IBM DeveloperWorks: Experiments Using PHP
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Paul Meagher wrote in to tell us about a new article of his over on the IBM DeveloperWorks section - Conduct Web experiments using PHP: Part 2.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:ProDevTips.com: Writing a CMS/Community with Smarty and the Zend Framework: Part 6Nessa's Blog: Using an .htaccess with PHP Compiled as CGIArnold Daniels' Blog: How I PHP: The Output Handler - ContinuedMartynas Jusevicius' Blog: PHP 5 features: Class autoloadingSean Coates' Blog: Actually Solving a Problem (believe it or not)The Northclick Blog: Message Queue Project: First working versionStefan Mischook's Blog: A Question about object properties in PHP ClassesJob Posting: G2 Technology Seeks PHP Developer (Memphis, TN)Rob Allen's Blog: Zend_View: Access the view from a view helperDavid Walsh's Blog: Using PHP Generic Objects To Organize Your Code
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A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:    Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.    On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.    He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").   You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.
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DevShed has posted the second and last part of a series of two articles based around the Composite design pattern - using it to work with strings in PHP5.   Are you a PHP developer who wants to improve your skills in pattern-based programming in PHP? If the answer to this question is a emphatic yes, then you should begin reading this article now! Welcome to the final part of the series "Implementing the composite pattern with PHP 5." Comprised of two instructive tutorials, this series walks you through the basic concepts of this important design pattern, and shows you how to apply it with some educational examples.   They start by defining a simple StringProcessor class as an abstract interface to build from. From there, they create two other classes - the SingleStringProcessor and the MultipleStringProcessor. Each of these takes in either a single file or multiple filenames and spits back out the value of the string and the length of the string.
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Cal Evans has posted his notes from the (just passed) Web Builder 2.0 Conference that happened over in Las Vegas. PHP had its presence there through Cal's "PHP Powers Mashups" talk and others like Chris Shiflett.   There was plenty to see and do at the conference besides PHP and Cal highlights just a few:  AJAX Optimization talks  An overview of some Flickr Stats Google's mashup offerings An introduction to  and some talk of benchmarking Ajax  Check out the full post though - it's jam-packed with links and some great event information.
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DevShed ramps up another new series today with this new article giving developers a look at working with object-oriented programming through the eyes of design patterns. It's another excerpt from the George Schlossnagle book "Advanced PHP Programming".   This chapter provides an overview of the advanced OO features now available in PHP. Some of the examples developed here will be used throughout the rest of this book and will hopefully serve as a demonstration that certain problems really benefit from the OO approach.   The article lays down the foundation for the more complex information to come. It introduces object-oriented programming briefly, and talks about some of the handy features of it - like inheritance, static attributes and methods.
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While attending Gunter Kniesel's "Aspect-Oriented Software Development" lecture yesterday it occured to me that it might be possible to (ab)use PHP 5's __autoload(), __call(), __get(), and __set() interceptors to facilitate Aspect-Oriented Programming with PHP.
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On the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans has posted a quick look at one of the new offerings from the Manning Publishing group - "PHP in Action".   My buddy Olivia over at Manning Publications sent us a present recently. They are working on the title PHP in Action and they sent us a chapter to share with you. PHP in Action is scheduled to release in April of this year but it's available now in "Manning Early Release Program", or MEAP. MEAP is a cool program that allows you to buy the book long before it is released and have access to the chapters as they are released. Then, when the final dead-tree edition ships, they will send you one. The great thing is, there is no additional cost for MEAP.   He links to the book's description on the Manning site and gives some credit to the authors, Dagfinn Reiersol with Marcus Baker and Chris Shiflett. And, of course, the link to the sample chapter from the book - a look at Design Patterns.
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Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interesting article over on the CIO magazine website that has some in the PHP community a bit up in arms about comments it makes towards the language.   The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.   Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:   Security and PHP Working with PHP and the shell Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)   These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.
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In this new article from DevShed.com, they provide a high-level introduction to PHP - what it is, where it came from, some of the sample features (of both PHP 4 and PHP 5), as well as some of the drawbacks for the language.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:DeveloperTutorials.com: Writing an Email Autoresponder Script with PHPJaybill McCarthy's Blog: 10 PHP Myths DispelledIBM developerWorks: Mastering regular expressions in PHP, Part 1Job Posting: OmniTI Seeks PHP Talent (Brooklyn, NY)Zend Developer Zone: php|architect Announces 'Programming with the Zend Framework'DeveloperTutorials.com: Create a Facebook Application With PHPRob Allen's Blog: New Zend Framework Blog/WebsiteMichael Kimsal's Blog: Ecommerce system ideasJob Posting: Buildersite.co.uk Seeks PHP Programmer/Web Developer (Central London)Zend Developer Zone: Debugging PHP applications with xdebug
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Ben Ramsey, a speaker at both the Zend/PHP Conference 2006 and the International PHP Conference 2006, has posted a monster wrap up for both events to his blog today.   This post is long overdue, but I was finally able to sit down and type out my thoughts about the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo and the International PHP Conference.    First up is his look at the Zend conference - largely a good experience. He specifically mentions the talk from Rob Richards, the "Extending PHP" tutorial session (with Sara and Marcus), and the infamous misunderstanding about his laptop bag (which was resolved shortly after the conference had concluded).   His experience with the International PHP Conference went equally well, despite the location of the event being slightly more out of the way than some liked. He comments on the excellent conference materials provided, the types of attendees, and some of the talks he attended - Aaron Wormus' "Mastering enterprise-level PHP tools PEAR, PhpDocumentor and testing" and Sata Golemon's "Navigating Streams" being among them. If you like to check them out, he's also posted some photos of the conference and a night out around the town he took.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:RefreshinglyBlue Blog: PHP vs Ruby - Practical Language DifferencesAndreas Gohr's Blog: Determine StumbleUpon RankingsPHP.net: PHP 5.2.4 ReleasedThe Bakery: Five New Posts - Custom Views, CSS, ViewInFile, ActsAs and Email ValidationPHPBuilder.com: File uploads made easyStefan Mischook's Blog: Turning on display_errors in WAMP - Video Tutorialphp|architect: Pro::PHP Podcast - Newscast for August 2007MT-Soft Blog: Creating a secure PHP production environment from Source CodeCommunity News: Andi Gutmans to Present at AjaxWorld 2007HowTo Forge: How To Set Up A Facebook RSS Feed Reader
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The Eclipse Project (who recently announced, in conjunction with Zend, the release of the PHP IDE PDT 1.0) are putting on a live webinar covering the software and its release.   This webinar will include a short history about the PHP Development Tools framework project, some statistical information (downloads, committers, bugs) and a demonstration of the project. The demonstration includes the different perspectives (PHP and PHP Debug) and the different views under each perspective. We will go through the creation of a PHP project, a PHP file and a debug session, where we will illustrate the debug features. During the presentation we will also see the relations to the WTP project which the PHP project is based on.   The event will be happening October 2nd (2007) at 9am PDT/12pm EDT/4pm GMT and will run about an hour. To attend, head to the event's page and click on the "Register" button on the right.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's this new tutorial that looks at making the move from PHP4's object-oriented programming up to the "more complete obejct model of PHP5" - specifically with the Decorator design pattern.   While working on a project I realized one particular solution was a pretty good way to demonstrate the decorator design pattern together with some of PHP5's features, including abstract classes, interfaces, type hinting, the final keyword and the visibility of properties and methods. This article is intended for those of you who, like myself, are moving from object-oriented programming, including some use of design patterns, in PHP4, to the more complete object model of PHP5.   He sets up a scenario about the development of an online pizza ordering system to show how to "decorate" a pizza with each of the toppings on a list (instead of having to list out every pizza in every possible topping combination). Of course, all of the code is included and explained so you understand exactly what's happening. Finally, there's a demonstration of its usage - a simple call that grabs the stock level/name/cost of each of the items in stock (pizza combinations).
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Over on the Zend Developer Zone today, Akash Mehta has written up  a review of a book from Packt Publishing, "PHP Web 2.0 Mashups" (by Shu-Wai Chow):    As it's title suggests, PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects is a demonstration of the various techniques available for developing mashups in PHP. Through a highly practical format, Shu-Wai takes the reader through a series of projects utilising different web services and APIs, while carefully exposing the reader to a wide variety of technologies and data formats.   With careful selection and shaping of language, the book is an extremely effective introduction to the world of mashup development with PHP.    Akash talks about the contents of the book (the different projects it covers) and how the book provides a version useful resource to those just getting into the mashup world - a reference guide to some of the popular data transfer methods/formats out there.
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With all of the recent talk about business cases for PHP, Ben Ramsey wanted to get some of his thoughts on the matter out and into his blog in a new post.   I don't believe anyone has ever published any white papers on PHP, giving it a business case, and while we have companies like Zend, OmniTI, and eZ Systems providing support for PHP, I haven't seen any documentation from them like this. So, last Thursday when Stuart Herbert announced his Google Group for developing a business case for PHP, I took notice and joined.   Definitely good to hear encouraging words about a project that could ultimately help out the language as a whole break into an area where the growth has been the slowest.