IBM developerWorks: Building the DB2 Health Monitor Sample Application for PHP
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On the IBM developerWorks website there's a new tutorial (part 2 of the series, here's part 1) about creating the DB2 Health Monitor sample app:   DB2 9 pureXML technology allows businesses to improve data integrity and avoid legacy data lock-in. It enables application developers to utilize the best storage medium for the task and eliminate the middle-tier application logic previously required to take advantage of Web services.   PHP's role in the creation is to generate the XML that the system needs to communicate between the application and the database.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Job Posting: WorldNetJobs.com Seeks Expert PHP Developer (Multiple Locations - FL/MD/NY)Stefan Reuter's Blog: Profiling PHP ApplicationsRich Zygler's Blog: People work with WS-* web services in PHP? Why?PHPBuilder.com: Securing Data Sent Via GET RequestsKore Nordmann's Blog: Comparision of PHP image librariesJim Wynia's Blog:  WebDAV, PHP and YouPadraic Brady's Blog: Namespaces (or Yet Another Pointless Opinion Piece)Christopher Jones' Blog: PHP 5.2.5 RPMs with OCI8 and PDO_OCI are availableZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 29: PHP Women Podcast (Recorded Live)Evert Pot's Blog: PHP WebDAV Integration Library
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In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".   I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.   His list consists of:  You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan Combat Database Abuse Do You Really Need A Database Anyway? Scale Horizontally Refactor To Scale Vertically  For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.
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In a post from PHP Magazine today, there's mention of an interesting discussion that was had at the latest NYPHP meeting concerning the accessing of the NDB Cluster native API directly from PHP.
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With just a quick, supporting note today, John Lim has posted to the PHP Everywhere blog about the Zend Core download that Zend offers to help make installing PHP and its friends even easier.   I'd like to point out that one of the greatest services to the PHP community that Zend is providing is the free Zend Core for Oracle and Zend Core for DB2. The latest versions install PHP 5.1.6. The little known secret is that these 2 installers are perfect for MySQL as the mysql and mysqli extensions are included in the release.   He also recommends it for the IISers out there because of the FastCGI support built in.
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Latest PECL Releases:PDO_IBM 1.1.1ibm_db2 1.6.1yaz 1.0.12imagick 2.0.0b1
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Tony Bibbs takes a look at an increasingly popular bit of functionality in PHP5, the SOAP extension, and notes that it still has a "ways to go".   In my latest round of web services work in PHP5 I was creating a PHP5 client that interacts with our Java-based ERP. The client needs to be a combination of a couple of WSDL's into one, nice, compact and powerful client. It should be noted this client will be distributed via the State of Iowa PEAR channel so it will undoubted by used by other project in our organization and throughout state government so the result needs to have a lot more fit-and-finish than would be typical.   He mentions his expectations for PHP's usage of the protocol, including the automatic generation of variables/methods/etc to help the developer use the remote application easier.
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Derick Rethans has posted a new item to his blog about the release of the popular PHP debugging software's latest version XDebug 2.0.1.   This version comes with a few bug fixes but the main thing is greatly improved performance of Xdebug's Code Coverage functionality. To give an idea on what kind of improvement I'm talking, I am including very rough benchmark results.   He describes the benchmarks and gives the results - without code coverage and the pre/post of this new version (2.0.0 versus 2.0.1). The results are very impressive.
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Daniel Krook has announced the latest release from the CakePHP framework team - the new DB2 driver (alpha version) he submitted.   The CakePHP team has included the ibm_db2 driver that I submitted in the latest 1.2 development branch. I've sent out a call for alpha testers to put it through its paces.   If you'd like to help out and test it yourself, check out his post for instructions on grabbing the sample application, setting up the database, and what to change on the CakePHP configuration to get started.
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Joshua Eichorn points out an interesting project in a new post to his blog today - quercus.   I found an interesting project, quercus that compiles PHP to Java Bytecode allowing it to run ontop of the Java Resin Application Server. It has a couple neat features, one being PHP6 compatible unicode support, the other being easy integration between Java and PHP code.   He gave it a shot and notes that the performance seems decent and allows you to compensate for some of the differences in the PHP API it supports and what you're using via a Java class. According to their site:   Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor.   It includes several extensions too, including the JSON library, APC, MySQL and Oracle support, and PDF functionality. Check out their Getting Started guide, documentation, or their wiki for more information.
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The results from the latest poll conducted by the International PHP Magazine have been released. This time, they asked developers what they thought was the best way to do QA for their PHP applications.   Among the options were things like "Do API documentation", "Use code analyzers that check CS violations, XSS or SQL injection attacks" and the number one choice - "Do unit tests using PHPUnit or phpt". Three other options followed behind (using debugging tools, code analyzers and having a commit mailing list) with the API documentation falling down in last place.   They already started up this week's poll too. This time, they ask developers to vote on which of the options make for good PHP code. There's four options - structured, consistent, portable and secure. Get your vote in today!
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:DAOSQL2CSVGD2 ClassCBenchmarkdeckThe ZipavRIFEdit BitmapPHP DirectAdminbm_chartLinkedin public profile plugin for SerendipityArc LengthPHP IOCDataGridAnother CAPTCHA projectNewsBox
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An investor's guide to service-oriented architecture
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPClasses.org: A PHP killer feature - Streams abstractionRob Thompson's Blog: Switch vs. IfPHPEverywhere: Octopussy numbers in PHPJob Posting: MODE Visual Seeks PHP Developer (Charlotte, NC)ProDevTips.com: Why PHP as a templating language sucksMatthew Turland's Blog: The Yin and Yang of TypingStubbles Blog: Stubbles 0.5.0 releasedChristopher Jones' Blog: Updated connection pooling in PHP's OCI8 extensionBen Ramsey's Blog: Congrats Costa Rica PHP!Carsten Lucke's Blog: Configuration issues with Xdebug on Debian Etch
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The latest release of PHP in the PHP 5.2.x series has been posted for download to the main PHP website today - version 5.2.3.   The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.3. This release continues to improve the security and the stability of the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.   Updates in this new version include many security fixes and enhancements - check out the Changelog for complete information.   Check out other comments on the release from Ilia Alshanetsky and Stefan Esser.
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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Daniel Krook has a quick post about the DB2 driver he's created for the CakePHP framework:    I've just completed the initial version of the IBM DB2 interface that I've written for the CakePHP framework.   This driver can also be used with IBM Cloudscape, Apache Derby, and Sun Java DB because it employs the same ibm_db2 PECL extension for connecting to all of these RDBMSes.    Stay tuned to his blog for more details...