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Why People Don't Contribute to OS Projects, and What We Can Do About It

Posted: March 31st, 2010, 1:07pm MDT by Elizabeth Naramore

Why I care, and you should too.

Many people know that when I can, I help Ed Finkler out with Spaz. I don't contribute to the code base, but I help with end-user support, and I help coordinate the efforts of other end-user support people. Many people also know that I work with PHPWomen and of our attempts to boost open source involvement with our members through the PHPWomen Partnership Program.

Interestingly, the issues involved with both of these groups overlap. As those in the open source community who either contribute to, use, or advocate open source projects, we understand the importance of keeping them vibrant and active. We understand how great it is to be a part of a growing project we believe in. We understand the benefits of being an active community member. We understand that it not only helps the good of those around us, but it helps us hone our own skills. So what can we all do to get more people to contribute? Even if you aren't a project lead on an open source project, you don't want to see it fail. The obligation to keep things going lies within us all.

I get curious about things sometimes, and when I wondered "where is everybody?" I wasn't sure of the answer. There are so many great opportunities in open source projects. Are people taking advantage of them? Do they even know about them? Do people even care?

What the "research" showed.

Naturally, my first thought was to ask Twitter. So in this completely non-scientific poll, I asked developers who weren't contributing to an OS project, why they weren't contributing. At the time of this post, there were responses from 264 people, and I allowed people to choose more than one reason. Of course this is by no means exhaustive, nor is it meant to be a substitute for any real research on the matter. But I think this does give a little insight.

Although there are many things that keep us from contributing (including one person who "thinks people like Ed Finkler are scary"), the top three replies, by far, were these:

1. Not enough time.
2. Not sure where or how to contribute
3. I'm not confident enough in my own skills.

Numbers 1 and 2 were no surprise to me. Funny thing about Number 3, though; I added that as an afterthought. It was one reason I personally always shied away from contributing, but I figured surely others were more confident in themselves. I found these results quite interesting, and I'm a bit relieved that I'm not the only self-conscious one out there.

So what?

How can we overcome these obstacles to encourage more participation in our projects?

Let's look first at Number 1: TIME.

It would be great to have more time. We all need more time. Nobody has enough time. Yeah, yeah. We get it. I don't foresee that changing anytime soon, so how can we work with this? Here are some ideas for project leaders/devs:

Break up big jobs into little jobs. If you need help with documentation, break it into smaller, more manageable chunks. Chances are, you'll have better luck getting someone to write a one-page doc as opposed to a 20-page doc.
Quantify time commitments. I tried being a member of our elementary school's PTA, but for some reason I didn't quite fit in with the other moms (long story; I'll tell you over a beer sometime.). While I still think those people are crazy, one thing I'll give them credit for is that they know how to recruit volunteers. They tell you up front how much time a task will take. Only then can volunteers make an informed decision about whether they can step up. Much like putting a monetary price on something, you are telling people how much it will "cost" them.
Keep time commitments minimal.. Something else the PTA does right, is that they've mastered the art of breaking things into 15 or 30 minute increments. They tell you up front "this task will take you 15 minutes" or "we need someone to take carnival tickets for 15 minutes." And really, who doesn't have 15 minutes in the day to work on something they care about? (Ok, there may be one guy out there; his comment on the poll was that "his wife would kick his ass for doing something that took away from family time without financial recompense." He might not really have 15 minutes to spare, poor guy). Even bigger tasks can be broken up per day; 15 minutes a day works out to almost 2 hours a week. Not too shabby.

What about Number 2? UNCLEAR EXPECTATIONS.

People aren't mind readers; they li

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Parsing XML documents with CSS selectors

Posted: March 31st, 2010, 9:50am MDT by Fabien Potencier

html and XML documents are the bread and butter of web developers. On a day to day basis, you probably create a lot of html documents. And odds are you also need to parse some from time to time: because you consume a web service and want to extract some information, or because you want to gather data from scraped web pages, or just because you want to write functional tests for a website. Retrieving the document is quite easy, but how do you navigate through it to extract the information you need?

PHP already comes with a lot of useful tools for parsing XML documents: SimpleXML, DOM, and XMLReader, just to name a few. But as soon as you need to extract information deeply embedded in the document structure, things are not as easy as they should be. Of course, XPath is your best friend when you need to select elements, but the learning curve is really steep. Even expressions that should be easy can be complex. As an example, here is the XPath expression to retrieve all h1 tags that have a foo class:

h1[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' foo ')]

The XPath expression is complex because a tag can have several classes:

<h1 class="foo">Foo</h1>
<h1 class="foo bar">Foo</h1>
<h1 class="foobar bar">Foo</h1>

The expression should match the first two h1 tags, but not the third one.

Of course, everybody knows that doing the same with a CSS selector is a piece of cake:

h1.foo

For Symfony 2 functional tests, I wanted a way to leverage the power and expressiveness of CSS selectors with the tools we already have in PHP. The first idea that came to my mind was to convert a CSS selector to its XPath equivalent. But is it possible? The answer is a surrounding 'YES'.

As John Resig wrote in a blog post some time ago about the same topic: "The biggest thing to realize is that CSS Selectors are, typically, very short - but woefully underpowered, when compared to XPath."

Writing a tokenizer, a parser, and a compiler able to convert CSS selectors to XPath is no trivial task. So, instead of reinventing the wheel, I looked for some existing libraries. I didn't look too much before stumbling upon lxml, a Python library. The lxml.cssselect module of lxml does exactly this. So, I took the time to translate the Python code to PHP, added some unit tests, and voilà, the Symfony 2 CSS Selector component was born.

symfony 1 has a sfDomCssSelector class, but it does not convert the CSS selector to XPath. It does the job nicely but it is limited to very simple CSS selectors and it cannot easily be used with standard XML tools.

The Symfony 2 CSS Selector component does only one thing, and it tries to do it well: converting CSS selectors to XPath expressions. Using it is dead simple:

use Symfony\Components\CssSelector\Parser;
 
$xpath = Parser::cssToXpath('h1.foo');

The $xpath variable should now contain h1[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' foo ')].

Let's take an example to see how you can use it. Let's say you want to retrieve all post titles and URLs for this blog (the information is available at http://fabien.potencier.org/articles).

use Symfony\Components\CssSelector\Parser;
 
$document = new \DOMDocument();
$document->loadhtmlFile('http://fabien.potencier.org/articles');
 
$xpath = new \DOMXPath($document);
foreach ($xpath->query"/>

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Making Zend_Navigation Useful

Posted: March 31st, 2010, 5:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

In the last blog post, we discussed creating Zend_Navigation pages and containers. This is certainly wonderful and exciting, but the reality is that for the most part, Zend_Navigation is a pretty useless component of Zend Framework until you have a way to get the data out of the structure you’ve built. And since navigation is [...]

Zend Framework starter kit interest?

Posted: March 30th, 2010, 4:42pm MDT by Michael Kimsal

I’m putting together a basic Zend Framework starter kit. Right now I’ve got basic Doctrine 1.2 integration with predefined directories for schema, models, etc. Also an init process to allow for automatic injection of specified objects on to front controllers (think $this->session available in your controllers, for example).

Any interest in getting a copy of this? What other things would you like to see preconfigured or preintegrated in a starter kit?

PHP on IIS: MonitorChangesTo setting in FastCGI

Posted: March 30th, 2010, 3:36pm MDT by Ruslan Yakushev

PHP on Windows loads its configuration file php.ini during the startup of the process php-cgi.exe. When PHP is run on IIS via FastCGI the php-cgi.exe processes are re-used to handle many requests. If configuration settings in php.ini file get updated, those changes will not be picked up by php-cgi.exe processes until the processes are recycled or restarted by IIS FastCGI module. This means that any time you change the PHP configuration you have to manually recycle IIS Application Pools that use PHP. This post explains how to configure FastCGI in IIS so that PHP configuration changes take effect right away without the need to manually recycle or restart the IIS Application Pools.

The latest releases of the FastCGI Extensoin 1.5 and FastCGI update for IIS 7.0 have a new configuration setting monitorChangesTo that takes an absolute path to a file that FastCGI will monitor for changes. In case of PHP this means that you can set monitorChangesTo to a path to php.ini file, so that any time it is modified the FastCGI module will restart the php-cgi.exe to pick up the configuration changes.

Assuming that the PHP configuration file location is C:\PHP\php.ini, the instructions below describe how to use monitorChangesTo on different IIS versions:

IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0
IIS 7.0
IIS 7.5

IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0

The FasCGI configuration is stored in a file %windir%\system32\inetsrv\fcgiext.ini. You can manually update it to use monitorChangesTo:

[Types]
php=PHP

[PHP]
ExePath=C:\PHP\php-cgi.exe
MonitorChangesTo=C:\PHP\php.ini

Alternatively you can use the configuration helper script %windir%\system32\inetsrv\fcgiconfig.js :

cscript %windir%\system32\inetsrv\fcgiconfig.js -set -section:PHP -MonitorChangesTo:C:\PHP\php.ini

IIS 7.0

You will need to install the FastCGI Update in order to be able to use monitorChangesTo in IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

To configure this setting, use the command below:

%windir%appcmd.exe set config -section:system.webServer/fastCgi ^
/[fullPath='C:\PHP\php-cgi.exe',arguments=''].monitorChangesTo:"C:\PHP\php.ini" ^
/commit:apphost

IIS 7.5

In Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 you can use the same appcmd command as described above or you can use IIS Manager user interface for FastCGI settings:

Technical Notes

Below are the technical details that you need to be aware of when using this new feature in FastCGI module:

The file that monitorChangesTo is pointing to must exist on a file system. If it does not exist then FastCGI module will generate an error;
If the file is located on a network share then FastCGI module cannot use Windows file change notifications so it will switch to polling and will check the file for changes every 5 seconds;
If a relative file path is specified instead of an absolute path then FastCGI will assume that it is relative to the location of php-cgi.exe file.

Obligatory NoSQL post

Posted: March 30th, 2010, 9:41am MDT by Lukas Smith

So everyone is blogging about NoSQL like there was just a divine intervention that handed us this epiphany just 2 weeks ago. Well I guess the term has still sort of fresh so everybody is busy making sure Google, Bing and friends get at least one hit on their blog when people search for NoSQL. Now is my turn.

A lot of the following is stating the obvious (though a lot of NoSQL posts from either side of the fence - why is there even a fence on this topic? - are not mentioning them .. so maybe not so obvious:

use the right tool for the job (yes I still have use cases for MyISAM)
NoSQL is a sucky name, because while some people also hate SQL, the key change is in dropping the relational model and/or ACID
So yes you can take away the SQL interface from a MySQL storage engine and its still not what people think of when they say NoSQL
You could stick an SQL interface in front of a NoSQL store
surprise MySQL has been loose when it comes to ACID since forever, which was one of the key reasons it was able to out perform many of the big guys for very specific use cases
most of us by now have a clear idea of RDBMS, what they do well and what they don't and how to work around that, we do not have the same level of expertise and tool chain for NoSQL
NoSQL is not just about scaling like Google, it can just as well be about convenience (enjoy EAV much?)
Yes NoSQL can also help scaling issues for some use cases (especially those PK lookups)
Some NoSQL is fast for writes, some is fast for reads, even for NoSQL its hard to be fast at both (but easier than for an ACID RDBMS because NoSQL is allowed to take short cuts)
NoSQL stores can be very different nature, so we will soon have to start coining even more terms (well there is key value store, column store, document store)
Using NoSQL for problems an RDBMS solves well today is going to be harder work

Hmm ... I guess I could go on, but I gotta run to frisbee practice :)

Speaking at TekX

Posted: March 30th, 2010, 7:50am MDT by Ligaya Turmelle

I have been lucky enough (or found the right bribe) to be selected to speak at this years TekX conference up in Chicago. I have to admit, they have a fantastic lineup again this year and can’t wait to get there to see old friends and make new ones. Every year I go it just gets better.

The conference this year will be held from May 18-21 at the Sheraton Gateway Suites O’Hare (same as the past couple of years). If you have already been to the conference, you already know about playing Tek frogger – and if you don’t or this is your first conference – be sure to find me at the conference so we can discuss it as we sit and have a drink at “Shirtless Slim’s”.

For those that are interested I will be giving 2 talks on MySQL this year. One will be an introduction to MySQL replication and the other will go over the new features found in MySQL 5.5. Both are new talks for me, so I am rather excited about speaking on the subjects and would love feedback.

I hope to see you there!

Speaking at Pfcongres 2010

Posted: March 30th, 2010, 12:34am MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

As has become tradition, the dutch web developers usergroup Pfz is again organizing their Pfcongres. I've been a visitor for the past years with a speaking engagement two years ago. With Pfcongres having a much bigger setup and more international focus I am very proud to announce I am again speaking this year. I will be doing my "Would you like docs with that?" talk.

Entering the WinPHP Challenge

Posted: March 29th, 2010, 11:22am MDT by Stefan Koopmanschap

Today I filled in the registration form for the European WinPHP Challenge (there is also a Canadian version of that here). My application, of which I will post more details in a later blogpost, will be written specifically for the Windows Azure platform. It will be an interesting experience for sure.

Zend Framework: Slow automatic view rendering

Posted: March 29th, 2010, 10:27am MDT by till

So I posted something on Twitter today, which wasn't exactly news to me. I was more or less pointing out the obvious.

From a couple follow-up tweets, I guess, I need to explain more.

The idea

My thesis is that there's a gain in page rendering time when I disable automatic view rendering and use explicit render calls ($this->render('foo');) inside my controllers. And to cut to the chase, there is. On our app, I measured a 12% improvement using Xdebug's profiler — simple before-after-style.

General setup

I've blogged about Zend Framework performance before (1, 2, 3). Our setup is not the average Zend Framework quickstart application. We utilize a custom (much faster) loader (my public open source work in progress), no Zend_Application and explicit (vs. implicit) view rendering. The framework code is at 1.10.2. On the server-side, the application servers are nginx+php(-cgi).

I don't feel like repeating myself and while a lot of issues were already addressed in new releases of the framework, or are going to be addressed in 2.0, the above links still hold a lot of truth or at least inside and pointers if you're interested in general PHP performance (in German).

Code

IMHO, it doesn't really matter how the rest of your application looks like. Of course all applications are different and that's why I didn't say, "OMG my page rendered in 100 ms", but instead I said something like, "we got a 10+% boost". The bottom line is that everyone wants to serve fast pages and get the most out of their hardware but since applications tend to carry different features there really is no holy grail or number to adhere to.

Proposal

I urge everyone to double-check my claim. After all, it's pretty simple:

Setup Xdebug
Profile the page
Restart PHP app server/processes (in case you use APC and/or php-cgi)
Disable automatic view rendering: $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
Add render() call: $this->render('foo');
Profile again

... simple as that.

Conclusion

All in all this thing doesn't require too much to follow.

Automatics — such as an automatic view renderer — add convenience which results in rapid development and hopefully shorter time to market. But they do so almost always (give it nine Erlang nines ;-)) at the expense of performance.

Update, 2010-03-20 21:37: As Rob pointed out, there's even more to gain by bypassing the helper entirely. Use the code snippet below, or consider something like the following:

Padraic also blogged extensively on Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer, I recommend reading Having a bad ViewRenderer day in your ZF app?.

Storing Date/Times in Databases

Posted: March 29th, 2010, 9:47am MDT by Derick Rethans

Storing Date/Times in Databases London, UK Monday, March 29th 2010, 16:47 BST

After my talk during ConFoo on Advanced Date/Time Handling I received a question about whether the UTC-offset, together with the date/time in years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds, was enough for storing a date/time in a database and still being able to do calculations with this. The answer to this question was no, but it lead to an even more interesting discussion about what would be enough to store an accurate date/time in a database.

Firstly let me explain why storing a UTC offset is not adequate at all for doing any sort of calculations. Right now (March 25th, 2010), Montreal is on the same time as Santiago (in Chile) with both a UTC offset of -4 hours. This means that for the same date/time (2010-03-25 19:03) the same timestamp is generated (1269558180). However if we want to add eight months (2010-11-25 19:03) to the current time for each of those locations then the timestamps should be different — 1290729780 for Montreal and 1290722580 for Santiago. It turns out that neither of them is exactly a full 24 hour difference from 2010-03-25 19:03 as is shown the following script:

<?php $s = '2010-03-25 19:03';
$montrealNow = date_create( "{$s} America/Montreal" )-?>format( 'U' );
$santiagoNow = date_create( "{$s} America/Santiago" )->format( 'U' );
$s = '2010-11-25 19:03';
$montrealThen = date_create( "{$s} America/Montreal" )->format( 'U' );
$santiagoThen = date_create( "{$s} America/Santiago" )->format( 'U' );

$hour = 60 * 60;
$day = 24 * $hour;

echo "Montreal:\n",
    $montrealNow, " - ",
    $montrealThen, "\n",
    ( ( $montrealThen - $montrealNow ) % $day ) / $hour, "\n\n";

echo "Santiago:\n",
    $santiagoNow, " - ",
    $santiagoThen, "\n",
    ( ( $santiagoThen - $santiagoNow ) % $day ) / $hour, "\n\n";

?>

which gives the output:

Montreal:
1269558180 - 1290729780
1

Santiago:
1269558180 - 1290722580
23

From this we see that Montreal has an extra hour and Santiago has an hour less. This is because Montreal changed from Daylight Savings Time to normal time and Santiago, being on the southern hemisphere, moved from normal time to Daylight Savings time.

Now if we had only the timestamp (1269558180) and the UTC-offset, the only thing we could do would be to advance a specific number of days. In this case, there are 245 days, which makes (245 * 24 * 60 * 60 = ) 21168000 seconds. If we add this to the original timestamp, we end up at 1290726180 which corresponds to 2010-11-25 18:03 Montreal time, or 2010-11-25 20:03 Santiago time. Neither of them being the correct 2010-11-25 19:03. Because from the UTC offset of 4 hours we don't know whether we're in Montreal or Santiago, we can conclude that with just this UTC offset and the original timestamp we can't calculate the timestamp of something that's 8 months in the future. Storing the UTC-offset can not change this fact either.

In order to to proper calculations, you need to keep information about the timezone itself. In PHP timezones are identified with identifiers such as America/Montreal. If we store those alongside the timestamps, we can do the proper calculations. The following example demonstrates that:

<?php $timestamp = 1269558180;
$tzid      = 'America/Montreal';

$d = new DateTime( "@$timestamp" );
$d-?>setTimeZone( new DateTimeZone( $tzid ) );
$d->modify( '+8 months' );

echo $d->format( 'Y-m-d H:i' ), "\n";
?>

which gives the output: 2010-11-25 19:03.

This seems to work, but unfortunately, even the approach of storing the timestamp and timezone identifier is not going to work correctly under certain circumstances. In order to find out why, we have to go back to January this year.

Imagine that in January this year—January 15th to be precise—we run the following script to determine the timestamp of a date/time two months in the future:

<?php $tz = 'America/Santiago';
$ts = date_create( "2010-01-15 10:41 $tz" )-?>format( 'U' );

$d = new DateTime( "@$ts" );
$d->setTimeZone( new DateTimeZone( $tz ) );
$d->modify( '+2 months' );

echo $d->format( 'U Y-m-d H:i' ), "\n";
?>

This returns the timestamp 1268664060 for the date/time 2010-03

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basename() is locale-aware

Posted: March 29th, 2010, 8:23am MDT by Evert Pot

For years I've always just assumed:


$baseName = basename('dir/file');

Was just an easy way to do:


$file = 'dir/file';

$baseName = substr($file,strrpos($file,'/')+1);

It turns out basename does a bit more than just splicing the string at the last slash, because it's locale aware. In my case I was dealing with a multi-byte UTF-8 string. It took me quite some time figuring out what was going on, because I was testing from the console which had the en_US.UTF-8 locale, and the bug was appearing on Apache, which defaults to the C locale.

Example:


<?php



$str = urldecode('%C3%A0fo%C3%B3');



setlocale(LC_ALL,'C');

echo urlencode(basename($str)) . "\n";



setlocale(LC_ALL,'en_US.UTF-8');

echo urlencode(basename($str)) . "\n";



?>

Output:


fo%C3%B3

%C3%A0fo%C3%B3

What bugs me about this, is that there was no way for me to know basename() operates on anything else than bytes. The PHP manual also doesn't point this out. It makes me wonder how many other string functions change behaviour based on their locale.

Content repositories: SQL or NoSQL?

Posted: March 29th, 2010, 5:08am MDT by Henri Bergius

The NoSQL movement seems to be pretty active, advocating a move away from traditional relational databases:

...developers have become crippled by being able to only think of data in terms of Rows and Columns. There's a multitude of database paradigms: Graphs, Trees, Objects, and so on. Furthermore, databases limit developers to SQL, which is great for certain kinds of set mathematics and not much else. In order to overcome fundamental limitations of DBs, things like Conditionals, Iteration, String Manipulation, and more have been hacked into what was at first an elegant set mathematics language.

Algorithms (such as MapReduce) which make data analysis scalable are highly unintuitive in SQL. The limitations in the environment lead to a limitation in engineers' ability to solve "big data" problems.

This may be true if you're building the next Twitter or Facebook. But how many of us really do?
In the quite ranty article I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die Ted Dziuba has a point:

by replacing MySQL or Postgres with a different, new data store, you have traded a well-enumerated list of limitations and warts for a newer, poorly understood list of limitations and warts, and that is a huge business risk.

This is exactly the reason we decided to build Midgard2 on top of a relational database. While it does constrain us in some cases, we can still provide a quite reasonably full-featured content repository this way.

And being built on SQL means we know the system scales down to mobile devices and all the way up to major business systems like Lufthansa's global marketing budget tracking. That is something very few NoSQL systems will be able to boast.

An Intro To Zend_Navigation

Posted: March 29th, 2010, 5:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

This past week I had the need to integrate Zend_Acl with a navigation and menu system. Unfortunately, the documentation took a couple reads for me to understand how Zend_Navigation worked; given this, I wanted to write a primer that others could use to get started with Zend_Navigation. This is a short guide to how Zend_Navigation [...]

Speaking at PHPWM: April 6th

Posted: March 29th, 2010, 1:13am MDT by Lorna Mitchell

Next week I will be making the trip to my original home town of Birmingham to speak at the PHP West Midlands User Group, on 6th April. They are an active user group and although I haven't managed to organise myself to attend their meetings before, I do keep meeting their members at other technical events so I know they are a good crowd and I'm looking forward to this! My talk will be "SVN in a Distributed World" - looking at the features of SVN, of the distributed source control solutions, and thinking about whether SVN is now an outdated technology or whether it is still a good choice for source control.

Hope to see you there!

Mind the encodings!

Posted: March 27th, 2010, 7:31pm MDT by Johannes Schlüter

Dealing with character sets and encodings is tough. As long as you're dealing only with English texts you in a luxury situation and can mix utf-8 and iso-8859-1 encoded texts and most (all?) of your tests will work. Some of your users, like me, with strange names ("Schlüter") will be annoyed as your application breaks them ("SchlÃ¼ter"), but these will be edge cases. There are bigger issues with mixing encodings but that's not what I wanted to tell now.

Handling these encodings in PHP correctly is tough. PHP, currently, has a quite simple approach to the problem in general: PHP doesn't care about encodings. A string is simply a sequence of bytes. Well in general. The details are difficult. Core features like JSON-handling or XML processing expect that your PHP strings are encoded using utf-8, which is a sane choice, for JSON it is part of the JSON specification, for XML it's the only way to be able to work with all documents without additional information from you along every XML operation.

On the other side we have browsers. A browser has to read documents from all over the world which can be encoded in any encoding you like. For whatever reason browser developers decided that iso-8859-1 would make a great default encoding, which means that if a response to a browser's request doesn't specify anything else the browser assumes the document is encoded using iso-8859-1. The document's encoding will also be used when sending form data back to the server. To handle this, PHP has a php.ini setting default_charset which, if set, will set the selected encoding in the HTTP header. The default value of this is setting is empty - so browsers fall back on their default, iso-8859-1.

Recently Rasmus made a commit to PHP trunk which changes the default to utf-8.

In the long-run this changes is good as it works for all languages, iso-8859-1 only works for a limited set of European languages, and works better with the outside environment, where utf-8 adoption is growing (JSON and XML were examples).

In the short-term this might cause trouble for applications depending on the default.The good thing is that the development in trunk has just started and the release of PHP.next is still sometime away and you can easily prepare your application - which is a good thing anyways to protect from administrators making mistakes with current versions already.

To set the encoding from within your application you can for example call ini_set('default_charset', $enc); or header("Content-type: text/html; charset=$enc"); at the beginning of your script, where $enc is your preferred encoding. Please mind that this has no effect on the script itself, which, for instance, means you have to configure your database connection accordingly, too!

Models in Zend Framework

Posted: March 26th, 2010, 6:00pm MDT by Matthew Turland

A question that frequently comes up in my interactions with other developers about Zend Framework is how to approach designing models. There’s a small collection of resources and advice that I generally give on the subject, so I thought I’d write up a blog post to give people an easy place to access it all.

More than one way to skin a cat

First, there is no one “correct” way to design a model. If there were, the framework would probably have an actual model component. It doesn’t, and as Bill Karwin — former Project Manager for Zend Framework — has said, the reason for this because designing the model is your job. There are pros and cons to any approach. It’s all about finding a method that works for you, is appropriate for the situation at hand, and mitigates difficulty in long-term application maintenance.

The Model section of the Quick Start Guide and this blog post by Michelangelo van Dam includes examples of a Data Mapper approach. Zend_Db uses a Table Data Gateway and Row Data Gateway approach. Doctrine, a popular ORM library that is gaining traction in the ZF community, uses an Active Record approach. And available approaches don’t stop there. As a general rule of thumb when designing models and components in general, I recommend favoring composition over inheritance. You’ll get a better sense of what I mean by that later in the post.

Defining the model

The Wikipedia article on the MVC architectural pattern isn’t all-encompassing, but isn’t a bad place to start either. In particular, it drives home a few important points about the model that you should bear in mind.

The model is a “domain-specific representation of the data upon which the application operates.”

In a nutshell, the model handles data: storing it, retrieving it, filtering and validating it, and providing access to it.

The model contains “domain logic” that “adds meaning to raw data.”

In other words, it handles the conversion from raw data in a data source to semantically meaningful PHP objects and back again.

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The Registry Pattern Reexamined

Posted: March 26th, 2010, 5:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

Last July, I wrote about the registry pattern and some of its advantages. These advantages include the ability to access objects across different areas of your application, and the storage of objects for later retrieval. Much of the debate in the comments focused on whether or not the registry pattern was suitable for today’s object-oriented development, [...]

How to Handle Unloaded PHP Extensions at Runtime

Posted: March 25th, 2010, 9:03am MDT by SitePoint Â» PHP

configure PHP Unless you’re creating very simple applications, you will soon require one or more PHP extensions. Extensions are code libraries which extend the core functionality of the language.

Loading an Extension

For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you need to create or manipulate images and require PHP’s GD library. To load the GD library on your system:

For Windows, you need to include/uncomment the line extension=php_gd2.dll in your php.ini configuration file.
For Linux/Unix, you should use the PHP configure option --with-gd.
For Mac OS X … er, you best Google it. Apologies for not providing specific details, but there appear to be multiple ways of configuring GD support. It depends on your version of OS X and whether you’re using the built-in web server or a custom installation of Apache.

But what happens when you want to move your web application to another host or platform where a different set of extensions are configured?

Checking an Extension is Loaded

PHP provides an extension_loaded(name) function which returns true when the named library is available, e.g.


<?php
if (extension_loaded('gd')) {
	echo 'GD extension is loaded and everything is fine!';
}
else {
	echo 'Where is the GD library?';
	exit();
}
?>

Alternatively, you can check for the existence of specific library function using function_exists(), e.g.


<?php
if (function_exists('gd_info')) {
	echo 'gd_info() is available so the GD library is probably available.';
}
else {
	echo 'gd_info() cannot be found?';
	exit();
}
?>

However, function_exists() is more risky — another developer could write their own function named ‘gd_info’.

I’d recommend using function_exists() in situations when a function has been introduced in a later version of PHP. For example, if your application runs in both PHP4 and PHP5, you could check for the existance of imagefilter() (a PHP5-only GD function) before attempting to modify an image.

Handling Unloaded Extensions

PHP provides a dl() function for dynamically loading extensions at runtime. Unfortunately:

it may be disabled on your system
extensions must be loaded by referencing the filename; these are different across platforms
it’s a little flaky…
so it’s has been deprecated in PHP 5.3
and will be removed from PHP6.

I’d recommend avoiding dl(). That leaves us with three options:

Ensure the extension is enabled on all your target platforms before coding begins!
Alert the administrator when an essential extension is not available during installation. For example, your application should stop gracefully and provide further instructions if it won’t run without the PDO database interface.
Provide a downgraded experience. For example, your application could disable image manipulation if the GD library is not available. You could alert the administrator during installation but still let the application run.

Do you have any other tips for handling missing PHP extensions?

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Horizontal Reuse aka Triats Reloaded

Posted: March 25th, 2010, 6:45am MDT by Lukas Smith

We have had a few RFC's pass through internals ever since the creation of the wiki, but embarrassingly enough the very first one is still up in the air: Traits. Actually Stefan has since tweaked the proposal and in the latest version it includes an alternative approach called Grafts along with the original Traits idea, which is essentially language level delegation pattern support. I am absolutely sure that we will either see Traits or Grafts in the next non patch release of PHP (aka 5.4 or 6.0). So I rather want to see this patch make it into trunk sooner than later (btw since my last post the old 6.0 has been moved to a branch, Jani's 5.4 branch has been deleted and trunk has been recreated from 5.3 using the version 5.3.99-dev). However for that we need as many people as possible to review the RFC and better yet try out the patch. Right now Grafts look like the better approach to me. So either leave your comments on this blog, which I will then take into account when providing additional feedback on the mailinglist, send a mail to Stefan or participate in the discussion in the internals mailinglist.

Horizontal Reuse aka Traits Reloaded

Posted: March 25th, 2010, 6:45am MDT by Lukas Smith

Develop and test your apps on the IBM Cloud

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 6:18pm MDT by Daniel Krook

I moved to a new position within IBM at the beginning of the year, joining the Enterprise Initiatives organization responsible for delivering IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud. Before I joined this team, Development and Test launched as a free public beta in 2009. Throughout 2010 we’ve incrementally improved [...]

GPG-signing Git Commits

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 10:26am MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

We're working on migrating Zend Framework to Git. One issue we're trying to deal with is enforcing that commits come from CLA signees.

One possibility presented to us was the possibility of utilizing GPG signing of commit messages. Unfortunately, I was able to find little to no information on the 'net about how this might be done, so I started to experiment with some solutions.

The approach I chose utilizes git hooks, specifically the commit-msg hook client-side, and the pre-receive hook server-side.

Continue reading "GPG-signing Git Commits"

Twitter vs. Facebook

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 10:10am MDT by Lukas Smith

Ages ago I created a Twitter account to get some free app. I figured some nobody was following me I didn't have to feel like a guilty spammer. For some odd obsession to honesty probably I did use my proper name and sooner or later people started following me despite me having only put out a single spam message. So on very few occasions I tried out tweeting (still feels weird using that word) since then, obviously I have never used it to get a free app again by spamming. Anyways I have now decided that for small blurps about technical stuff I will from now on use Twitter, thereby sparing my Facebook friends from such gibberish. In turn my developer friends on Facebook that do not care about what I have to say about Frisbee, DJing or politics can start removing me from Facebook. Actually I might just do this myself, because its FUCKING ANNOYING that so many people multi spam their status messages to Twitter and Facebook.

Anyways the choice for how to split things up was obvious seeing that the bulk of my friends on Facebook are not developers and the bulk of my friends/followers on Twitter are developers. I guess this is my way of fishing for some more Twitter followers so that I have a decent audience to communicate with, since right now I still have more developer connections on Facebook than on Twitter. You can expect to see some random PHP, MySQL, Solr etc. tidbits to start appearing on my Twitter account from now on like ZF wtf's or a reminder that we now have a replacement for @fopen hacks in our autoloaders.

By the way, the account name "dybvandal" originates from my QuakeWorld gaming days. My friends actually just got active again playing as Clan Dybbuk. My nick was Vandal inspired by a character in a pen and paper adventure, Shadowrun to be exact. Vandal was the name of a timid elf and I just thought it was a funny combination "timid" and "vandal". Heh, that website runs on some ancient code, that is probably quite embarrassing if I would read it. Definitely before I started using mod_rewrite to create nice URLs.

Thinking About Trac Replacements? Consider Mtrack.

Posted: March 24th, 2010, 5:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

Recently, I began working alongside Wez Furlong here at Message Systems. One of the many tools we use is Mtrack. This tool is a port of Trac into PHP, along with the addition of some great new features. Spearheaded by Wez, it’s a great tool that we use internally for our projects, and since it’s [...]

Logging with MySQL

Posted: March 23rd, 2010, 11:20pm MDT by Brian Moon

I was reading a post by Dathan Vance Pattishall titled "Cassandra is my NoSQL solution but..". In the post, Dathan explains that he uses Cassandra to store clicks because it can write a lot faster than MySQL. However, he runs into problems with the read speed when he needs to get a range of data back from Cassandra. This is the number one problem I have with NoSQL solutions.

SQL is really good at retrieving a set of data based on a key or range of keys. Whereas NoSQL products are really good at writing things and retrieving one item from storage. When looking at redoing our architecture a few years ago to be more scalable, I had to consider these two issues. For what it is worth, the NoSQL market was not nearly as mature as it is now. So, my choices were much more limited. In the end, we decided to stick with MySQL. It turns out that a primary or unique key lookup on a MySQL/InnoDB table is really fast. It is sort of like having a key/value storage system. And, I can still do range based queries against it.

But, back to Dathan's problem: clicks. We store clicks at dealnews. Lots of clicks. We also store views. We store more views than we do clicks. So, lots of views and lots of clicks. (Sorry for the vague numbers, company secrets and all. We are a top 1,000 Compete.com site during peak shopping season.) And we do it all in MySQL. And we do it all with one server. I should disclose we are deploying a second server, but it is more for high availability than processing power. Like Dathan, we only use about the last 24 hours of data at any given time. There are three keys for us doing logging like this in MySQL.

Use MyISAM

MyISAM supports concurrent inserts. Concurrent inserts means that inserts can add rows to the end of a table while selects are being performed on other parts of the data set. This is exactly the use case for our logging. There are caveats with range queries as pointed out by the MySQL Performance Blog.

Rotating tables

MySQL (and InnoDB in particular) really sucks at deleting rows. Like, really sucks. Deleting causes locks. Bleh. So, we never delete rows from our logging tables. Instead, nightly we rotate the tables. RENAME TABLE is an (near) atomic process in MySQL. So, we just create a new table.

create table clicks_new like clicks;
rename table clicks to clicks_2010032500001, clicks_new to clicks;

Tada! We now have an empty table for today's clicks. We now drop any table with a date stamp that is longer than x days old. Drops are fast, we like drops.

For querying these tables, we use UNION. It works really well. We just issue a SHOW TABLES LIKE 'clicks%' and union the query across all the tables. Works like a charm.

Gearman

So, I get a lot of flack at work for my outright lust for Gearman. It is my new duct tape. When you have a scalability problem, there is a good chance you can solve it with Gearman. So, how does this help with logging to MySQL? Well, sometimes, MySQL can become backed up with inserts. It happens to the best of us. So, instead of letting that pile up in our web requests, we let it pile up in Gearman. Instead of having our web scripts write to MySQL directly, we have them fire Gearman background jobs with the logging data in them. The Gearman workers can then write to the MySQL server when it is available. Under normal operating procedure, that is in near real time. But, if the MySQL server does get backed up, the jobs just queue up in Gearman and are processed when the MySQL server is available.

BONUS! Insert Delayed

This is our old trick before we used Gearman. MySQL (MyISAM) has a neat feature where you can have inserts delayed until the table is available. The query is sent to the MySQL server and it answers with success immediately to the client. This means your web script can continue on and not get blocked waiting for the insert. But, MySQL will only queue up so many before it starts erroring out. So, it is not as fool proof as a job processing system like Gearman.

Summary

To log with MySQL:

Use MyISAM with concurrent inserts
Rotate tables daily and use UNION to query
Use delayed inserts with MySQL or a job processing agent like Gearman

Happy logging!

PS: You may be asking, "Brian, what about Partitioned Tables?" I asked myself that before deploying this solution. More importantly, in IRC I asked Brian Aker about MySQL partitioned tables. I am paraphrasing, but he said that if I ever think I might alter that table, I would not trust it with the partitions in MySQL. So, that kind of turned me off of them.

PEAR channels on google code currently broken

Posted: March 23rd, 2010, 9:55am MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

PEAR channels hosted on google code (like the unofficial Smarty channel, unofficial Zend Framework channel and the unofficial Mediawiki channel) are currently broken.

The reason for it has been discovered in the corresponding bug report: HTTP requests containing a port number in the “Host” header field are rejected, returning a 404.

The issue is currently being investigated by Google. If you cannot wait, apply a hack-fix to your PEAR installation. Alternatively, use Pyrus, the next-gen PEAR installer.

Automated testing with GUI clients

Posted: March 23rd, 2010, 1:40am MDT by Tobias Schlitt

As all eZ Components, the eZ Webdav component is highly unit tested. But since WebDAV clients all interpret the standard a little (or more) different, we implemented custom regression tests for this component, based on the PHPUnit framework. Generating these regression tests with each and every supported client was still tedious handwork so far. This needed to be done whenever the servers responses changed due to bug fixes or feature implementations. In this article I present Sikuli, a screenshot based GUI testing framework, which I now used to automate this last part of the testing process.

The Adventures Of Merging Propel With Zend Framework

Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 5:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

Recently, I finished my first production-quality Zend Framework application. It was a new website that made use of an old backend that powers another application I wrote using a custom framework. I wanted to use Zend Framework to practice on it, and to learn things I hadn’t yet learned since I had yet to put [...]

Best methods to optimize JPEG images for websites

Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 12:53am MDT by Web Development Blog Â» PHP scripts

While Internet connections becoming faster and faster, it’s still important to keep your website as fast as possible. One of the “slow” parts of your website are the images. In this article we show several ways to down-size the JPEG images for your website.

If you design your website should use some compression for your photos, banners and many other web elements. You favorite image editor should have some function to down-size your images. For this article we compare 4 ways to compress our example photo (file-size 393KB):

Adobe Photoshop

If you use the “Save for web…” function it’s possible to create a web optimized version from your image that is small enough and has a quality which is good enough for the Internet. In our example we used the preset “High Quality” which is equal to 60% quality. The result is a smaller file with a file-size of 95KB.

Adobe Fireworks

Fireworks is my favorite web image editor because of the unique feature to have bitmap and vector elements in a single file. We did an export with 80% quality and the compressed version has a file-size of 85KB.

GIMP (free Image Editor)

Both Adobe products are not free and are only available for Wndows or Mac. If you need a free editor you should try Gimp, an Image editor which many functions like the other commercial products mentioned before. The editor has also a “Safe for web” function and we used and 86% quality for our export file which becomes a size of 87KB. If you use GIMP to down-size your photos from your digital camera you should check the option “Strip EXIF”, removing the photo’s meta data will make the file smaller for another ~10KB.

ImageMagick (command line tools)

The last option is a tool we used via the command line. Using the following command the file is down-sized using an 80% quality (file size after conversion is 89KB):

convert original_100.jpg -quality 80 imagemagick_80.jpg

Sure this method works different from the other methods but the good point is that you can use this code in your PHP scripts or just from the command line of your web server.

Original image and compressed copies

Check the images below and note that the quality for the compressed images (file 2-5) is very similar.

The results after compression is very similar and the file size is between 85KB (fireworks) and 95KB (Photoshop). If you’re looking to down-size another 5-10%, you should try Smush.it a free service from Yahoo. They offer a tool which is able to optimize your images for 5-10% smaller file size without to lower the grade of quality.

Optimize your JPEG images with ImageMagick and PHP

If you need to optimize the images for your existing website, the following code might be useful:

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 5102 bytes)

Reducing Oracle LOB Memory Use in PHP, or Paul's Lesson Applied to Oracle

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 6:38pm MDT by Christopher Jones

Paul Reinheimer's PHP memory pro tip shows how re-assigning a value to a variable doesn't release the original value until the new data is ready. With large data lengths, this unnecessarily increases the peak memory usage of the application. In...

PEAR in March 2010

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 2:31pm MDT by Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President

After a quiet holiday season, the PEAR community has started rumbling again.

Digg gave PEAR a plug, new versions of Mail, Services_Facebook, System_Daemon, and html_Template_IT were released, the number of bugs reported dropped to less than one per package for a brief time, and two promising new proposals in PEPr arrived.

What’s even more exciting, we’ve got a continuous integration environment currently set up; discussion (and bug fixing) is turning more and more towards the future of pear, and the quiet on the mailing lists has vanished in a recent flood of posts.

Even better, we’ve seen the conceptual basis of PEAR (channel server and installer) take off with Pirum and PEARFarm being launched; and several large projects like PHPUnit, Smarty, and even Zend Framework (!) being installable via pear channels.

If this level of activity is anything to judge by, the future of PEAR looks bright for 2010!

A Simple Resource Injector for ZF Action Controllers

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 2:20pm MDT by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Brandon Savage approached me with an interesting issue regarding ZF bootstrap resources, and accessing them in your action controllers. Basically, he'd like to see any resource initialized by the bootstrap immediately available as simply a public member of his action controller.

So, for instance, if you were using the "DB" resource in your application, your controller could access it via $this->db.

Continue reading "A Simple Resource Injector for ZF Action Controllers"

Ada Lovelace Day 2010 is March 24th!

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 1:42pm MDT by Maggie Nelson

From findingada.com: Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited.

A lot of developers get into technology because of strong role models (anything varying from “Einstein” to “the Doc from Back to the Future” to “astronauts”). While there are many prominent male models in the tech field, it is less so for women. I do believe that one of the ways to involve women more in the community is starting to do so at a younger age (before college, before high school) and part, not all, of the appeal is having strong role models to reference.

You can help by blogging about a woman in technology on March 24th, 2010. All the cool kids are doing it! Ada wrote the first computer program (to calculate Bernoulli numbers). Do it for Ada!

Memory usage in PHP

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 1:38pm MDT by Paul Reinheimer

A colleague called me over today for some help with a memory usage issue in his PHP script. The script was performing the basic (but critical) task of importing data, pulling it in from MySQL in large chunks, then exporting it elsewhere. He was receiving the wonderful "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of XXXX bytes exhausted (tried to allocate YY bytes)" error message.

The code was following a basic flow:
10 Get stuff from the database (large array of arrays)
20 Iterate over it, doing stuff
30 Goto 10

I fixed the memory usage exceeded problem with an unset(), at the end of a loop.

Take a look at this sample program: loopOverStuff(); function loopOverStuff() { $var = null; for($i = 0; $i

The important thing to realize is that PHP will end up needing around twice as much memory as getData() takes. The problem is the line $var = getData(). The first time it is called $var is incredibly small, it's clobbered and the return value of getData()is assigned to it. The second time through the loop $var still holds the value from the previous iteration, so while getData() is executing you're maintaining the original data (in $var), and a whole new set (being built in getData()).

Fixing this is incredibly easy: function loopOverStuff() { $var = null; for($i = 0; $i

This way we avoid the duplication in memory of those values on that line. To see this happen in more detail take a look at this sample script with ouptut: memory-usage-example.php.

This isn't critical, except when it is. Once loopOverStuff() completes, and the function ends. The memory is released back to the rest of PHP automatically. You'll only run into problems where Other Stuff + (2 * memory needed in loop) > Memory Limit. There are better architectures available to avoid the issue entirely (like not storing everything in the array, just to iterate over it later) but they're an issue for a different post.

For a very simple base case demonstration of the issue take a look at the simple example.

WS-* for PHP

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 6:49am MDT by Rob Richards

Support for dealing with encrypted SOAP messages was a feature that had been missing from my WS-* libraries pretty much due to my lack of time to implement it. When people ask for help interoperating with a SOAP server that requires encryption I typically just point them over to the WSF project. The problem has been that in many cases people are unable to install that framework, as they don't control the servers, or more recently I have gotten reports that they simply could not get it to work. Either it didn't support what they needed, wouldn't compile, or simple wouldn't work with even simple SOAP requests. I decided to finally set aside some time and implement the encryption/decryption portion of the library. Note that it was developed against some WCF services implementing message level security, so your mileage might vary against other platforms. Bug reports would be fastest way of getting any of those issues dealt with.

As part of the recent changes, I also finally got around to creating an official project for the libraries rather than just being ad-hoc files people pulled from my web site. The libraries are now officially part of the wse-php project hosted over at Google Code. It was a toss up between that and GitHub, but I really wanted to play around with Mercurial since I already use Git over at the Gnome project. Currently the libraries provide support for a portion of WS-Addressing and WS-Security that can be used with ext/soap in PHP. As time goes on I plan to add some support for simplified configuration of messaging as well as some other of the WS-* specs that might be useful when interoperating with other SOAP servers.

SabreDAV 1.0.9 released & CalDAV news

Posted: March 19th, 2010, 1:18am MDT by Evert Pot

The last SabreDAV announcement I made here was 1.0.4, which happened in January. Just today I've released 1.0.9, so I figured it's time for a small update.

A public demo site

I've bought the sabredav.org domain, and placed a live demo on it for people to try out. Give it a shot:

url demo.sabredav.org.
username: testuser
password: test

Please note that OS/X Finder will not be able to upload files here, because it uses the Chunked Transfer Encoding, which is not supported by sourceforge's webserver Nginx. Read more here.

Bugfixes

There's been a number of small(ish) bugfixes.

Fixed fatal error when a malformed url was called.
Issue 19: Better responses to HEAD requests on collections, improving compatibility with MS Office.
Issue 23: Fixed Allow header, improving compatibility with Evolution.
Issue 21: Typo.
Issue 27: Incorrect encoding of entities in properties.
Issue 29: Missing constant causing fatal error on lock requests with infinite timeouts.

So there it is. You can download the latest version on the googlecode project page.

CalDAV

CalDAV support is going well. Currently iCal, Evolution and Lightning/Sunbird are supported. If you want to test it out, be sure to download the alpha version (1.1.x), and read the related documentation.

IRC

I've also setup an irc channel on freenode.net. If you feel like idling somewhere new, head over to #sabredav.

SimpleDNSd: new features & bugfix

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 6:24pm MDT by Mark Karpeles

Anyone using SimpleDNSd is strongly encouraged to update to latest SVN (you will have to erase the php-5.3.1 directory and recompile php to get it patched correctly). The current SVN version will most likely go release candidate and be released later.

Current SVN release includes many fixes and improvements, including for SimpleDNSd, the DNS daemon written in PHP.

This includes:

Support for delegation-only zones: it is now possible to handle TLDs via SimpleDNSd. I did a test by adding “free” domain names to the KalyHost service. Those domains can be ordered for free, and a webinterface is made available to control the domain DNS, allowing you to test SimpleDNSd and see how easily changes are done in realtime.
Support for PHP new requested feature (PHP bugreport #51295): queries to the DNS daemon were failing or returning wrong data randomly because of this bug. It took me a while to point this out as it was rather random. Basically current PHP implementation of SQLite3 has no “busy timeout”, meaning requests will fail immediatly if database is busy.
I had to add a busyTimeout() method in SQLite3 (similar to the one already existing for the old sqlite PHP extension) and use it. This means we’ll have to wait for this patch to be added to a current PHP release before pinetd2 can be released as stable.
PZC: “Progressive Zone Change”. This is one feature no other DNS daemon has (or maybe they do, I don’t know). This feature allows to schedule change of a domain to a new zone. When the scheduled time comes closer, the DNSd will send expiration time smaller and smaller to make records expire on the time the zone will change.

A bit more about PZC:
Let’s say we have domain “example.com” pointing to zone A. Calling API method domainPzc(‘example.com’, ‘B’, time()+86400); will make domain example.com pointing to zone B in 24 hours. In the meantime, no returned record will expire after the scheduled time for zone change: any record obtained 15 seconds before zonechange will be marked to expire in 15 seconds.
This features allow a really precise control of “DNS Propagation”: you decide exactly when zone change will happen. Note that if you have a record in your zone expiring in 3 days, you shouldn’t schedule zone changes less than 3 days before effective date, or it might not have the expected behaviour.

As far as I know, no other DNS server support such a feature allowing to switch to a different zone with full control of when it will “propagate”.

(I know some resolvers out there will not follow expiration times given by the authoritative DNS server, however I like to think those are only a minority, and that PZC will give the expected behaviour for almost everyone)

Python. Good, bad, evil -2-: Native sets

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 10:51am MDT by Tobias Schlitt

One thing I really liked in Python is the data structure set, which is built into the language core. A set in Python is defined as known from mathematics and beside mathematical use cases, it is helpful in everyday programming live. In this episode of my series on Python, I give you a short insight into how sets work in there, how you can achieve similar results in PHP and why I like the Python approach.

The 15 Minute Rule Of Software Development

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 5:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

I talk a lot about how having a spec is a critical component of software development. But how do you know that your spec is good, and that it has been developed enough? Simply put, how do you distinguish between a good spec and a spec that is lacking? This problem had confounded me for a [...]

Zend Studio formatter for Zend Framework and ATK

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 2:39am MDT by TechPortal

Zend Studio is a great IDE and we use it a lot at Ibuildings (in addition to NetBeans, PDT and Vim). One of the nice features is the code formatter that helps develop code according to agreed standards, which is useful to keep projects consistent.

One problem we have with the current versions of Zend Studio is that its default Zend Framework formatter is not consistent with the official Zend Framework coding standard. Luckily, that can be easily fixed. Sandy Pleyte, one of our developers, created a formatting file for Zend Studio that does adhere to the formal standard. There might be a few issues here and there but we’ve found it to work much better than the default one in Zend Studio. Because it might be helpful to others, we’re sharing the formatter file with anyone that’s interested. Download the file and read on for instructions.

Zend Framework formatter for Zend Studio

Instructions

Download the above file to your desktop. Open the Zend Studio formatter preferences, which will give you the following screen:

Click the ‘import’ button and import the file that you’ve downloaded. Voila, your formatter now uses the Zend Framework official coding standards. If you find any issues with this formatter, please let us know in the comments below.

ATK formatter

If you use the ATK business framework, you might also be interested in the following formatter, which is similar to the ZF formatter but adds support for some of ATK’s coding conventions:

ATK formatter for Zend Studio

Have fun!

Pake 1.4.0 is released

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 2:16am MDT by Alexey Zakhlestins blog » php

I just released new version of Pake.

Pake is a command line utility for executing predefined tasks, inspired by make. It is written in PHP and the tasks are also described in PHP. Pake can be used for compiling projects from different pieces, generating code, preprocessing templates and deploying projects.

If you know Phing, then Pake is a similar thing, but doesn’t use XML, is easier to use and faster.

Here’s the brief Changelog:

added “interactive mode” (pake -i)
new helper: pakeMercurial (in addition to pakeSubversion and pakeGit we already had)
updated sfYaml library
use copy+unlink instead of rename in pake_rename() to workaround problem of moving files between volumes
“pake compact” (developers-only) command works again
added explicit pakePearTask::package_pear_package($file, $target) method
fixed output-formatting (long texts in exceptions, etc.)
various packaging fixes

All Pake 1.x versions are compatible with php-5.2. Earlier versions might work, but those are not tested.

If you need automation tool for your project, then Pake might be exactly what you need.

Useful links:

Pake’s homepage (including documentation)
Installation instructions

and Firefox Contacts Add-on

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 12:25am MDT by Evert Pot

Yesterday Mozilla Labs published the Contacts add-on, which I think is pretty neat. The add-on integrates your existing (Twitter, Gmail and AddressBook.app) contacts into your browser. It's pre-alpha stability, but it seems to work for me.

After installing it, it allows you to use contacts in two new ways:

Any <input type="email" /> field will now auto-complete with the contacts in your list.
A javascript api is added, allowing you (the developer) to pull in contacts from the user. The api is in the W3C standards track.

I love seeing these types of bite-size non-obtrusive features getting implemented in the browser.

The <input type="email" /> form element is specified in the html5 specification, but it mostly discusses validation & sanitation. It has been supported by Opera for a while, and Safari now does too. Any old browser will also gladly accept type="email", because the behaviour for unknown types has always been to revert to type="text".

So the next time you're asking your users for an email address, consider using type="email", which automatically makes you future compatible when all the browsers get around implementing it.

Learning Zend Framework: A Case Study

Posted: March 17th, 2010, 11:00pm MDT by Brandon Savage

Recently I’ve been immersed into a Zend Framework project in a way that I’ve never been immersed before. This immersion experience has brought out a few thoughts and lessons that I’ve learned through the process about how to get into a framework, how to start a new project using a framework you’ve never used before, [...]

Conference season is upon me!

Posted: March 17th, 2010, 10:51pm MDT by Larry Garfield

Ah, the spring. So many things happen in the spring. Snow melts. Flowers bloom. The Easter Bunny sells cheap chocolate. People set their clocks ahead in an attempt to confuse their pets. It is also the start of conference season in the northern hemisphere, which means flying about the country talking about Drupal. This year is especially busy, with 10 presentations in 4 cities so far. (Possibly more to come.)

Here's where you'll be able to stalk Crell in the coming weeks:

Easier templating for Midgard 8.09

Posted: March 17th, 2010, 2:33pm MDT by Henri Bergius

For a while now there has been discussion about making template editing easier with Midgard CMS. In the Ragnaroek series we have a very comprehensive template system where all output from the system can be overridden. While the possibilities have not always been easy to discover, things should be better in the next Ragnaroek LTS release.

To access the template system just click Folder > Edit layout template in the Midgard toolbar:

This will take you into Asgard, the Midgard administration interface. There you'll be shown what elements are used by the components running on your site:

Clicking on an element name will let you create it. Then you'll be shown the default contents of that element to make overriding them easier. The language used in the templates is obviously PHP:

When you save your element it will replace the component's default output in the folders using that particular style. You can also do nice things like including contents from another page using Dynamic Loading.

What about file attachments?

Asgard also allows you to add files (images, CSS, javascript, whatever) to your template. To do this click the Attachments button when you're in the style. There you'll be able to manage existing file attachments and to add new ones:

If you're dealing with a text-based file (CSS, javascript, XML, ...) Asgard will also allow you to edit it directly on the web:

...and finally when you're done with your file and want to use it in some of your templates, the URL is available easily from the interface:

Conferences, Speakers & Presentations

Posted: March 17th, 2010, 9:34am MDT by Eli White

There has been alot of chatter in the PHP community lately about conferences, speakers and specifically the fact that many speakers at conferences seem to be doing last-minute preparations for their presentations instead of being professional and ready well in advance.

Most recently this came out because a number of speakers for ConFoo (A PHP/Python/Ruby/Java conference in Montreal) were tweeting about working on their slides the days/nights before their talks. Some people starting taking offense at this and calling it unprofessional

First of all, I want to point out a simple fact that while yes, a SELECT FEW presenters are the types that only start making slides the night before a talk. The majority of people (myself included) who are presenting, have made our slides at least weeks in advance (if not earlier). However, we continue to tweak them up until the minute we present. We want them to be perfect, and so we keep reviewing them and modifying them. In fact, I’ve been known to change my slidedeck in response to other discussions happening at the conference, or due to information that was passed on in the Keynote.

In those rare other cases, those speakers are ones that know their topic intimately and are simply planning on having a conversation about the topic with the attendees. In those cases, the slides are less important in the first place.

But let’s put that aside for a moment, because I want to focus on something actually completely different.

The mention of the word: “unprofessional”. Speakers at PHP conferences are, by definition, unprofessional. The PHP ‘conference circuit’ if you will, is one that has grown up in a different manner than other conference circuits that I’ve been familiarized with in the past (Java, Adobe, ‘Web’, etc).

In most of these other areas, the speakers are PAID to attend. Some of the speakers in fact make their living (or a good portion of it) via being paid to present at conferences. They will get a significant payment for being there, as well as expenses being covered.

On the flip side, in the PHP conference circuit, every speaker there, in fact, is PAYING for the right to attend that conference and be a part of it. (Or, if they are lucky, their companies are covering their expenses) Sure, most of the conferences do their best to offset the expenses that the speakers will accumulate, but that’s it. The standard package involves a free conference pass, a night or two hotel per presentation, and airfare being covered. (Though some conferences, like OSCon, cover much less).

There are still so many expenses that a speaker will have. Transportation from airport to conference venue. Parking at their home airport. Meals that are not otherwise provided (usually only lunch is). Extraneous flight expenses (checked bags, etc).

All of this is being paid by the speaker (or their company) for the privilege of speaking at the conference. This is a net negative, not even breaking even, let alone being a paid speaker who would be taking their position as a ‘professional’, being paid to do a job. Heck, let’s not even take into account the direct loss of productivity that the companies take by allowing the speakers to attend (though other great benefits are gained by doing so)

In the end, my point is this. I feel that given the nature of all of these conferences. That the organizers and attendees need to understand the situation and treat the speakers not as a ‘professional speaker that they paid good money to see’. But as what they really are. Far more akin to an Open Source Developer, who is donating their time for the better good and education of the masses.

That is until at least, the situation overall changes. Where conference organizers are able to pay a respectable payment/stipend for the amount of time actually spent by a speaker in preparation and execution of a session. Also where attendees are willing to pay a conference fee that accordingly will cover those speaker payments. It would not be nearly so inexpensive as conferences now are.

Filed under: PHP

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Using MongoHq in Zend Framework based applications

Posted: March 16th, 2010, 3:32pm MDT by Raphael Stolt

As the name slightly foreshadows MongoHq is a currently bit pricey cloud-based hosting solution for MongoDb databases provided by CommonThread. Since they went live a few weeks ago I signed up for the small plan and started to successfully re-thinker with it in an exploratory Zend Framework based application.

Therefore the following post will show how to bootstrap such an instance into a Zend Framework based application and how to use it from there in some simple scenarios like storing data coming from a Zend_Form into a designated collection and vice versa fetching it from there.

Bootstrapping a MongoHq enabled connectionTo establish and make the MongoDb connection application-wide available the almighty Zend_Application component came to the rescue again. After reading Matthew Weier O'Phinney's enlightening blog post about creating re-usable Zend_Application resource plugins and deciding to use MongoDb in some more exploratory projects, I figured it would be best to create such a plugin and ditch the also possible resource method approach.

The next code listing shows a possible implementation of the MongoDb resource plugin initializing a Mongo instance for the given APPLICATION_ENV (i.e. production) mode.

For the other application environment modes (development | testing | staging) it's currently assumed that no database authentication is enabled, which is also the default when using MongoDb, so you might need to adapt the plugin to your differing needs; and since I'm currently only rolling on the small plan the support for multiple databases is also not accounted for.

library/Recordshelf/Resource/MongoDb.php

<?php

class Recordshelf_Resource_MongoDb 
    extends Zend_Application_Resource_ResourceAbstract
{
    /**
     * Definable Mongo options.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $_options = array(
        'hostname'     => '127.0.0.1',
        'port'         => '27017',
        'username'     => null,
        'password'     => null,
        'databasename' => null,
        'connect'      => true
    );
    /**
     * Initalizes a Mongo instance.
     *
     * @return Mongo
     * @throws Zend_Exception
     */
    public function init()
    {
        $options = $this->getOptions();

        if (null !== $options['username'] && 
            null !== $options['password'] &&
            null !== $options['databasename'] &&
            'production' === APPLICATION_ENV) {
            // Database Dns with MongoHq credentials
            $mongoDns = sprintf('mongodb://%s:%s@%s:%s/%s',
                $options['username'],
                $options['password'],
                $options['hostname'],
                $options['port'],
                $options['databasename']
            );
        } elseif ('production' !== APPLICATION_ENV) {
            $mongoDns = sprintf('mongodb://%s:%s/%s',
                $options['hostname'],
                $options['port'],
                $options['databasename']
            );
        } else {
            $exceptionMessage = sprintf(
                'Recource %s is not configured correctly',
                __CLASS__
            );
            throw new Zend_Exception($exceptionMessage);
        }
        try {
            return new Mongo($mongoDns, array('connect' => $options['connect']));
        } catch (MongoConnectionException $e) {
            throw new Zend_Exception($e->getMessage());
        }
    }
}

With the MongoDb resource plugin in the place to be, it's time to make it known to the boostrapping mechanism which is done by registering the resource plugin in the applic

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Why Active Record Isn’t A Bad Design Pattern

Posted: March 16th, 2010, 7:00am MDT by Brandon Savage

Were I writing this as an article for a newspaper, the subhead would be “Design Patterns Don’t Cause Application Slowness.” The point of this piece isn’t to defend Active Record per se; it’s to discuss the fact that design patterns aren’t to blame for your application’s problems, and more to the point, design patterns aren’t [...]

Book preview: PHP 5 E-commerce Development

Posted: March 16th, 2010, 3:33am MDT by Eirik Hoem

I have been reviewing some books from Packt Publishing lately, and I’m now expecting a copy of PHP 5 E-commerce Development in a few days. I have been looking forward to for a while, as I will be working on a similar project in the near future. Here is the lowdown:

Php 5 eCommerce Development Book Cover

This book will show you how to create your own PHP framework that can be extended and used with ease, particularly for e-commerce sites. Using this framework you will be able to display and manage products, customize products, create wish-lists, make recommendations to customers based on previous purchases, send email notifications when certain products are in stock, rate the products online, and much more.

You can check out the sample chapter Enhancing the User Experience now.

Performance improvements in Drupal with WINCACHE user cache

Posted: March 15th, 2010, 3:55pm MDT by Venkat Raman Don

Now that WINCACHE 1.1 Beta is released and it has support for user cache, you can enhance Drupal’s performance by integrating WINCACHE user cache. For this you will need to have two things already setup:

Drupal running
Drupal extension CacheRouter configured (The below code will work only for latest nightly builds of CacheRouter extension available at [drupal.org] , 7.0 beta1 and version 5.* and 6.* won’t work)

Once you have above setup ready, integrating WINCACHE user cache is really easy. I will assume that you have copied CacheRouter extension in the ‘modules’ folder of Drupal installation. This means you should have added below lines in your file named settings.php inside folder sites\default:

$conf['cache_inc'] = './modules/cacherouter/cacherouter.inc';

$conf['cacherouter'] = array(

  'default' => array(

    'engine' => 'wincache',

    'servers' => array(),

    'shared' => TRUE,

    'prefix' => '',

    'path' => 'sites/default/files/filecache',

    'static' => FALSE,

    'fast_cache' => TRUE,

),

);

type="text/css"> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

Now let’s move to next step. Please save the file named wincache.php_.txt from link [drupal.org] as wincache.php file to folder modules\cacherouter\engines.

Restart your server and you are done.

In order to verify that WINCACAHE is storing values in user cache, hit the homepage of your Drupal installation. Now open WINCACHE.PHP file which ships with the installation and click on tab named “User and Session Cache”. It should look something like below:

As of writing this blog, a bug in CacheRouter (daily builds) prevents any caching functionality to work. The bug has been logged at [drupal.org] .

In order to make it work with older versions of CacheRouter build like 7.x-1.0-beta1, 6.x-1.0-rc1 or 5.x-1.0-beta9 the attache

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Post-ConFoo

Posted: March 15th, 2010, 3:34pm MDT by Sean Coates

Today I am back in the (home) office after speaking at ConFoo last week.

I gave two talks:

Undercover Code—Supporting PHP with non-web tools; Slides (PDF); Session; joind.in
Interfacing with Twitter; Slides (PDF); Session; joind.in

Despite some timing issues (as is always the case for me with new talks), I think both sessions went well. I got some good, constructive feedback from attendees on how the talks could be made better, and if I get the opportunity to give them again, I'll definitely take it into consideration.

Because PSAV (not the conference organizers' fault, other than trusting PSAV—a lesson all conference organizers eventually learn) was its normal bucket of fale, conference Internets weren't exactly usable. I was lucky enough to be in my home country (for a change), so I was able to tether on 3G for most of the week, and that kept me and a few others online. However, I think that most attendees didn't have the same opportunity, so if you attended one of my talks, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could head over to joind.in and post a comment or two about what you thought (talk-specific links above).

After the conference ended, Andrei stayed at my place.

On Saturday, we brewed a second annual batch of Белый, which—if all goes well—will end up at 11.5%ABV. Maybe it will be ready for next year's ConFoo. (-:

We decided to take it easy on Sunday… sort of. We spent most of the afternoon planning out a PHP extension we'd been talking about for several months: a highly-customizable and user-hookable PHP preprocessor. Afternoon turned to evening, turned to night, and by the time we turned in, we had a working—but not yet ready for release—extension. More details to come, but here's a teaser.

PHP parse errors with cgi and nginx

Posted: March 15th, 2010, 12:26pm MDT by till

So for whatever reason, it took me a while to figure this out earlier today:

2010/03/15 15:44:16 [info] 22274#0: *148224 client closed prematurely connection, so upstream connection is closed too while sending request to upstream, client: a.a.a.a, server: localhost, request: "GET / [HTTP] upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/tmp/.fastcgi.till/socket:", host: "localhost"
2010/03/15 15:44:16 [info] 22274#0: *148207 client closed prematurely connection, so upstream connection is closed too while sending request to upstream, client: a.a.a.a, server: localhost, request: "GET / [HTTP] upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/tmp/.fastcgi.till/socket:", host: "localhost"

The issue was a PHP parse error which I overlooked when I added a new file. The weird thing is, I had nothing in the logs (E_ALL, display_errors is off, but all logs are enabled and I tailed them using multitail) and nginx only displayed a blank page. The errors above were in nginx's own log file.

Available for PHP Extension Writing

Posted: March 15th, 2010, 6:28am MDT by Derick Rethans

Available for PHP Extension Writing London, UK Monday, March 15th 2010, 12:28 GMT

Slightly more than a month ago I left my job as team-lead of eZ Components at eZ Systems behind, to focus on something new. During the past month I've been contemplating about what to do next and realized that I do not want to take on a new full-time position right away. Instead I will be available to work on (custom) PHP extensions and internals related issues. Extensions are a great way around PHP's limitations and performance issues.

As first project I am working on a "QuickHash" extension for StumbleUpon. This extension circumvents PHP's hefty memory (and performance) overhead by providing more specific data structures. The extension currently implements integer sets and integer to integer hashes. I am now adding integer to string hashes and string to integer hashes. The QuickHash extension will be released under the PHP Licence and I will dedicate another post to it later.

If, like StumbleUpon, you are also interested in having work done on PHP or a specific extensions feel free to contact me. I'd be happy to discuss things with you.

Open letter to designers and UI experts

Posted: March 15th, 2010, 3:52am MDT by Horde news

We've sent out a letter to a number of designer and interface mailing lists, asking for help improving the user interface of the upcoming Horde 4. Here's the text of that letter, if you feel addressed, don't hesitate to talk to me personally or leave a note on one of the Horde mailing lists.

Zend Webinar: Sichere Applikationen auf Basis des Zend Frameworks

Posted: March 14th, 2010, 8:17am MDT by Stefan Esser

Hier einmal ein Announcement in letzter Minute: in zwei Tagen halte ich für Zend ein Webinar über “Sichere Applikationen auf Basis des Zend Frameworks“.

Immer mehr PHP-Entwickler setzen das Zend Framework bei der Programmierung neuer Applikationen ein. Für die Entwicklung bringt dies einige Veränderungen mit sich, da mehr und
mehr Framework-Komponenten benutzt werden und immer weniger direkt auf PHP Funktionen zurückgegriffen wird. Dadurch ändert sich auch der Prozess, wie sichere Applikationen zu entwickeln sind.

In diesem Webinar erfahren Sie, welche Features des Zend Frameworks die Entwicklung sicherer Applikationen erleichtern, welche Features bei falschem Einsatz zu Sicherheitsproblemen führen können, welche Sicherheitsfeatures existieren, wie man sie einsetzt und welche Sicherheitsprobleme nach wie vor alleine gelöst werden müssen.

Why I am pissed.

Posted: March 13th, 2010, 6:18am MST by Lukas Smith

Being the verbose kind, I guess I will put in a summary at the top leaving the original post below for everyone to read all the little details. Essentially the summary is that I (and many other core developers) agree that HEAD/trunk in its current form was stalling future development on PHP. Jani indirectly jump started the discussion of moving this stumbling block out of the way by essentially doing two commits that violate the most fundamental rules of PHP development (and common sense courtesy) we have. I am worried that this will lead to confusion in the user base and other seem to think that the "ends justify the means". I also think that we need clearer processes to make it easier for new developers to have a clear path to follow in order to get things done in PHP.

Full story:
So this all requires a bit of background. I still remember my first contact with a PHP core developer. I do not quite remember the year, but it was quite some time ago. Anyway Jani was great, we filed a bug report on the imap extension. He fixed the bug in no time. IIRC we also ended up sharing a room at the second IPC in Frankfurt I attended. I think only a few years later I realized that Jani is the same guy a lot of people were complaining as being rude. But I guess few of these people realize how much time Jani has spend on verifying bug reports and what a tedious job this is, especially since most bug reports are quite low on the actual relevant details and come with a "fix my code for me, now!" attitude. In other words, I get along fine with Jani and I have great respect for his contributions to PHP.

Next piece of background. I am also one in the long list of people that has made a fool of himself by predicting a release of PHP6 in about 18 to 24 months (quite a few people have given this prediction over the past 3-4 years I guess). I have also been one of the people that has tried to motivated people at various times to finish those last 2% that seem to be missing to complete PHP6 in terms of functionality. As such I have opposed a PHP 5.4 because I felt its time to focus on finish up PHP 6 which we have promised people for so long. After releasing 5.3.0 I was hoping things would happen. But last weekend I came to the realization that we have waited long enough. That even if PHP 6 would be unicode bliss (at least in terms of features, probably not in terms of performance), the fact of the matter is that in all of the many years nobody put in the time to finish it. This imho is an indirect proof that the approach taken apparently does not hold enough merit to the world in general. Furthermore looking at internals since last summer it has been more dead than ever: PHP 6 aka HEAD aka trunk had become such a motivation killer that nothing was happening.

At the same time I knew that suggesting to move trunk to a branch and copying 5_3 to trunk would cause a lot of confusion. Not only among those reading internals, but also that this would quickly make it to the news sites of the world. Call it politics, marketing or just an unwillingness to cause thousands (millions?) of PHP developers distress and uncertainty, but I figured it would be better to propose this with a semi solid plan and giving a number of PHP core developers the heads up that I will bring this to the list, so that they also could prepare themselves. So I started talking to people offlist, either in person, via phone, via IRC/skype or via email with the full intention of going to the list no later than the end of this month, ideally sooner rather than later. I should also note, I do not code C, I also do not consider myself a unicode expert. So if I wanted to present a plan, I obviously needed to talk to people to get my facts straight.

Anyways, this week Jani decided to commit a patch. I guess I didn't mention one more piece of background. Jani had asked to get this patch into PHP 5.3 during the pre alpha stage, but at the time Johannes and I (I was co-RM back then) felt that the patch hadn't been tested enough in HEAD and that while we knew the patch fixes several bugs, we felt the risk of introducing new bugs was too high, especially since Michael who wrote the original patch for HEAD was not always around to fix things. Johannes had tried to get the patch into 5.3 six months earlier, but at the time nobody had time to do the work. So we decided to stick with the known bugs, instead of fixing them and risking new bugs in a very core component of PHP close to going alpha. So basically Jani committed a huge patch into a stable branch, without talking to anyone about this, despite knewing full well that the RM had specifically vetoed this patch in principle. Furthermore the patch from my understanding even breaks the ABI which makes the patch even more a no go.

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 6351 bytes)

Search without the Database

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 3:27pm MST by Paul Reinheimer

I gave my second talk at #ConFoo today, this one was on Searching without the Database. This talk was based on a situation at work where I replaced a MySQL search solution with a Sphinx + Memcached solution for higher performance. If you're interested, here's the slides: Search without the DB - ConFoo 2010.pdf.

If you attended my talk, you can rate it on the Joind.in Page

Running Apache with a dozen PHP versions

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 2:40pm MST by Christian Weiske

After showing you how to set up multiple PHP versions on a single machine, it's time to explain how to stuff all those compiled php-cgi executables into a single Apache web server instance.

Idea

Instead of using mod_php, mod_fastcgi is going to be utilized.
Every single PHP version runs its own CGI server
Configuration of used PHP version is made per virtual host.

Installation of FastCGI Debian

The Debian setup is painless:

aptitude install libapache2-mod-fastcgi apache2-mpm-worker apache2-suexec
a2enmod actions fastcgi suexec

CentOS

The open source version of Redhat's operating system does not provide the fastcgi module for Apache, which is why one needs to install it by hand. It's trivial.

Assuming phpfarm is installed in /root/phpfarm, you need to chmod +x /root. Last but not least is setting up permissions for the fastcgi state files: chmod +x /var/log/httpd.

FastCGI setup

After mod_fastcgi is available, we need to prepare the FastCGI servers. Open /etc/{apache2 [httpd}] and make it load conf/php-cgisetup.conf before including server.conf. Put the following lines into conf/php-cgisetup.conf:

#php-cgi setup
#used for multiple php versions
FastCgiServer /var/www/cgi-bin/php-cgi-5.2.12
FastCgiServer /var/www/cgi-bin/php-cgi-5.3.0
FastCgiServer /var/www/cgi-bin/php-cgi-5.3.1
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin-php/ /var/www/cgi-bin/

PHP-CGI setup

For each single php version you installed with phpfarm, you need to create a file /var/www/cgi-bin/php-cgi-$version and make it executable. Example for php-cgi-5.3.2:

#!/bin/sh
PHPRC="/etc/php5/cgi/5.3.2/"
export PHPRC

PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=3
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN

PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=5000
export PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS

exec /root/phpfarm/inst/bin/php-cgi-5.3.2

Activating a PHP version in a virtual host

If you followed all of the previous steps, everything is setup now and ready to be used. In your /etc/{apache2 [httpd}] , put the following code in each section that you like to switch to a certain version of PHP:

  
    AddHandler php-cgi .php
    Action php-cgi /cgi-bin-php/php-cgi-5.3.2

Conclusion

With the simple steps listed above and the help of phpfarm, you are able to test your web applications in a dozens or more PHP versions easily.

As as side note: The CGI versions of PHP are only used on the vhosts that you determine. All others are still served by mod_php that was probably setup before, making it trivially easy to keep your server's main web sites up-to date with your distribution's package manager.

Not-so-shortlisted!

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 11:31am MST by Mark Dennehy

I got shortlisted for Best Technology Blog in the Irish Blog Awards!

Solar 1.0.0 Stable Released

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 6:38am MST by Paul M. Jones

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.) You can see the change notes here. The highlights are: Added [...]

Future of PHP 6

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 5:15am MST by Johannes Schlüter

Yesterday was a quite thrilling day for the PHP development team and led to some imprecise news articles so let's take a look at what happened: Over the last months many of the core contributors agreed that the current approach to bring Unicode into PHP's engine wasn't the right approach and a good thing would be to rethink it from the start. By a provocative move of one contributor the stalled situation got some more movement and Rasmus declared the current implementation to be discontinued to restart.

The past

When the foundation of what should have become PHP 6 was created a decision was made to use UTF-16 as internal encoding for "everything" inside the engine. The choice for UTF-16 was made due to the fact that PHP 6 would use the ICU library which is focused on offering UTF-16 string functions. By using UTF-16 as default encoding we'd have to convert the script code and all data passed from or to the script (request data, database results, output, ...) from another encoding, usually UTF-8, to UTF-16 or back. The need for conversion doesn't only require CPU time and more memory (a UTF-16 string takes double memory of a UTF-8 string in many cases) but makes the implementation rather complex as we always have to figure out which encoding was the right one for a given situation. From the userspace point of view the implementation brought some backwards compatibility breaks which would require manual review of the code. These all are pains for a very small gain for many users where many would be happy about a tighter integration of some mbstring-like functionality. This all led to a situation for many contributors not willing to use "trunk" as their main development tree but either develop using the stable 5.2/5.3 trees or refuse to do development at all.

The present

Yesterday the stagnation created by the situation has been resolved and it was decided that our trunk in svn will be based on 5.3 and we'll merge features from the old trunk and new features there so that 5.3 will be a true stable branch. The EOL for 5.2 has not yet been defined but I suggest you to really migrate over to 5.3, which usually can be done with very little work, as soon as possible.

The future

Right now we're starting different discussions to see what kind of Unicode support we really want. Many contributors react positive on a proposed "string class" which wraps string operations in Unicode and binary forms without going deep in the engine. In my opinion such an approach might also be a way to solve some of the often criticized inconsistencies in PHP's string APIs without the need to break old code. (new code uses the new class, old code the old functions) But that idea is far from a proper proposal or even the implementation, current status is about refocusing the development and get the requirement and design discussions going. By that it's a bit early to decide whether the next version of PHP will be called PHP 5.4, PHP 6 or maybe even PHP 7.

PHP is alive and kicking!

New Server

Posted: March 12th, 2010, 12:12am MST by Andrew Hill

I’ve dumped the old hosting provider, and move the www.fornax.net server to Slicehost. So far, their service and support has been excellent!

Hopefully, everything was migrated across correctly, and all of the RSS feeds still work. Apologies in advance if this post ends up anywhere it should not — please let me know if that’s the case and I’ll be happy to fix it!

In Defense of Development Practices

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 11:00pm MST by Brandon Savage

On Tuesday, Marco Tabini told us that we were doing it all wrong. He makes some fantastic points about software development overall, and about the state of our profession. This article’s point isn’t to be a rebuttal, but a corollary to what he had to say.’t Marco is right: every one of us is “doing it [...]

Module Bootstraps in Zend Framework: Do's and Don'ts

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 9:55am MST by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

I see a number of questions regularly about module bootstraps in Zend Framework, and decided it was time to write a post about them finally.

In Zend Framework 1.8.0, we added Zend_Application, which is intended to (a) formalize the bootstrapping process, and (b) make it re-usable. One aspect of it was to allow bootstrapping of individual application modules -- which are discrete collections of controllers, views, and models.

The most common question I get regarding module bootstraps is:

Why are all module bootstraps run on every request, and not just the one for the requested module?

To answer that question, first I need to provide some background.

Continue reading "Module Bootstraps in Zend Framework: Do's and Don'ts"

Webinar - New in Zend Framework 1.10!

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 9:27am MST by Zend Developer Zone

Zend Framework 1.10 sports a ton of new features, as well as completely revamped online documentation. In this webinar, Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Framework Project Lead, and Ralph Schindler, Zend Framework Software Engineer, will present a synopsis of the new features, discuss the new online documentation system and how it’s built, and answer your questions about the new release….

ConFoo PHP 5.3 == Awesome! Slides

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 7:06am MST by Ilia Alshanetsky

Finally managed to upload my slides from my ConFoo PHP 5.3 == Awesome! talk.
Slides

Thanks for all the attendees, especially those who asked questions ;-)

ConFoo PHP 5.3 == Awesome! Slides

Posted: March 11th, 2010, 7:06am MST by Ilia Alshanetsky

Finally managed to upload my slides from my ConFoo PHP 5.3 == Awesome! talk.
Slides

Thanks for all the attendees, especially those who asked questions ;-)

Slides from my Confoo.ca talk now online

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 4:28pm MST by John Mertic

I’ve just uploaded the slides from my confoo.ca talk “Making software management tools work for you”. You can download the slides from here.

Thanks again to everyone who attended! Please give me feedback on joind.in.

Performance tuning a server in less than three minutes while being slashdotted

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:33pm MST by Mark Dennehy

Tuning a webserver in three minutes while it's being slashdotted.

ConFoo - PHP in the Enterprise

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 2:24pm MST by Paul Reinheimer

I just finished my PHP in the Enterprise talk at ConFoo, Slides are available here: PHP in the Enterprise - ConFoo March 2010

PHP command line progress bar

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 10:33am MST by Brian Moon

Was just looking through some code and came across this function I wrote some time ago. If you do a lot of your processing scripts in PHP like we do, you probably need to know what is going on sometimes. So, I made a progress bar for use on the cli. I thought I would share it. Here is a video of it in action. And the code can be found here.

Introducing phpfarm

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 8:58am MST by Christian Weiske

PEAR consists of literally hundreds of packages (libraries) that help you to build your PHP applications faster, less error-prone and more secure. Millions of web applications use and rely on the proper functioning of PEAR packages.

To ensure constant quality, many packages utilize phpt or PHPUnit tests that are run during development and before each release. They help us making sure new features or bug fixes do not break existing functionality.

One of hard to solve challenges is ensuring that a package's unit tests do not only run on the specific PHP version the developers have installed on their machines (which often is the latest and greatest, maybe not even released version from SVN), but to cover the whole range of supported PHP versions. This goal can be achieved in several ways:

Test on different machines with another PHP version on each
Test on different PHP versions on one machine

Solution number 1 requires either much hardware or at least quite some setup time for virtual machines. Besides that, running tests regularly on many different machines needs automated deployment tools - you won't ssh into the 15th machine manually, let alone setting up database servers and other software that might be required.

There is no single Linux distribution I know of that supports installing multiple versions of PHP beside each other - making solution number 2 similar daunting to setup and running as #1. The benefits above #1 are obvious: All software on one machine means easier deployment because the software to test needs to be setup only once. Software dependencies need to be installed only once. Executing the tests is easier if all versions of PHP are on this single machine, which means that the cross-version tests can be automated really easily.

A tool to solve all problems with the multiple-php-versions-on-one-machine solution is phpfarm. The best way to demonstrate its easiness is probably a shellshot:

$ svn co [svn.php.net] phpfarm
$ cd phpfarm/src
$ ./compile 5.3.2
... fetching sources from php.net
... configuring
... compiling
... installing
... fetching and setting up pyrus
$ php-5.3.2 --version
PHP 5.3.2 (cli) (built: Mar 10 2010 18:08:27) (DEBUG)
Copyright (c) 1997-2010 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies
$ pyrus-5.3.2 --version
Pyrus version 2.0.0a1 SHA-1: 2FDFB5E00A6D707437DBC047AAF9D115C6484D90
Using PEAR installation found at /home/cweiske/Dev/cvs/pear/phpfarm/inst/php-5.3.2/pear
php pyrus.phar version 2.0.0a1.

That's it. With one single command, you can install each version of PHP you like, and you get pyrus, the next-generation PEAR installer for free! Let's try it:

$ pyrus-5.3.2 channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
Discovery of channel pear.phpunit.de successful
$ pyrus-5.3.2 install phpunit/phpunit
...
Installed pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit-3.4.11
$ pyrus-5.3.2 list-packages
Listing installed packages [/home/cweiske/Dev/cvs/pear/phpfarm/inst/php-5.3.2/pear]:
[channel pear.phpunit.de]:
 PHPUnit

phpfarm automatically sets up your php.ini with the values you desire. It sets your include_path. It lets you specify custom configuration options, per patch, minor or major PHP version - just have a look at the README.

Now everything is ready for you (and us PEAR developers!) to let the unit tests run on all the little PHP versions we want to. Did I tell you that phpfarm also installs php-cgi versions? My next blog entry will show you how to run dozens of php versions simultaneously in apache.

If you have questions or suggestions about phpfarm, don't hesitate to ask on the pear-general mailing list (subscription info) or on the #pear IRC channel.

Happy testing!

An intriguing use of lambda functions

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 7:47am MST by Eli White

I’ve been working hard on Goodsie.com lately trying to bring it to launch. It’s been great being in on a new PHP project from (near) the beginning, as it frees up a number of things.

One of those, is the fact that I can be using PHP 5.3 and all the new features that come with PHP 5.3. While I’ve used my fair share of the short-cut ternary already (?:), the bigger win for me, are the Lambda functions with scoping (anonymous functions).

I found a very specific use out of the blue of Lambda functions that I have now used and I see as a great use-case. Which is specifically passing functions/logic from your Controller to your View.

In the case of Goodsie, I’m using PHP for my templating language and as usual I’m trying to remove as much logic from my View as possible, while still allowing the view to be malleable.

The specific case I had, was a subview that was generating some pagination code for me. You know, the standard ‘previous, page 1, page 1, next’ section of links. The basic html template I had, looked looked similar to:

<div class="pagination">
    <a href="<?= $baseurl . '/page:' . ($page - 1) ?>">← Previous</a>
    Page <?= $page ?> of <?= $total ?>
    <a href="<?= $baseurl . '/page:' . ($page + 1) ?>">Next →</a>
</div>

Rather straight forward, but I quickly ran into a problem. The way it worked, as you see, is that you passed in a base URL, and the page number you are currently on, and it generated appropriate forward/back links. (Ok, there was also some other logic where it determined if you needed the prev/next links at all, but I’ve removed that for clarity)

But I then had a case, where I wanted to reuse this subview in an ajax situation. Where instead of straight URL’s being passed in, I might want to pass in a javascript function, and have that function be called with the page number as a parameter. That would be nice as I could use it in both situations. What pagination looked like, could completely change, and still work on both cases. Perhaps we’d want to give a full list of all possible pages. Or show a couple forward/back, etc. The view could handle all of that without a change to the controller.

But therein lied the problem. When using a URL based pagination, I wanted to concat the page number onto the end of the URL. But when using javascript, it wasn’t pure concatenation, it instead needed to wrap the page number with the function call. Oh the pain a simple ) could cause me.

I started writing code, where I ended up with tons of switch statements and logic inside of the view. I’d have to pass in two different possible values, a URL or a javascript function. The view at every point where it would output a link, would need to see which version was being used, and from that decide what type of output to create. In short, it was a mess.

But then the solution dawned upon me. A lambda function would work admirably here. So what I did, is inside of my controller I created a function on the fly, that would generate the appropriate type of link that I was wanting. It looks something like:

if ($jsfunc) {
    $url = function ($p) use ($jsfunc) { return "javascript:{$jsfunc}({$p})"; };
} elseif ($baseurl) {
    $url = function ($p) use ($baseurl) { return "{$baseurl}/page:{$p}"; };
}

Now I could simply rewrite my original template, to use this lambda function $url to generate it’s URLs.

<div class="pagination">
    <a href="<?= $url($page - 1) ?>">← Previous</a>
    Page <?= $page ?> of <?= $total ?>
    <a href="<?= $url($page - 1) ?>">Next →</a>
</div>

Now not only would this work for my specific situation, but ANY controller could reuse this pagination subview and define exactly how it wanted it’s URLs to be formed. Now, the view could completely change around how the pagination section is displayed, show as many, or as few pages as it wants to, and all that without ever touching the controller.

This is one simple example, but I’ve become enamored of this approach. Using lambda functions in this way, you are able to have complicated logic represented inside of your view, but encapsulated/created by the controller. Also of note is the fact that the view is managing to use the $jsfunc and $baseurl values, but without actually having to be granted access to them. This allows for another level of encapsulation, as I exposed one function,

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1389 bytes)

Accelerando

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 3:12am MST by Tobias Schlitt

This is a very unusual blog post for the open source area of my website, since it contains a recommendation for a science fiction book. The reason I've put it here instead of the private section is on the one hand, that it will definitely reach more geek - and therefor probably scifi interested - people here. On the other hand, the book I'm writing about can be found online for free in English language, but the private section is mostly kept in German.I love scifi literature and movies, as most geeks do. But the quality of works in this area varies quite a lot. Beside the style of writing, there is one crucial point, which can make the best novel be a total disaster: Authenticity.

First year of Qaiku, and a travel writing challenge

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 2:00pm MST by Henri Bergius

1st birthday of Qaiku Qaiku, the conversational microblogging service that launched a year ago had a refresh that launched today. While it hasn't yet convinced the twittering masses, it has already proven itself as a lot more thoughtful platform for the Finnish online community, and as a valuable workstreaming tool.

The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels and profiles that are private or invitation-only:

Technically the new version is also remarkable as it is the first major website to run fully on top of the legacy-free Midgard2 platform. So yes, every entry you see there is a GObject. And D-Bus signals fly when you post.

On to the challenge, then

To highlight Qaiku's threading, conversational nature I started a new "On my travels, I have" thread for sharing your most extraordinary travel experiences. This is not on Twitter or Buzz as with Qaiku it is so easy to keep the conversation together and accessible for the future as well.

To contribute, sign up on Qaiku, go to the thread and add your experiences as a comment. If you have a link or picture to include, you can also do so. My first entry was:

seen ice descend from the heavens and provide us with cold beer on a hot day in Lesotho

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this :-)

Getting started with the Midgard content repository

Posted: March 9th, 2010, 8:50am MST by Henri Bergius

I'm doing a talk today in the Bossa Conference about using Midgard as a content repository for mobile applications. As part of my presentation I wrote some simple example code for using the Midgard APIs in Python, and thought they would be good to share to those not attending the event as well.

The idea of a content repository is that instead of coming up with new, isolated file formats or database setups for your application you can just work with objects and signals, and let Midgard handle the rest. This is something that lots of people are doing with CouchDB as well, but we feel Midgard, with its light footprint and native APIs for languages like Python, C, Vala and PHP fits better in the mobile applications context.

Installing Midgard

Midgard packages are available for many different Linux distributions through the OpenSuse Build Service. To find the right repository for your setup, go to the OBS project page. For example, on my Ubuntu Karmic netbook the URL to add to apt sources.list is deb [download.opensuse.org] ./. Then I just:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-midgard2

Midgard is also available in Maemo extras and for OS X on MacPorts.

Defining a schema

The first thing when developing a Midgard application is to define your storage objects. This is done using the MgdSchema XML format. In this case we're doing a simple "attendee" object that amends Midgard's built-in person record with information related to the conference:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Schema xmlns="http://www.midgard-project.org/repligard/1.4">
    <type name="openbossa_attendee" table="openbossa_attendee">
        <property name="id" type="unsigned integer" primaryfield="id">
            <description>Local non-replication-safe database identifier</description>
        </property>
        <property name="person" type="unsigned integer" link="midgard_person:id">
            <description>Person attending the event</description>
        </property>
        <property name="registration" type="datetime">
            <description>Registration date of the attendee</description>
        </property>
        <property name="likesbeer" type="boolean">
            <description>Whether the attendee likes beer</description>
        </property>
    </type>
</Schema>

Then we just save this XML file into /usr/share/midgard2/schema/ so that Midgard will find it.

Initiating the repository connection

Once the MgdSchema is in place it is time to import antigravity and start hacking in Python. The code works pretty much in the same way in other languages Midgard is available for, but Python is used here for the sake of simplicity. First we load the Midgard extension:

import _midgard as midgard

Then we setup the repository connection. With these settings we will store our content into an SQLite database located in ~/.midgard2/data/midgardexample.db:

configuration = midgard.config()
configuration.dbtype = 'SQLite'
configuration.database = 'midgardexample'

# Open a Midgard repository connection with our config
connection = midgard.connection()
connection.open_config(configuration)

As this is the first time we're interacting with the repository we need to tell Midgard to prepare the storage for itself and also for our new openbossa_attendee class:

midgard.storage.create_base_storage()
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_person')
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_parameter')
midgard.storage.create_class_s

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2314 bytes)

Neural Networks in PHP

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 11:26pm MST by PHP Classes

Neural Networks in PHP By Louis Stowasser Neural networks allow emulating the behavior of a brain in software applications. Neural Networks have always had a too steep learning curve to venture towards, especially in a Web environment.

Neural Mesh is an open source, pure PHP code based Neural Network manager and framework that makes it easier to work with Neural Networks.

This article explains how to easily implement Neural Mesh to develop Neural Network applications in PHP.

CMS Watch on their Midgard usage

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 11:24am MST by Henri Bergius

Which CMS does The Real Story Group Use? (Tony Byrne / CMS Watch):

The answer is, we use an open-source platform called "Midgard." We picked it nearly ten years ago, and it has held up fairly well.
...

One of the things we like about Midgard actually makes it rather unsuitable for many simpler publishing scenarios: it is highly object-oriented. This allows us to run multiple sites off largely a single codebase -- at the cost of quite user-unfriendly administrative and authoring facilities.

Also, Midgard is very much a development platform, and we have had to create a fair amount of custom code, especially to handle structured content. In that regard, our CMS experience probably resemble yours. As an industry we remain very far from plug-and-play content management technology for all but the simplest of websites.

While the post contains many negative points about older Midgard (the UIs are a bit better now than they used to be, quite a lot of development has since been happening especially in the LTS branch), it is remarkable that CMS Watch has been able to run their services through the same CMS setup for ten years. This really shows the durability and commitment to long-term stability we have in the Midgard community. We've been doing this for more than ten years, and will likely keep going for quite a bit longer.

As for usability and popularity of Midgard, there is quite little we can do about it in the Midgard1 area, as that is now in long-term support phase that won't allow major changes. But Midgard2 is a new world with new opportunities. Midgard's content repository is pretty much there already, as is the MVC layer, and this spring we should be able to unveil the new, quite revolutionary CMS concept as well. Watch this blog for updates!

Upgrades In Open Source

Posted: March 7th, 2010, 11:00pm MST by Brandon Savage

PHP 5.3 has been out now for eight months, and in that time lots of projects have made decisions to begin developing against this version of PHP. Juozas Kaziukenas makes the argument that you shouldn’t be afraid of PHP 5.3 and he provides a number of excellent points to support his argument. I don’t dispute [...]

Seed doc updates, and Gio async directory listing

Posted: March 7th, 2010, 10:52pm MST by Alan Knowles

The documentation for seed gobject introspection is improving continually, I now have a jhbuild virtual machine, which is picking up the latest versions from git.
In addition many of the documentation details have been expanded, including

Interfaces, Enums
callback methods are now documented
More libraries have been added.
More doc comments can be picked up

With better documentation it's finally possible to figure out how to use the API. A classic example of this was a small problem I tried to solve before the API documentation was available. Listing a directory asynchronously, It took me over an hour to get close to figuring out how to do this, I eventually had to give up. as digging through the source, C reference and GIR files took so long.
However within 5 minutes with the documentation, I was able to write a small script to do this.

Gio = imports.gi.Gio;
Gtk = imports.gi.Gtk;

var f = Gio.file_new_for_path('/home/');
f.enumerate_children_async (
        "*",  
        Gio.FileQueryInfoFlags.NONE, 
        GLib.PRIORITY_DEFAULT, 
        null, 
        function(o,ar) {
          // listing completed..
           var fe = f.enumerate_children_finish(ar);
           var ch = false;
           while (ch = fe.next_file(null)) {
               Seed.print(ch.get_name());        
           }
           Seed.quit();
    
        },
        null);

Gtk.main();

My NAS - QNAP TS 119 Turbo NAS

Posted: March 6th, 2010, 3:00pm MST by Andrey Hristov

Few weeks ago I got new hardware for my home network, a QNAP TS 119 Turbo NAS.

PHP London Conference: In Review

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 9:19am MST by Lorna Mitchell

I'm really late with this post, but I wanted to write about the PHP London Conference which was held in London last Friday. The event was in a great venue and had hoards of people - this was my fourth year in attendance!! They do, however, have the longest twitter tag in history #phpuk2010!

This year I had the privilege of speaking at this event, although I was concerned that I had to stay coherent and alert right through to the graveyard slot at 4:30pm (conference organisers take note: I really am much sparklier in the mornings!). I kept myself awake by attending what I affectionately refer to as the "Ibuildings track" - with 4 speakers at the event, it did feel like a bit of an invasion by myself and my colleagues. In our defence I can only say that we are a pretty big local PHP employer and, as a developer, I'm happy to be working for someone who sends all their developers to these events, and even happier to be in the company of those other excellent speakers as colleagues!

My talk was entitled "Best Practices in Web Service Design" although perhaps "Things I Wish Web Service Creators Would Consider Before Writing Unclear and Unstable Useless And Frustrating Services" would have been a better title! I talked about web services in general, a bit about HTTP and the various service types, and also gave some general tips and tricks for writing good, stable services. In a bit of a break with geeky tradition, I then talked about services as a whole package, and how to deliver and document them in a way that helps users help themselves. If you are interested the slides are here:

[www.slideshare.net]

The experience was overall very positive for me, I haven't spoken at this conference before and I was very pleased to be included. My talk went quite smoothly, with my nerves nicely hidden away (I've had issues with this lately), and I also avoided falling over either the curtain or the piece of screen that was carefully placed to trip unwary speakers! I'd like to thank everyone who came and asked questions afterwards, and all those who saw my talk and left comments for me on my joind.in talk page - it all helps me to do better next time, thanks and I'll see you all next year!

Do you queue? Introduction to the Zend Server Job Queue

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 7:00am MST by Zend Developer Zone

There has been a lot of talk over the past several years about the difference between performance and scalability. Never mind that the difference between the two will probably not really affect most developers. Never mind that the “difference between performance and scalability” argument is often used when someone’s code performs poorly and their best argument is “Yeah, but my code scales”. Yeah, sure it does.

Creating Scalable Vector Graphs with PHP

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 6:31am MST by Zend Developer Zone

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification provides a way to programmatically generate images using vector paths expressed in XML. This makes it ideal for generating images that need to be scaled to different resolutions without losing fidelity. A common requirement in Web applications is to dynamically generate charts and graphs from numerical data. If these graphs are expressed using SVG, they can be blown up to different sizes without any deterioration in quality, and they are also typically smaller in size as compared to their GIF or JPEG counterparts. With this in mind, this article examines various open source PHP libraries that allow you to add SVG charting capabilities to your PHP application.

Suhosin-Patch 0.9.9.1

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 1:26am MST by Stefan Esser

Together with the release of PHP 5.3.2 by the PHP team I have released Suhosin-Patch 0.9.9.1 which comes with bugfixes and new features. The changes are:

fixed some crashbugs for IA64 architecture
check return value of mprotect() to ensure that memory is read only - credits: PAX Team
fixed mprotect() call - encrypted pointer was used in revoked 0.9.9 - credits: PAX Team
added additional hardening to destructor protection
added pointer obfuscation to memory manager

The most important new feature is the pointer obfuscation inside the PHP memory manager. This mitigation makes it much harder to exploit lots of memory corruptions correctly. Pointer obfuscation is also used to protect the pointer to the read only configuration inside Suhosin-Patch that allows it to be configured by environment variables.

Month of PHP Security - Blog Post Drawing

Posted: March 5th, 2010, 1:06am MST by Stefan Esser

While going through the [HTTP_REFERER] log of the Month of PHP Security website I realised that there are more incoming refers from various blog posts about it than there are submissions to drawing@php-security.org. Like I previously announced we will honor 10 blog postings with 25 EUR amazon coupons. The winners will be selected by random, however only among those we will select that announce their blogpost to us via the email address provided above.

The reasons for this rule is very simple. Without the announcement we would have to look at every new [HTTP_REFERER] and manually check if it is just spam, an old link to the Month of PHP Bugs, someone who just copied the blog of another person or other nonsense. In addition to that we have to find a contact address of the person who originally has written the entry and ask him/her if he/she wants to take part in the drawing. This would be too much work. Therefore announce your blog posting to drawing@php-security.org or you have no chance of winning one of the coupons.

Performance improvement in Joomla with WINCACHE user cache to cache session

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 9:54pm MST by Venkat Raman Don

Now that we have WINCACHE 1.1 Beta release which supports user as well as session cache, I am going to tell you a way to integrate session cache with Joomla using WINCACHE. Joomla has the way of integrating session cache based on user cache implementation and that’s what I am going to explain today. Increasing performance of Joomla by enabling it’s user cache functionality using WINCACHE is explained here.

Joomla session code is modular enough and in order to enable session cache based on WINCACHE user cache, one needs to paste the below code in a file named wincache.php and place it at folder libraries joomla\session\storage. This folder path is relative to your Joomla root installation folder.

<?php

// Check to ensure this file is within the rest of the framework

defined('JPATH_BASE') or die();

/**

* WINCACHE session storage handler for PHP

* @package        Joomla.Framework

* @subpackage    Session

* @since        1.5

* @see [www.php.net]

*/

class JSessionStorageWincache extends JSessionStorage

/**

    * Constructor

    * @access protected

    * @param array $options optional parameters

*/

    function __construct( $options = array() )

        if (!$this->test()) {

            return JError::raiseError(404, "The wincache extension is not available");

        parent::__construct($options);

/**

     * Open the SessionHandler backend.

     * @access public

     * @param string $save_path     The path to the session object.

     * @param string $session_name  The name of the session.

     * @return boolean  True on success, false otherwise.

*/

    function open($save_path, $session_name)

        return true;

/**

     * Close the SessionHandler backend.

     * @access public

     * @return boolean  True on success, false otherwise.

*/

    function close()

        return true;

/**

      * Read the data for a particular session identifier from the

      * SessionHandler backend.

      * @access public

      * @param string $id  The session identifier.

      * @return string  The session data.

*/

    function read($id)

        $sess_id = 'sess_

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 7501 bytes)

How to avoid Identity Theft in Zend Framework with Zend Auth

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 9:30pm MST by Zend Developer Zone

While there are many major security issues possible in a web application, there is a particular one that bugged me for some time. The Identity theft - Broken account and session management issue. Why can one so easily still my session id cookie and suddenly gain access to my account in one particular web application? I know it its rather impossible to make this 100% hack-proof but I strongly believe that the system should be improved as much as possible. Our goal is to implement a Zend Auth extension that adds a new level of security to the previously mentioned class. This extension - let's call it Project_Application_Auth - would check the Zend Auth storage for the IP and/or User Agent. In order to do so, these should be set in the login process in the storage. If the IP is different then the initial IP from the login process and / or the User Agent is not the same as the initial User Agent from the login process, then our extension would tell us that it is not a secure identity (aka it is safe to assume it has been stolen) and thus we should disconnect the user.

Performance improvement in Joomla using WINCACHE user cache

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 5:09pm MST by Venkat Raman Don

Now that we have WINCACHE 1.1 Beta released which has got implementation for both user and session cache, one can easily take advantage of WINCACHE user cache and increase performance of Joomla. In this post I am going to tell you steps to use WINCACHE user cache with Joomla.

Joomla caching code is modular and in order to enable WINCACHE user cache, one needs to paste the below code in a file named wincache.php and place it at folder libraries\joomla\cache\storage. All the folders mentioned here is with respect to root folder of Joomla installation.

<?php

// Check to ensure this file is within the rest of the framework

defined('JPATH_BASE') or die();

/**

 * WINCACHE cache storage handler

*/

class JCacheStorageWincache extends JCacheStorage

/**

     * Constructor

     * @access protected

     * @param array $options optional parameters

*/

    function __construct( $options = array() )

        parent::__construct($options);

        $config        = & JFactory::getConfig();

        $this->_hash    = $config->getValue('config.secret');

/**

     * Get cached data from WINCACHE by id and group

     * @access    public

     * @param    string    $id        The cache data id

     * @param    string    $group        The cache data group

     * @param    boolean    $checkTime    True to verify cache time expiration threshold

     * @return    mixed    Boolean false on failure or a cached data string

     * @since    1.5

*/

    function get($id, $group, $checkTime)

        $cache_id = $this->_getCacheId($id, $group);

        $this->_setExpire($cache_id);

        return wincache_ucache_get($cache_id);

/**

     * Store the data to WINCACHE by id and group

     * @access    public

     * @param    string    $id    The cache data id

     * @param    string    $group    The cache data group

     * @param    string    $data    The data to store in cache

     * @return    boolean    True on success, false otherwise

     * @since    1.5

*/

    function store($id, $group, $data)

        $cache_id = $this->_getCacheId($id, $group);

        wincache_ucache_set($cache_id.'_expire', time());

        return wincache_ucache_set($cache_id, $data, $this->_lifetime);

/**

     * Remove a cached data entry by id and group

     * @access    public

     * @param    string    $id        The cache data id

     * @param    string    $group    The cache data group

     * @return    boolean    True on success, false other

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 10114 bytes)

Searching for a decent set of cans…

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 4:49pm MST by Mark Dennehy

The old and fairly reliable Sennheiser RS40’s I was using up until a few weeks ago finally gave up the ghost in the run-up to Mobile World Congress this year – or to be more accurate, the battery packs finally…

Responding to Different Content Types in RESTful ZF Apps

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 1:28pm MST by Matthew Weier O'Phinney

In previous articles, I've explored building service endpoints and RESTful services with Zend Framework. With RPC-style services, you get to cheat: the protocol dictates the content type (XML-RPC uses XML, JSON-RPC uses JSON, SOAP uses XML, etc.). With REST, however, you have to make choices: what serialization format will you support?

Why not support multiple formats?

There's no reason you can't re-use your RESTful web service to support multiple formats. Zend Framework and PHP have plenty of tools to assist you in responding to different format requests, so don't limit yourself. With a small amount of work, you can make your controllers format agnostic, and ensure that you respond appropriately to different requests.

Continue reading "Responding to Different Content Types in RESTful ZF Apps"

A little light reading…

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 8:44am MST by Mark Dennehy

What do you do when you’ve successfully gotten a demo to Mobile World Congress and you want to reward yourself?

Go order a little light reading of course!

Amazon are really getting to…

More Performance Improvements in WinCache 1.1-Beta

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 2:10am MST by Ruslan Yakushev

Since the WinCache Extension for PHP has been released last year it has been widely deployed by customers who run PHP on Windows OS and it has proven to provide a substantial performance boost for PHP applications hosted on Windows-based web servers.

Today IIS team has published a beta of WinCache 1.1, which provides more options for improving performance of PHP applications on Windows. Specifically, the new version includes :

User Cache API’s, that can be used by PHP scripts to store PHP objects and variables in shared memory. This way PHP scripts may improve the execution speed by storing processed data in the cache and then using it in subsequent requests instead of re-creating the data on every request. The addition of these API’s closes the remaining feature gap that WinCache had when compared with other similar caching solutions like APC and XCache.
WinCache Session Handler, that can be used to configure PHP to store the session data in shared memory cache. Using shared memory instead of the default file session storage helps improve performance of PHP applications that store large amount of data in session objects.

The beta builds of the extension can be downloaded and installed from the extension home page at: [www.iis.net] (look for the “WinCache 1.1 – Beta” section there). The source code can be obtained from [pecl.php.net] . The documentation for the extension can be found on PHP.NET WinCache documentation.

This is the beta release and the WinCache team is looking for your feedback on new features and functionality. Use the WinCache Community Forum to ask questions about the extension, report bugs and problems and to suggest features and improvements.

More Performance Improvements in WinCache 1.1

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 2:10am MST by Ruslan Yakushev

Today IIS team has published a beta of WinCache 1.1, which provides more options for improving performance of PHP applications on Windows. Specifically, the new version includes :

User Cache API’s, that can be used by PHP scripts to store PHP objects and variables in shared memory. This way PHP scripts may improve the execution speed by storing processed data in the cache and then using it in subsequent requests instead of re-creating the data on every request. The addition of these API’s closes the remaining feature gap that WinCache had when compared with other similar caching solutions like APC and XCache.
WinCache Session Handler, that can be used to configure PHP to store the session data in shared memory cache. Using shared memory instead of the default file session storage helps improve performance of PHP applications that store large amount of data in session objects.

How to Override PHP Configuration Options

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 1:49am MST by SitePoint Â» PHP

configure PHP Configuring PHP is easy. You can change almost any aspect of the interpreter within the php.ini configuration file, e.g. modify error handling, increase memory usage, etc.

Unfortunately, problems can occur when you move your application to a live hosting environment or are distributing the code to customers. ISPs usually lock down the php.ini configuration file — especially on shared hosting. This could cause your application to fail.

Fortunately, it’s not necessary to upgrade to an expensive dedicated server. The two methods below allow you to override PHP settings within your application.

Apache Module Directives

The majority of ISPs provide Apache web server hosting on Linux or Unix platforms. Hopefully, they’ve also granted “AllowOverride Options” or “AllowOverride All” privileges in Apache’s [httpd.conf] configuration. This allows you to create an .htaccess file within your application’s root folder overrides the default Apache and PHP configuration.

Two PHP directives are permitted within .htaccess:

php_flag <boolean-flag-name> on|off
php_value <flag-name> <flag-value>

php_flag should be used for on/off values, whereas php_value can be used for any others. For example, the following .htaccess file will disable globals, set the maximum file upload size to 20MB, and allow PHP scripts to run for 10 minutes (600 seconds):


php_flag register_globals off
php_value upload_max_filesize 20M
php_value max_execution_time 600

However, the solution will not work in all Apache installations or other web servers such as IIS.

PHP Runtime Configuration

A more portable, server-agnostic solution is PHP’s ini_set function. — it allows you to change a setting within your application at runtime. The function accepts two arguments: ini_set(flag-name, flag-value), e.g.


<?php
ini_set('register_globals', 0);
ini_set('upload_max_filesize', '20M');
ini_set('max_execution_time', 600);
?>

Booleans, numbers and strings can be used interchangeably — PHP will attempt to cast the value to an appropriate type.

Several related functions are available:

ini_get(flag-name)
Returns the configuration value. I’d recommend checking your configuration change and taking appropriate action. Don’t assume ini_get() will always work.

ini_get_all([extension])
Returns all configuration values as an associative array. The optional extension parameter returns options specific to that extension, e.g. ‘allow_url_fopen’.

get_cfg_var(flag-name)
Returns the original configuration value from php.ini (not any overrides set in .htaccess or by ini_set).

ini_restore(flag-name)
Returns a configuration option to its original value.

Coming soon: How to Handle Unloaded PHP Extensions.

Has PHP configuration ever caused you problems when porting an application to another server?

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PHP 5.3.2 Release Announcement

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 4:00pm MST by PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.2. This is a maintenance release in the 5.3 series, which includes a large number of bug fixes. Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.3.2:Improved LCG entropy. (Rasmus, Samy Kamkar)Fixed safe_mode validation inside tempnam() when the directory path does not end with a /). (Martin Jansen)Fixed a possible open_basedir/safe_mode bypass in the session extension identified by Grzegorz Stachowiak. (Ilia)Key Bug Fixes in PHP 5.3.2 include:Added support for SHA-256 and SHA-512 to php's crypt.Added protection for $_SESSION from interrupt corruption and improved "session.save_path" check.Fixed bug #51059 (crypt crashes when invalid salt are given).Fixed bug #50940 Custom content-length set incorrectly in Apache sapis.Fixed bug #50847 (strip_tags() removes all tags greater then 1023 bytes long).Fixed bug #50723 (Bug in garbage collector causes crash).Fixed bug #50661 (DOMDocument::loadXML does not allow UTF-16).Fixed bug #50632 (filter_input() does not return default value if the variable does not exist).Fixed bug #50540 (Crash while running ldap_next_reference test cases).Fixed bug #49851 (http wrapper breaks on 1024 char long headers).Over 60 other bug fixes. For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3. Further information and downloads: For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.2, see the ChangeLog. For source downloads please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.

DB_CouchDB_Replicator

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 12:44pm MST by till

Update, 2010-03-04: I just rolled a 0.0.2 release. In case you had 0.0.1 installed, just use pear upgrade-all to get it automatically. This release is trying to fix a random hang while reading documents from the source server.

I also opened a repository on Github.

---

As some may have guessed from a previous blog post we are currently running a test setup with CouchDB lounge. My current objective is to migrate our 200 million documents to it, and this is where I am essentially stuck this week.

No replication, no bulk docs

The lounge currently does not support replication (to it) or saving documents via bulk requests, so in essence migrating a lot of data into it is slow and tedious.

I have yet to figure out if there is a faster way (Maybe parallelization?), but DB_CouchDB_Replicator is the result of my current efforts.

I think I gave up on parallelization for now because it looked like hammering the lounge with a single worker was already enough, but generally I didn't have time to experiment much with it. It could have been my network connection too. Feedback in this area is very, very appreciated.

DB_CouchDB_Replicator

DB_CouchDB_Replicator is a small PHP script which takes two arguments, --source and --target. Both accept values in style of http://username:password@localhost:port/db and attempt to move all documents from source to target.

Since long running operations on the Internet are bound to fail, I also added a --resume switch, and while it's running it outputs a progress bar, so it should be fairly easy to resume. And you also get an idea of where it's currently at and how much more time it will eat up.

These switches may change, and I may add more — so keep an eye on --help. Also, keep in mind, that this is very alpha and I give no guarantees.

Installation

Installation is simple! :-)

apt-get install php-pear
pear config-set preferred_state alpha
pear channel-discover till.pearfarm.org
pear install till.pearfarm.org/DB_CouchDB_Replicator

Once installed, the replicator resides in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin and is called couchdb-replicator.

Fin

The code is not yet on github, but will eventually end up there. All feedback is welcome!

Zend Framework and Doctrine integration – autoloading of doctrine models

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 12:11pm MST by Michael Kimsal

I’m reinvestigating Doctrine and Zend Framework for a new project. I’d dismissed them last year as not meeting my needs, but am giving it another go this year. I have to say I’ve got mixed impressions at best, as there seems to be little in the way of documentation with real use cases.

I would have expected there to be some explicit reference to how to set this up, but the best I can find are general examples where the Doctrine models directories are appended to the include_path in a ZF index file. Shouldn’t there be a way to explicitly have the Doctrine subsystem react to requests for models as well?

I was expecting the Doctrine::autoload to look for the classes on the ‘models path’ set via Doctrine::setModelsDirectory() call, but it doesn’t.

Hrm… after more investigation, it seems there’s a ‘modelsAutoload’ method on the Doctrine_core which will automatically look at the models_path set via setModelsDirectory(). Almost what I need. Except…(!)

There’s no support for multiple directories. The standard Doctrine generation process creates a ‘BaseFoo’ object in a ‘generated’ directory below where the standard ‘Foo’ file is written. The ‘Foo’ file subclasses the BaseFoo, but there’s no support to have it autoloaded.

In my ‘_initDoctrine()’ in Bootstrap, I’ve got

$autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();
$autoloader-&gt;pushAutoloader(array('Doctrine','modelsAutoload'));

I know what to do here! I thought to myself. I’ll subclass Doctrine’s Core (which is what’s referenced by the ‘Doctrine’ above) and have that be the autoloader to use. I’ll modify the modelsAutoload() method to deal with an array of $_modelsDirectory entries, and attempt to load from each of them. Except…(!)

$_modelsDirectory is *private*. I can’t modify it in a subclass, nor is there a get() method on the Core class to access it. There’s a *set* method (setModelsDirectory()) but no get! So, I’m rather forced to go through modifying the Doctrine Core to get the behaviour I want, in the simplest form. I’ve been trying to followup on some other postings about getting autoload to work with Doctrine-generated models, but they seem incomplete (to me anyway) or suggest to modify how Doctrine generates its class names (doesn’t seem simple or straightforward to me at all). Having Doctrine core be able to deal with an array of paths to check for models would be the simplest, especially given that Doctrine *forces* this issue on you by generating classes in different directories by default.

Crux of the code is:

Doctrine/Core.php line 1142

if(is_array(self::$_modelsDirectory)) {
 foreach(self::$_modelsDirectory as $dir) {
  $class = $dir . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR "/>

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 4098 bytes)

Why I’m (truly and geekishly) excited about Zend Server 5!

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 6:33am MST by Andi on Web & IT

Over the years I’ve played key roles in many software projects. Although I have had many successes there are only a few which were truly memorable. On average I probably do a very exciting project every three years. I would say that’s above industry standards :)

Last week we released Zend Server 5 and it is another memorable moment for me. Not because the process of getting it out the door was all smooth (it sometimes felt like pulling teeth) or because it’s a new major version of Zend Server.

It’s because the new code tracing feature gets me very excited and is a kickass technology. Code tracing solves real problems for developers and IT operation teams. One of the biggest challenges in managing production environments is troubleshooting problems. Whether it is an application that runs transactions against a database, calls Web Services, or interoperates with a Java app server, being able to reproduce the problem after the fact is very often hard and sometimes just impossible. Working on such problems has always killed my productivity and reduced the amount of time I could truly be focused on writing new code.

This is where code tracing comes in. It’s a very cool technology that is optimized to run in production and can keep track of what’s happening deep within the PHP application. It hooks into our event system that tracks DB events, slow scripts, errors, and more. When something goes wrong it can dump a snapshot of the whole execution flow – function calls, arguments, return values, memory consumed, duration – from the beginning of the request to the point where the error occurs. This enables developers to analyze and triage the problem after the fact – easily and efficiently. Best of all – while it’s targeted at production (high performance and robust) it’s also extremely useful during development and testing.

What makes this feature even cooler is that Adobe worked closely with us to build a really nice Flex UI ( [static.zend.com] ) for analyzing code tracing. It feels good to have stable and efficient production technology, but it’s even better when there’s visualization that enables the users to interact with the data quickly and effectively. Thanks to Adobe for helping us build a superb UI! This is just the first version of the UI – the sky’s definitely the limit with where this can go.

I am proud of what we’ve built and the people who participated in building it. I have no doubt that it will lead to tremendous time savings for PHP shops and make developers’ lives significantly easier and happier. I just hope I don’t need to wait another three years now for the next big thing… I bet not!

Reported Attack Site - recovering from gumblars

Posted: March 3rd, 2010, 1:58am MST by Alan Knowles

Just about finished a gumblar cleanup, for a small Hong Kong company. This is not the first crack I've seen in the last few months, I fixed another server last month that got ssh brute force attacked. It looks like cracking is on the up, so if you need help fixing a site, by someone who knows what they are doing, and at the same time you will help out a number of open source projects - give me a bell (alan@akbkhome.com)

The gumblar (or derivative) attack I was looking at was quite interesting, the first indication the owner got was that browsers kept showing the "Reported Attack Site!" or "Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer" message. So I get the call to find out what's going on.

When you ignore the message and go through to the site, look at the html the first thing you see is that there is a <script> tag added just before the body pointing to a gifimg.php file. After that you have a long hunt around google to find out what's going on.

At the time of writing, the exact attack vector does not look like it's been confirmed, but is either a brute force ftp attack (I think is quite unlikely considering the username/pass combo on this sample site). Or more likely a PDF desktop attack to a machine that has access to the site.

My first assumption was that it was a Wordpress exploit, but the more I examined the situation, it seemed less likely. However I highly suspect that the PDF attack vector having got the ftp credentials goes looking for standard locations of wordpress installations (eg. '/wordpress) - so hint one is not to install your software in such obvious places.

Cleaning it out

The first step in sorting out the mess was to mirror the original site, with virus and all onto a offline location. (both as a precaution that if we broke things we had a backup, and so we can use this as a source to replace the hacked files with new ones).

After that it was a matter of googling for details of the attack and writing a gumblar cleaner script. It basically checks for infected file types, then preg_replaces out the hacked additions. These include

php files with an eval/base64_encode line
javascript files with document.write lines
html, shtml and htm files with <script tags.

I used ftpput, and check return values, to ensure that each file was successfully replaced before overwriting the local copy and making a nice copy for my reference into the virus folder.

Inside out of the attack.

The infection is quite interesting, and in this case was quite painful, due to the nature of how Wordpress publishes files.

Initially I suspect the core code in the PDF actually has some ftp code which will try and modify standard set of PHP files to add a small base64_encode script.. (phplist, and wordpress appear to be core targets, and I'm sure there are more.)

This is a snippet of some of the code that get's added (it's all eval, base64_encoded - read up on my blog post about idiot ways to protect your PHP code using this idea.)

This is a snippet of the decoded script


if(!function_exists('kqyf')){
   function kqyf($s){

     ... infect the page stuff goes here...  
	}
	function kqyf2($a,$b,$c,$d){
		global$kqyf1;
		$s=array();
		if(function_exists($kqyf1))
			call_user_func($kqyf1,$a,$b,$c,$d);
		foreach(@ob_get_status(1)as$v)
			if(($a=$v['name'])=='kqyf')
				return;
			elseif($a=='ob_gzhandler')
				break;
			else
				$s[]=array($a=='default output handler'?false:$a);
		for($i=count($s)-1;$i>=0;$i--){
			$s[$i][1]=ob_get_contents();
			ob_end_clean();
		}
		ob_start('kqyf');
		for($i=0;$i<count($s);$i++){
			ob_start($s[$i][0]);
			echo $s[$i][1];
		}
	}
}

$kqyfl=(($a=@set_error

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1041 bytes)

Mobile World Congress 2010

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 8:32am MST by Mark Dennehy

Two years ago while I was working at dotMobi, I was one of the programmers working on the DeviceAtlas project, which launched at Mobile World Congress 2008. At the time, it was the largest launch I’d been involved in and it was quite a ride towards the end – when you’re launching to 60,000 people [...]

LAMP Training for GrameenPhone: Download the course materials

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 4:33am MST by Hasin Hayder

Strategische Vorgehensmodelle für Web Security Vortrag@Mayflower-München

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 3:39am MST by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

Achtung! Neuer Termin: 04. März 2010

Am kommenden Donnerstag, den 04.03.2010 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 "Strategische Vorgehensmodelle für Web Security".

Web Security rückt zunehmend in den Mittelpunkt aktueller Businessanwendungen. Dabei gibt es einige strategische Vorgehensmodelle, wie Web Security für Lösungen in Unternehmen realisiert werden kann. Johann-Peter Hartmann gibt einen Überblick.

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!

Foto: ntr23 (flickr)

Using Daemon-Kit and RobustThread to Build Ruby Daemons

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 3:30am MST by IONCANNON

On a number of occasions I have found myself needing to assemble a daemon process for some type or processing done using Ruby. Each time I roll things a little different and I finally started to wonder if someone had already put together tools for doing the daemon parts. After some quick digging I ran into Daemon-Kit and after adding it together with a couple other tools it seems like what I've needed. I've put together a few recipes here to help guide others who might be looking for something similar.

A simple daemon
An event driven daemon with RabbitMQ
RobustThread, timeouts, monit/god, capistrano
Other Ruby daemon options

A simple daemon

Creating a simple daemon is easy. This is a simple walk through so look at the project's documentation for much more information. First you will need to get the gem installed:

gem install daemon-kit

After the gem is installed you create a daemon with the following command:

daemon-kit asimple

Now you have some generated code in the asimple directory. In that directory you will find a README that tells you want each directory is used for. The main file to look at for this example is:

libexec/asimple-daemon.rb

A fresh file will have a lot of comments in it pointing you in the right direction. Here is a modified version where I'm displaying the contents of /tmp over and over:

DaemonKit::Application.running! do |config|
end

loop do
  DaemonKit.logger.info Dir.entries('/tmp/').join(' ')
  sleep 5
end

To run the daemon you would use a command like the following:

RUBYOPT=rubygems ./bin/asimple

The documentation found in the project is great so look there for more information. There is a lot of flexibility built in like multiple environment support and command line options. The daemons and angels blog post is educational and worth a read for more on the basics of daemon-kit.

After experimenting for a while I think I may want to go back and redo the live segmenter so that it uses daemon-kit instead of my hand rolled process. That is probably a good example of where the simple functionality comes in.

An event driven daemon with RabbitMQ

What tilted me towards looking into Ruby daemon options was actually another event driven process I was thinking about. As it turns out daemon-kit supports creating evented daemons as well. I picked RabbitMQ for the following example but anything that supports AMQP should work. I'm going to assume you have RabbitMQ installed already.

First off you need to install the AMQP gem:

gem install eventmachine
gem install amqp

At this point you might want to verify that you can connect to your MQ server using some AMQP examples.

To generate an event based daemon use the following command:

daemon-kit -i amqp eventbased

For some reason the generated code didn't work right out of the box for me but a slight modification fixed the issue. I added the following to the top of the config/environment.rb file:

require 'amqp'
require 'mq'

Again the file generated in libexec is the starting point and gives you good hints as to where you want to start. I've modified my example above to take a directory to gather the contents of and respond with those contents as another message:

DaemonKit::Application.running! do |config|
end

DaemonKit::AMQP.run do
  amq = ::MQ.new

  amq.queue('dir_request').subscribe(:ack => true) do |h, msg|
      h.ack # just ack the message

      DaemonKit.logger.debug "Received message: #{msg.inspect}"

      amq.queue('dir_response').publish(Dir.entries(msg).join(' '))
  end
end

One thing to note is that I've set the message queue to require an acknowledgement for each message. I did this to simulate a process that requires that each request be executed once. Now all that is needed is a simple application to produce request messages and display the response:

require 'rubygems

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 7600 bytes)

Reported Attack Site - recovering from gumbars

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 2:25am MST by Alan Knowles

Just about finished a gumbar cleanup, for a small Hong Kong company. This is not the first crack I've seen in the last few months, I fixed another server last month that got ssh brute force attacked. It looks like cracking is on the up, so if you need help fixing a site, by someone who knows what they are doing, and at the same time you will help out a number of open source projects - give me a bell (alan@akbkhome.com)

The gumbar (or derivative) attack I was looking at was quite interesting, the first indication the owner got was that browsers kept showing the "Reported Attack Site!" or "Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer" message. So I get the call to find out what's going on.

Cleaning it out

After that it was a matter of googling for details of the attack and writing a gumbar cleaner script. It basically checks for infected file types, then preg_replaces out the hacked additions. These include

php files with an eval/base64_encode line
javascript files with document.write lines
html, shtml and htm files with <script tags.

I used ftpput, and check return values, to ensure that each file was successfully replaced before overwriting the local copy and making a nice copy for my reference into the virus folder.

Inside out of the attack.

The infection is quite interesting, and in this case was quite painful, due to the nature of how Wordpress publishes files.

This is a snippet of some of the code that get's added (it's all eval, base64_encoded - read up on my blog post about idiot ways to protect your PHP code using this idea.)

This is a snippet of the decoded script


if(!function_exists('kqyf')){
   function kqyf($s){

     ... infect the page stuff goes here...  
	}
	function kqyf2($a,$b,$c,$d){
		global$kqyf1;
		$s=array();
		if(function_exists($kqyf1))
			call_user_func($kqyf1,$a,$b,$c,$d);
		foreach(@ob_get_status(1)as$v)
			if(($a=$v['name'])=='kqyf')
				return;
			elseif($a=='ob_gzhandler')
				break;
			else
				$s[]=array($a=='default output handler'?false:$a);
		for($i=count($s)-1;$i>=0;$i--){
			$s[$i][1]=ob_get_contents();
			ob_end_clean();
		}
		ob_start('kqyf');
		for($i=0;$i<count($s);$i++){
			ob_start($s[$i][0]);
			echo $s[$i][1];
		}
	}
}

$kqyfl=(($a=@set_error_ha

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1038 bytes)

PHP Continuous Integration with Atlassian Bamboo

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 7:46pm MST by Mike Willbanks

Continuous integration is all the rage these days; you are unit testing your code are you not? During some consulting in January with the help of Sebastian Bergmann, from thePHP.cc, we setup continuous integration utilizing Atlassian Bamboo and received training on PHPUnit.

Using Atlassian Bamboo for continuous integration will take you a bit to setup, however, I have found it to be an invaluable tool when utilizing the Atlassian stack (JIRA, Confluence, Crucible, Bamboo and Crowd).

Overview

This posting assumes the following:

You have Atlassian Bamboo setup
Ant is available on the system
You already have PHPUnit setup for your project
You have selected a coding standard

This posting will go over the following:

Getting Started
PHP Depend
PHP Code Browser
PHP Code Sniffer
PHP Copy/Paste Detector
PHP Mess Detector
PHPUnit

Getting Started

Welcome to the voyage of continuous integration with Bamboo, now that you are ready, lets get started.

Installing the PHP Tools

We will assume using the PEAR installer for installing all of the tools.

PHP Depend

pear channel-discover pear.pdepend.org pear install pdepend/PHP_Depend-beta

PHP Code Browser

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de pear install phpunit/PHP_CodeBrowser-alpha

PHP Code Sniffer

pear install PHP_CodeSniffer

PHP Copy/Paste Detector

pear install phpunit/phpcpd

PHP Mess Detector

pear channel-discover pear.phpmd.org pear install --alldeps phpmd/PHP_PMD-beta

PHPUnit

pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

Build Setup in Bamboo The Plugins

There are a few plugins that we will utilize to capture build metrics. You will want to install these to follow along:

Plan Details

Assuming that you are new to Bamboo and have not created a build as of yet, you will need to login to Bamboo and then click on “Create Plan” in the navigation. Here you will find a few options, most of these are self explanatory. Just remember that you can have several different builds so you may want to specify if it is a trunk build or a specific component build. Once you are completed, click on next.

Source Repository

Put in the details to your source code repository. If the source code repository is not available, there is likely a plug-in for it available. Download it, restart bamboo, and continue to this step. We do not force a clean build every time, this is due to some additional configuration that we have set for an environment in a configuration file and to reduce the amount of time to do a build. Lastly, we do polling to detect if we need to do a build. This helps us because we do not want a 5 minute build during every change but rather within 10 minutes of any change. This helps reduce building too frequently or causing a potential for a race condition (assuming there was a bug in Bamboo). Go to the next step…

Builder

Let’s use ant for the build process. Do not worry about this for now, we will get more into the ant build script later on. State the build file as “build.xml” which will live in the main root of the source code (you could place this elsewhere but for simplicity sakes lets put it here and assume you’re not storing the htdocs at the root – please tell me you’re not). Under target place “clean build” since we will do some manual cleanup of existing build information.

Under the following questions you will want to fill out information:

Where should Bamboo look for the test result files?
- Check: “The build will produce test results.”
- Specify custom results directories: “**/build/logs/phpunit.xml”
Where should Bamboo look for the PMD code analysis output?
- Check: “PMD output will be produced”
- PMD XML Directory: “**/build/logs/pmd*.xml”
Would you like to view Clover Code Coverage for this plan?
- Check: “Use Clover to collect Code C

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 21234 bytes)

Handling fonts in PECL/Cairo

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 12:06pm MST by Michael Maclean

(This is just a quick note to get some information out there for reference, I am adding it to the PHP manual as well!)

Currently, in PECL/Cairo the only way to draw text is the referred to as the "toy" text API, which is a very basic way of handling text compared to the facilities available in the Cairo library itself. However, it's sufficient for most purposes that I've come across so far. In version 0.1.0 of PECL/Cairo, there was only one way to choose what font you wished to use, which was the CairoContext::selectFontFace() method. You pass a string to this method with the name of the font you want, along with the optional slant and weight parameters. This then invokes your system's font handling to find the font you're after, or an alternative if it's not available, so you need to have the font you want installed into your system's font library.This is occasionally not handy.

In version 0.2.0 FreeType support was added. It allows you to choose any font file you'd like, as long as PHP's streams API can find it. Yes, this means 'http://' streams, but I wouldn't recommend it.

<?php
/* Set up the surface, and make the background white */
$s = new CairoImageSurface(CairoFormat::ARGB32, 300, 100);
$c = new CairoContext($s);
$c->setSourceRgb(1, 1, 1);
$c->paint();

/* Draw the text using the Vollkorn font, from
[friedrichalthausen.de] */
$c->setSourceRGB(0, 0, 0);
$c->moveTo(10, 60);
$f = new CairoFtFontFace(dirname(__FILE__) . "/vollkorn.otf");
$c->setFontFace($f);
$c->setFontSize(50);
$c->showText("Hello world");

/* Send the image to the browser */
header("Content-type: image/png");
$s->writeToPng("php://output");
?>

The output image should hopefully look like this:

Script output

(For those who are familiar with the Cairo library, this function maps to the cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_ft_face function in its API.)

There is still some work to be done in this area, notably to support the Windows and Mac OS X font systems, but they'll be coming in a future release, we hope. If anyone would like to help us with that, or any other aspect of it (including documentation!), you can get in touch on the PECL dev mailing list, or if you're on IRC, drop in to #php.pecl on EFnet. All contributions are welcome!

Speaking

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 10:46am MST by Ian Barber

Thanks to everyone that came along to my talk about integrating search engines at the wonderful PHP UK 2010. The slides are available over at Slideshare. It was great speaking to so many people afterward about the challenges and solutions they've found with various engines, and the conference itself was top notch - congratulations to the organisers.

I'll be giving a (slightly shortened) version of the same talk at the Dutch PHP Conference 2010, which June 10-12th in the ever lovely Amsterdam. The schedule is absolutely chocker with great talks, from people like Elizabeth Naramore, Helgi, Thijs, Derick, Johannes and a load more. I'm particularly looking forward to Marcus' talk on geo data, and I would be looking forward to Sam de Freyssinet's talk on HMVC, except it's on at the same time as mine!

Solar 1.0.0beta5 Released

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 7:10am MST by Paul M. Jones

This past Friday, I released verion 1.0.0beta5 of the Solar Framework for PHP. You can read the change notes here. Overall, most of the work was related to the form helpers and making them even more flexible than they were previously. We’ve also added a new manual chapter on working with models and forms. It [...]

Developing scalable PHP applications using MongoDB

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 4:11am MST by PHP Classes

Developing scalable PHP applications using MongoDB By Cesar D. Rodas Nowadays there is a new kind of databases that is getting very popular, specially for Web development, including the PHP world, which are the NoSQL databases.

This article focus specifically on MongoDB, despite there are several other NoSQL database implementations.

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