The Bakery: File Uploads, TuneShout.com, Zip Files and Uuid Behavior
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The Bakery has four new items posted today - articles and tutorials on a few different subjects:   Multiple files upload in v1.2 - "Are you wondering how to upload more than one file by CakePHP? Today I wrote this solution." TuneShout.com: Music Downloads and CakePHP - "How I used CakePHP to build TuneShout.com, a socially controlled online music network and store." Zip Component - "I am currently building a web 2.0 implementation of Bake that allows users to create their entire application in a friendly web environment and than creates a zip on demand." Uuid Behavior - "I have a requirement to use UUID's as primary keys. I was initially using MySQL triggers to call uuid() on insert but in the end decided a behavior makes more sense. This behavior adds a UUID to the field specified in your models."   Check back with The Bakery
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A new device capable of detecting and throttling encrypted BitTorrent traffic hits the shelves. The game of cat and mouse between ISPs and BitTorrent users continues. In Monkey Bites.
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On The Bakery today, there's three new examples of how the CakePHP framework was used to create three very different types of sites - PremierMarinas.com, ScienceHack.com and a simple iPhone-compatible application.   In the first article they describe how they built a "powerful, full featured CMS" to allow their customers to login and work with their personal information. It included the use of JSON messaging and the use of dynamic libraries. The article for the second site talks about the creation of a search engine for science videos to provide a more reliable resource for fellow video enthusiasts. He talks about what all he learned in the process and the design of the application. Check out the end result here. Finally, the third article talks about the creation of an application for the iPhone - "an app that would allow other users to add RSS feeds and I could go look for some and add them to my collection". He details the process he went through to create the application and the modules that he used to accomplish it.   Check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related articles and tutorials.
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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Latest PEAR Releases:MDB2_Schema 0.8.0File_Bittorrent 2.0.0b1File_Bittorrent2 1.0.0RC1XML_Query2XML 1.3.0
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Photocopying wallet information pays off.
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On Dotvoid.com, there's a new post that reminds us of two of the more "ajaxified" features of the new releases of PHP 5 (like 5.2) - the JSON extension and the functionality to track file uploads.   These features aren't competing for the heavy weight title in the release notes. Still, having these implemented in PHP makes it a lot easier to develop modern, more responsive, web based applications.   You can get more info on the JSON extension here and an example of the file upload monitor in this entry on the Bitflux blog.
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FOAF/LOAF  and bloom filters have a lot of interesting properties for social network and whitelist distribution.  I think we can go one level higher though and include GPG/OpenPGP key fingerpring distribution in the FOAF file for simple web-of-trust based key distribution.  What if we used FOAF and included the PGP key fingerprint(s) for identities? This could mean a lot.  You include the PGP key fingerprints within the FOAF file of your direct friends and then include a bloom filter of the PGP key fingerprints of your entire whitelist (the source FOAF file would of course need to be encrypted ).  Your whitelist would be populated from the social network as your client discovered new identit ...
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The eagerly-awaited Ubuntu Studio has been released, adding another entry into the expanding list of multimedia-optimized Linux distributions. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but interested readers can peruse some installation screenshots or check out the latest news and information on the Ubuntu Studio Wiki. I plan to review the distro in a future column, along with an update on the latest version of the venerable PlanetCCRMA, but in this entry I'm focused on another very exciting new release. Ardour 2.0 is now available for download. This version is a significant improvement over the 0.99 series (1.0 was never released), with many new features and enhancements to performance and stability. The following article profiles the new Ardour as I employed it for three projects, all involving the program in the processes of composition and arranging as well as the more typical tasks of recording and editing. I've described each project in some detail, and each description includes a link to the final audio output.
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In a new blog entry today, Matthew O'Phinney talks about updates (and refactoring) that he's done to a PEAR package he's developed, File_Fortune.   Over the past few evenings, I've refactored File_Fortune to have it implement Iterator, Countable, and ArrayAccess -- basically allowing it to act like an array for most intents and purposes. As a result, I've eliminated the need for the File_Fortune_Writer package, and greatly simplified the usage.   The package is designed to make an interface between the casual PHP user and the fortune files common on most *nix machines. To illustrate he update, he includes some code that grabs the fortune file, parses it to grab a random one and echoes them out. Also included is the save() method so you can add your own to the list easily.
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Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.   Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).   Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.   There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).
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An 'export to iTunes' feature is included in GarageBand 4.1.1, released last week.
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Plus: File sharing growing like a Weed. [News.com Extra]
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Letter Can collective database licensing cure this tragedy of the commons?
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Continuing the thread from yesterday. I got absolutely nowhere, some people suggested I use a smart playlist, missing the point that I'm a developer working on a podcatcher, not a user trying to use iTunes as a podcatcher. I'm sure it's an excellent way to subscribe to podcasts, but I have my own ideas how podcatchers should work, and I want to integrate them with other stuff I'm working on. Integrating with iTunes is proving to be quite a challenge, or maybe it's an art, we'll see.  As usual Mac users are superior sumbitches.  (Quoting the James Brolin character the first time we meet him in the third season finale of The West Wing.) Anyway, the search continues, I tried another more direct tack, and looked for glue for iTunes for UserLand, and bingo, there's a match, from 2001, a well-known Frontier programmer Sean Elfstrom, apparently converted glue for the Sonic SoundJam app that iTunes used to be, before Apple acquired it.  I installed the glue in the OPML Editor. It's daunting, for sure, but let's see what I can get working.
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In response to this recent article from the Hiveminds website, Marco Tabini has a few choice words about some of the topics they cover in the article, and cover incorrectly.   Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.   He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.
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Russ asks: Where's the OpenSocial container API? I love Russ because he cuts through all the BS and gets right to the core, most basic question, and he doesn't care who he pisses off. That's my kind of developer. You can't lie to the compiler, when the bits hit the road, you gotta know what garbage goes in and what garbage comes out.  (Ahh programmer's humor!) In other words, suppose I wanted to compete with Google, MySpace, Plaxo and LinkedIn, well, where's the spec that shows me how to do that? Well, of course I don't know, they aren't communicating with riffraff like me, but I have some experience with this kind of stuff, so I can hazard a guess. If they publish a spec,all kinds of projects will likely get started to enable the API in (just for the sake of argument): Drupal, WordPress, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Scripting News (why not add widgets to a random blog), CNN, The New York Times, well you get the idea. There might be lots of implementations very quickly. And that would be it for changes. It would be frozen de facto, they'd have to live with what they have, which given how quickly it was thrown together, probably isn't very good. Not the kind of stuff you'd like to support for the next decade or two. Or maybe they would break everyone, something guaranteed to make them a lot of enemies, much the way Microsoft did, and they were good at migration of APIs.  Google is good at doing AJAXy web UIs, they make users happy, but they're not very good at APIs. This one is a loser, for sure. That's the answer to Russ's question. It's probably not malice that keeps them from releasing details to everyone outside their club, it's pragmatism. They have to try to hold on to it to keep it from becoming even more of a mess than it already is. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. I've been wrong many times before.