects, one finds, that there are repetitive tasks, which would be much easier to deal with, if automated. In the C/Unix world, this task is often solved by Make, Java programmers prefer Apache Ant, Ruby programmers use Rake. The fact, which is not commonly known, is, that PHP also has such instrument, and it is called Pake. It was originally created by authors of Symfony framework. Unfortunately, they never wrote any documentation, which killed adoption rates.

To start automating something, you need to create Pakefile.php in the root-directory of your project, define some tasks inside and run them with “pake taskname” from command-line. The good news is, that tasks are defined in PHP language and syntax is quite simple:

<?php

pake_desc(‘FOO task’);
pake_task(‘foo’, ‘bar’);

pake_desc(‘BAR task’);
pake_task(‘bar’, ‘baz’);

pake_desc(‘BAZ task’);
pake_task(‘baz’);

pake_alias(‘default’, ‘foo’); // marking foo as default task

function run_foo($task, $args)
{
echo "foo\n";
}

function run_bar($task, $args)
{
echo "bar\n";
}

function run_baz($task, $args)
{
echo "baz\n";
}

I defined 3 rules, gave them descriptions and specified dependencies. Additionally, I specifed default rule. Now, we can play with this a bit. Create file with this contents, save it somewhere, and point your terminal to the same directory.

> pake baz bar foo

What happened? Pake looks for “default” task in the pakefile. We defined “foo” as default. Pake found out, that foo depends on bar, and bar depends on baz. So, Pake runs “baz”, then “bar” and then, finally, “foo

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1495 bytes)

PHP 5.3 Not In Next Version Of Ubuntu

Posted: August 4th, 2009, 7:31am MDT by Brandon Savage

When the next version of Ubuntu is released on October 29th, PHP developers won’t be able to upgrade to PHP 5.3 through the included package management tools.

A meeting of the development team on July 30th nixed the inclusion of PHP 5.3 from inclusion in Karmic, the next iteration of Ubuntu for the desktop and the server. According to meeting minutes, there is concern amongst the Ubuntu security team that failure to include the suhosin patch in the PHP release would be a feature regression. Instead, the release will be referred to PPA until more testing can be completed.

It is unlikely that Ubuntu will see official PHP 5.3 support until April, 2010, based on the history of Ubuntu release cycles. However, you can still compile PHP 5.3 on Ubuntu yourself.

Code and human languages

Posted: August 3rd, 2009, 11:28am MDT by Johannes Schlüter

In a previous blog post I mentioned the possibility for using non ASCII characters as part of identifiers. Nils Langner, who runs the German "PHP hates me (but that's ok)" blog, then wondered whether it makes sense to use German (in his case) terms for identifiers in code in the comments it was also discussed what language is best to be used in comments.

The argument for using only English is simple: Every developer should know at least basic English and using English helps when either outsourcing, opensourcing or reaching new markets.

Now there are arguments against English, too, one is that not all developers are able of using English properly so reading and writing comments is more difficult for them - now you don't have to write long prosaic texts in comments, but still ...

The other argument goes by domain-specific terminology. In some cases - for instance when bound to legal environments - such terms can't be translated properly. For instance when dealing with financial data accounting by US-GAAP differs in many parts from the German accounting rules: For some positions you find translations which have the same meaning but are calculated slightly different so using the English term would imply the values would be calculated by the US rules (sorry British folks for this example - I have no idea about the British terminology and accounting rules, but have basic understanding of German rules and US-GAAP ;-) ). Ignoring this problem you still have to consider that you'd still talk German to your customer so the customer would use German terminology and you have to keep a dictionary for these terms which is a pain for everybody involved.

So now one could use mostly English with some local terms which gives a nice mixture ("function getEigenkapitalrendite()") or invent complete new terminology ("function erhalteEigenkapitalrendite()") which is stupid in comments, too ("The Eigenkapitalrendite is depending on the Gewinn and the Eigenkapital") ...

Now I'm in the "lucky" position that most things I do these days are either done for some American company or a popular world wide used open source project and is mostly about stuff where the typical terminology is English so I can use my bad English everywhere - but I'm curious what others are doing and what others think.

A letter from the European commission regarding the Oracle/Sun merger

Posted: August 3rd, 2009, 4:37am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

Last week I received a really extensive questionaire from the European commission. They investigate in the case of the Oracle/Sun merger and supplied a long questionaire how Mayflower sees the Oracle/Sun merger. One of the question, for example, is if the quality of InnoDB has increased or declined since Oracle bought Innobase Oy some years ago. I wrote to the commission and asked if I could distribute the two Word documents they delivered to me. Important information: the questionaire has to be sent back until August, 13th!

This is what Vera Pozzato on behalf of the team told me:

Dear Mr. Schotte,

Many thanks for your email and for the interesting information you have provided us with.

As our investigation is a rather extensive and complex exercise, we would appreciate if you could send us, if possible, the contact details (company name, address, telephone number+fax+email address of a contact person) of companies that work with MySQL and Open Source products, and who could be willing to assist us in our investigation.

We would then send the questionnaires ourselves so we can more easily keep track of replies and double-check whether they might have already received our requests for information last week.

Please let us know if this is possible for you and, in any case, do not hesitate to contact us should you have any further queries.

Many thanks.

Kind regards,

Vera Pozzato On behalf of the case team

Vera Pozzato
European Commission
DG Competition
Directorate C - Information, Communication, Media
Mergers
Tel. +32-2-29-93012
Fax +32-2-29-98588
E-mail vera.pozzato@ec.europa.eu

I encourage everybody who works with MySQL in the OpenSource area to write to Ms. Pozzato and ask for the questionaire. I also encourage you to distribute this content to everybody who is working with MySQL and Open Source products writing E-Mails to Ms. Pozzato and asking for the questionaire.

RFID Reader Writer USB Prototyping Kit

Posted: August 3rd, 2009, 4:00am MDT by IONCANNON

I recently won a programming contest that netted me a gift card for ThinkGeek and not knowing what else to do I strolled the site looking for something interesting to use the gift card on. Eventually I ran into the RFID Experimentation Kit they have and decided that was what I needed. I have been wanting to play around with RFID for a while and this kit turned out to be pretty nice for tinkering.

Even though I picked this RFID kit from ThinkGeek you can buy it a couple different places and in a number of different configurations. The one I got came with a book from ExtremeTech called RFID Toys: 11 Cool Projects for Home, Office and Entertainment and the RFID parts are from Phidgets, who actually make a lot of other interesting kits.

Outside of the book you can get the RFID reader and RFID keyfobs, cards, etc. Another good place to look for this type of gear is SparkFun and they also have a USB RFID reader.

This RFID kit reads EM4102 type tags and operates at 125 kHz. The frequency and tag type are actually important. I have a number of badges and keyfobs outside of what I got with the kit and none of them work with this reader.

The Phidgets site has source code in a number of different languages making it very easy to develop custom applications. To get started you will need to grab the driver source and compile that. It isn't a driver in the normal sense of the word since it doesn't get installed by your operating system but more of a base library. Once you have the base library compiled you can grab any number of different language source files from the RFID reader source area. There should be a simple RFID reader example that shows how to use most of the available functions out of the base library.

If you are interested RFID projects check out these links:

5 Ways to Make Friends at a Technical Conference

Posted: August 3rd, 2009, 1:51am MDT by Lorna Mitchell

These are my top tips for getting along and meeting new people at a technical conference.

Take an extension cable
Conferences are notorious for having too few and too short power leads, and everyone needs to recharge laptops, especially in hands-on sessions like tutorial day. Having an extension cable will make you instant friends as you bring power to more people.

Join in the pre-conference hype
Follow the nominated twitter tag and log into the IRC channel if there is one. Find out who is staying in the same place as you or arriving at the same time, arrange to travel together or meet for a pre-conference drink to break the ice.

Attend the extra-curricular events
Don't think for a moment that when the official schedule ends, you are off-duty for the night! Find out about any social activities going on - and if there is an informal track such as an unconference, make sure you attend, or even participate. This is a great opportunity to meet more people and see more talks in a much less structured environment.

Take business cards
Or if you don't have that kind of job (or even if you do!) get some moo cards to take with you so you can pass on your blog/email address, name and twitter details to people you want to stay in touch with after the event.

Stay an extra day
The party starts when the conference ends, so hang around for 24 hours or so and join in :) Especially for the speakers (whose rooms are paid for) and those travelling internationally, there's no need to rush off straight away. Some of the best times I've had at conferences have been after the main event.

Keep in touch
Write up your experiences on your blog (do you have a blog? If not, this is a great place to start) and tag it appropriately. Comment on other people's and stay in touch with the new friends that you made at the conference.

OK, so technically this is six ways to make friends, but I won't apologise for that :) What's your top tip for conference attendees?

work with TwitterData in PHP

Posted: August 2nd, 2009, 1:36pm MDT by Alexey Zakhlestins blog » php

I recently created a small library for working with twitterdata in PHP. Sources are available from GitHub: php-twitterdata

Here’s the description from Twitter Data site:

Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time by powerful new kinds of applications built on the Twitter platform. Here is an example Twitter Data message:

I love the #twitterdata proposal! $vote +1

The part with the dollar sign, $vote +1, is a piece of data embedded using the Twitter Data format.

To use php-twitterdata library, download it into the sub-direcory in your project’s directory (or any other place you like) and init the autoloader:

<?php
require ‘php-twitterdata/autoload.php’;
?>

PHP API provided by php-twitterdata has 2 layers. On lower level, there are 3 classes: TwitterData_Message, TwitterData_Frame and TwitterData_Tuple which correspond to parts of data-enabled twitter-message. Message can consist of several Frames, Frame can consist of several Tuples and a “subject”. Objects of each of these classes can be created programmatically and combined in hierarchy. Each of them has “magic” __toString() method, so, to export them as a valid twitter-message, you just need to put objects in string context. Something like this:

<?php
$tuple = new TwitterData_Tuple(‘foo’, ‘bar’);
$frame = new TwitterData_Frame(‘Hello, world!’, array($tuple));
echo $frame;
?>

and the result will be:
Hello, world! $foo bar

If you need to parse Twitter Data messages you should use TwitterData_Parser class. It is a SAX-style parser, with DOM-style export. If all you need is a hierarchy of objects, use it like this:

<?php
$parser = new TwitterData_Parser($text_from_twitter);
$message = $parser->export(); // $message is object of TwitterData_Message class
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 3047 bytes)

work with TwitterData in PHP

Posted: August 2nd, 2009, 1:36pm MDT by Alexey Zakhlestins blog » php

I recently created a small library for working with twitterdata in PHP. Sources are available from GitHub: php-twitterdata

Here’s the description from Twitter Data site:

Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time by powerful new kinds of applications built on the Twitter platform. Here is an example Twitter Data message:

I love the #twitterdata proposal! $vote +1

The part with the dollar sign, $vote +1, is a piece of data embedded using the Twitter Data format.

To use php-twitterdata library, download it into the sub-direcory in your project’s directory (or any other place you like) and init the autoloader:
<?php
require ‘php-twitterdata/autoload.php’;
?>
PHP API provided by php-twitterdata has 2 layers. On lower level, there are 3 classes: TwitterData_Message, TwitterData_Frame and TwitterData_Tuple which correspond to parts of data-enabled twitter-message. Message can consist of several Frames, Frame can consist of several Tuples and a “subject”. Objects of each of these classes can be created programmatically and combined in hierarchy. Each of them has “magic” __toString() method, so, to export them as a valid twitter-message, you just need to put objects in string context. Something like this:
<?php
$tuple = new TwitterData_Tuple(‘foo’, ‘bar’);
$frame = new TwitterData_Frame(‘Hello, world!’, array($tuple));
echo $frame;
?>
and the result will be:
Hello, world! $foo bar

If you need to parse Twitter Data messages you should use TwitterData_Parser class. It is a SAX-style parser, with DOM-style export. If all you need is a hierarchy of objects, use it like this:
<?php
$parser = new TwitterData_Parser($text_from_twitter);
$message = $parser->export(); // $message is object of TwitterData_Message class
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 3047 bytes)

PHP_Depend-0.9.6 released

Posted: August 2nd, 2009, 1:32pm MDT by Manuel Pichler

Today I released PHP_Depend 0.9.6, which contains many bug fixes and improvements, but the main feature of this release is behind the scene, I have started to migrate PHP_Depend's internal system from plain Token object to an Abstract Syntax Tree.

Closed #57: Display caption for abbreviations in overview pyramid, implemented in svn revision #947.

Closed #80: Store default value for class properties.

Fixed #81: PHP_Depend does not support comma separated property declarations, fixed in svn revision #916.

Fixed #82: PHP_Depend does not support comma separated constant definitions, fixed in svn revision #931.

Closed #83: Make ClassOrInterfaceReference an ASTNode, implemented in svn revision #917.

Fixed #87: The parent keyword is not accepted as parameter type hint, fixed in svn revision #925.

Fixed #89: Coupling analyzer reports wrong results, fixed in svn revision #939

Fixed #90: Coupling analyzer does not handle PHP 5.3 function chains, fixed in svn revision #943.

Fixed #91: Parser throws an exception when __CLASS__ as default value of an array property, fixed in svn revision #944.

Closes #92: Use class constants as analyzer identifiers, implemented in svn revision #950.

You can get the latest PHP_Depend version from its PEAR channel: pear.pdepend.org

mapi@arwen ~ $ pear channel-discover pear.pdepend.org mapi@arwen ~ $ pear install pdepend/PHP_Depend-beta

Move to GitHub

Posted: August 2nd, 2009, 12:05pm MDT by Alexey Zakhlestins blog » php

Just notifying all interested parties, that my “Application Server in PHP” and “MySQL Query Builder” projects are moved to GitHub.

Their new homes are:

Application Server in PHP

MySQL Query Builder

p.s. newest release of MySQL Query Builder has support for subqueries in IN(…) statements

Move to GitHub

Posted: August 2nd, 2009, 12:05pm MDT by Alexey Zakhlestins blog » php

Just notifying all interested parties, that my “Application Server in PHP” and “MySQL Query Builder” projects are moved to GitHub.

Their new homes are:

Application Server in PHP

MySQL Query Builder

p.s. newest release of MySQL Query Builder has support for subqueries in IN(…) statements

Slides for “Migrating to PHP 5.3″

Posted: August 1st, 2009, 7:21am MDT by Stefan Priebsch

Migrating to PHP 5.3 View more documents from Stefan Priebsch.

The elections are still going!

Posted: August 1st, 2009, 6:42am MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

As every year, the elections for the PEAR Group and PEAR President are happening. This year due to a few factors and messages lost in translation, we decided to extend the elections period by 10 days so more people would have time to vote!

So remember to cast your vote at [pear.php.net] and you have until the the 5th of August 2009.

There are many new candidates for the Group and I think you should go and check them out!

Using Yahoo pipes

Posted: August 1st, 2009, 3:58am MDT by Lukas Smith

For a while now I have been meaning to create a planet for digital DJs. Thanks to Yahoo pipes it was a breeze to create this planet once I finally sat down to do it. Essentially Yahoo pipes lets you take any web content, preferably feeds, and pipe them through various tools for looping, string manipulation etc and aggregate them all together into one final output stream. This stream can then be consumed in various ways like RSS, json, php serialized strings and even a nicely formatted website. You can also embed the output into your site with some simple javascript. If you are interested in reading about my motivation for this planet check out my music related blog. Nice!

Unfortunately if you view the feed in html on the pipes site, it always takes a while to load. The GUI interface is also not super speedy, but its still kind of nice if you can deal with visual "programming". Be sure to check out the source to get an idea of how things work. This all just took a few minutes really to setup. I spend more time deciding which feeds to include than configuring the planet.

The main missing pieces (or maybe I just overlooked the right tools) at this point is being able to easily append a name identifying the source feed in the final output. I have solved this by adding the "item.dc:creator" to the titles using a loop and a string builder. This means me to the next issue, obviously not all feeds are created equal and so some contain "item.dc:creator" some "item.author.name" and others some variation thereof. So I needed to add some loops around some feeds to normalize them to all contain the "item.dc:creator" field, so that I can do the title manipulation with just a single loop. It would be nice to have a "feed normalizer" that handles such difference for me and just spits out a stream that gives me the same format for all feeds.

What I want to look into next is using the Yahoo maps integration. The idea being that I could have DJTT add new fields in their forum where people can fill in their location as well as certain aspects about themselves like if they have access to a DJ practice room, if they have a residency at a local club, if they have a firmware upgrade kit for the VCI-100 and whatever else. Then I could create a feed out of this data that I could then map via pipes. I would also want to allow people to filter the data and this also seems to be supported in pipes. Though I am not sure if I would want to do the filtering inside pipes or if I would use the ability to construct feed URLs dynamically to be able to do the filtering on the source server.

The last thing where I am pondering to use Yahoo pipes is actually for a customer project where we want to integrate some third party content. The sites would all be ok with us taking the content, but they simply currently do not provide an API for us and I doubt they ever will. So using the screen scraping tools, especially YQL, which is a query language against any markup content on the web also created by Yahoo, we could probably get fairly good results, that a somewhat technically inclined customer could maybe even expand on his own.

My RSS » Planet PHP » August 2009

Feeds

Planet PHP

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 4:24pm MDT by Terry Chay

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 3:39pm MDT by Stubblog - Planet PHP

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 12:10pm MDT by Benjamin Eberlei

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 10:54am MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

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Posted: August 31st, 2009, 8:21am MDT by Lorenzo Alberton

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Posted: August 31st, 2009, 4:30am MDT by Brandon Savage

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 12:52am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 12:44am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 9:01pm MDT by Davey Shafik

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 7:58am MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 3:28am MDT by Stuart Herbert

Posted: August 29th, 2009, 8:01am MDT by Web Development Blog Â» PHP scripts

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 6:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 2:11pm MDT by John Mertic

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 12:22pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

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Posted: August 28th, 2009, 11:06am MDT by Davey Shafik

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 4:30am MDT by Brandon Savage

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 1:53am MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 12:57am MDT by Lorna Mitchell

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 1:25pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 5:48am MDT by Lars Jankowfsky

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 12:13pm MDT by Zend Developer Zone

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 9:50am MDT by Alexey Zakhlestins blog » php

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 2:54am MDT by Arno Schneider

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Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 1:47pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 4:22am MDT by Jakob Westhoff

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 7:03pm MDT by PHP 10.0 Blog

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Posted: August 21st, 2009, 7:15am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

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Posted: August 20th, 2009, 1:47pm MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

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Posted: August 18th, 2009, 4:30am MDT by Sebastian Bergmann

Posted: August 18th, 2009, 1:42am MDT by Christopher Kunz - PHP

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Posted: August 15th, 2009, 8:54pm MDT by blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP

Posted: August 15th, 2009, 5:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

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Posted: August 15th, 2009, 3:45am MDT by Horde news

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 2:07pm MDT by Lars Strojny

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 4:35am MDT by Lukas Smith

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 2:47pm MDT by Vidyut Luther