CodeSnipers.com: Book review: Beginning Ajax with PHP by Lee Babin
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On CodeSnipers.com today, there's a new book review posted of the APress book "Beginning Ajax with PHP" by Lee Babin.   Although no stranger to Ajax, I received a review copy of Beginning Ajax with PHP expecting some watered down presentation of Javascript with some PHP thrown in. I was quite surprised to find a good presentation of using Ajax and PHP, easy enough for the beginner and still interesting for those who have done it for years.   Nola covers the contents of the book, generalizing the sections just to give you a brief overview of what's going on in each chapter. She also describes the end of the book as a "random splattering of interesting topics" dealing with using Ajax in different, useful situations.
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Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone are hosting a new contest for all of the avid PHP readers out there - a giveaway for free PHP-related books.   There are a lot of good programming contests out there for PHP programmers to enter and win. Most of them require you to write a piece of code or solve a problem. There's nothing wrong with that but programmers are busy people. So I've come up with a contest for busy programmers. Give blog about PHP Abstract and you could win a free book. Not just any book though, these are programming books. (you know the ones, when you go to check out at your favorite book store they charge you by the pound.)   Entering the contest is simple - just blog about your favorite episode of PHP Abstract (DevZone's great podcast series) and get it tracked on Technorati.    Cal will scan the listings each week and pick the one he likes the best. He'll send along the book of his choice and will spring for the postage to send it along. Nice and easy - so check out their podcast series and find an episode you like the best (or just talk about it in general) and get it tracked.   Click here to subscribe to their podcast in your favorite feed reader.
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Joshua Eichorn, being the generous soul that he is, is offering in his latest post to answer any Ajax questions his readers might want to know about.    Have you wondered whats the easiest way to submit a form using AJAX, what the status of HTML_AJAX development is, or what is covered in Understanding AJAX?   Well nows your chance.    To get your question(s) in, just submit them as a comment on this post and he'll come back in a few days with the answers.
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For those that weren't able to make it to Adobe's webcast for combining Flex and PHP for web developers, the host Mike Potter has posted the slides for your review.   The session is targeted at PHP developers starting out with Flex.  I'll show examples of how to connect to a PHP datasource using three different methods - REST web service, JSON and AMFPHP.  I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages to using each of them, and then show you how to extend your in browser application to the desktop using Adobe AIR.   You can find the slides here [pdf]. Also, if you want the full experience of the webcast and not just the slides, you can also sign up for the other session on July 17th.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of a PHP-related offering from the APress Publishing company - Rob Richards's "Pro Pro PHP XML and Web Services".   Crack the front cover though and you'll soon discover that your new phone-book sized shield contains a lot of useful information. Let's dive into it a bit, shall we?   Cal talks about the contents of the book - all the way from the history of XML out to things like Web APIs, XML-RPC, and REST. He goes through, spotlighting some of the chapters along the way (including those on SimpleXML, syndication, and RSS/Atom formats). There's only one real complaint that Cal has about the book, one that's immediately evident to anyone that sees or holds the book in their hands - the sheer size and quantity of the material covered in the book (almost 1,000 pages).
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On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new post pointing to the second part of their look at the Manning Publishing book "PHP in Action".   If you've been anxiously awaiting part two of this series then your wait is over. Here's a short introduction to the section part of this series written by the author of the book, Dagfinn Reiersol. I had the privilege of meeting Dagfinn at phpuk last week. Below the introduction is the link I know youâve been waiting for.   The new PDF they link to focus on two different patterns - the Decorator (a wrapper class) pattern and the Null Object (an object that works like the others but does nothing behind the scenes) pattern.
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Aaron Wormus has a new note on his blog today about his presentation at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and another speaker he's excited to hear.    One of the Zend conference sessions that I'm pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe's (of WSO2) "Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP".   I'll be presenting a session on "Moving to PHP5 with Style." This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.    Aaron's talk fits under the banner of the "PHP Development" talks, including others on topics like hosting PHP applications on Windows, working with PDO, unicoding in PHP6, and using PHPUnit.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:The bla.st Blog: Process your URLs in PHP with Apache mod_rewrite and wildcard DNSZend Developer Zone: Book Review : PHP and MySQL by ExampleBen Ramsey's Blog: Zend Executable Debugger Eclipse PluginIlia Alshanetsky's Blog: PHP 5.2.1 RC1 Available for testingphp|architect: 7-Day Promo Fest BeginsNew Earth Online: Detecting Users OnlinePHPBuilder.com: Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to ProfessionalVexxhost.com: Top 5 new (and cool!) features in PHP5 that you probably haven't heard ofFelix Geisendorfer's Blog: A PHP developers guide to JavaScript - Part 1DevShed: Introducing Bridge Classes with PHP 5Book Review: The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web SitesPaul Jones' Blog: New Year's BenchmarksHowToForge.com: Building Apache with PHP,MySQL, OCI8 instant client supportManfred Weber's Blog: Consuming PHP SOAP Webservices with Flash - Part IZend Developer Zone: Who Uses the Zend Framework?
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In the next edition of their IRC Talks series, the PHP Thinktank-ers has posted the logs of the latest discussion for last week - a look at Ajax.   Some of the topics that were mentioned in this week's talk include:  what Ajax is/who uses it javascript libraries that support it a look at some of the technology (XMLHttpRequest, responseXML, responseText) that make up an Ajax message.    Be sure to check out the other talks on their blog including a PHP-GTK talk one and a look at the SPL in PHP.
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Joshua Eichorn notes in a quick post that, due to a last minute change, he will be speaking at php/db|works this year.   He'll be giving two Ajax sessions:  Scaling with Ajax (Wednesday @ 10:15) Javascript Light and Sweet (Wednesday @ 14:45)    Check out the full listing schedule over on the php|architect site for complete details on the whos and whens of each day of the conference. And, of course, you can still sign up for the conference too!
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PHPRiot has a post about the release of a new book from Quentin Zervaas (owner of the PHPRiot site) as published by APress - Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP.   Want to assert yourself as a cutting-edge PHP web developer? Take a practical approach, learning by example from author Quentin Zervaas, and discover how to bring together the many technologies needed to create a successful, modern web application.   The book covers the full life-cycle of an application - setting up the framework, using CSS, adding dynamic effects - and includes information on using the PHP/MySQL combo, Ajax and APIs to enhance your application.   Check out the APress description for more details.
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P&aacute;draic Brady has a suggestion for all of the PHP readers out there - two articles in the latest edition of php|architect magazine, the May 2007 edition:   The two that stick in my mind are Jim Delahunt's "Unicode and PHP: A Gentle Introduction" and Jeff Moore's "Test Pattern: Model View Controller". Both are something those seeking illumination on these topics should certainly read.   The first presents an introduction to one of the hottest topics in the PHP world - Unicoding - including a few same scripts to get you going. The second article, a look at the Model/View/Controller pattern that really gets more to what the pattern is about rather than just talking about its structure.
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Andrei Zmievski has posted something new to his blog today about a feature of PHP6 that's finally been hammered down - HTTP input (request) decoding.   There have been no fewer than 4 different proposals floated before, but this one combines flexibility, performance, intuitiveness, and minimal architectural changes, and has only a couple of small drawbacks. Let's take a closer look.   He details the functionality - what it is, what's been decided on, and the advantages of the method. The basic approach is a "lazy" one where PHP will only store the request when it comes in, no filtering or anything, until you want to do something with it (i.e. get it via $_GET, $_POST, etc). When the request for data is made, PHP looks at the encoding settings and formats the data accordingly.   Advantages he mentions for this method include removing the guess-work on PHP's part for which encoding the request is and that it removes some of the overhead by not processing the data until it's actually needed.
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Stefan Mischook has posted the third and final part of his video series introducing sessions in PHP to beginning developers.   He includes some notes from some of the previous videos covering things like the session ID, how long they last, if they're arrays or not and where they need to be defined.   You can find the other videos here: Part One, Part Two
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Stefan Mischook has updated his "Object  Oriented PHP for Beginners" tutorial with more new steps bringing the count up to 11 of the 20 planned steps.   Based on an article I wrote for a web design magazine; the tutorial is presented as a series of simple steps where I walk the reader through the process of building objects while at the same time, exposing them to basic object oriented concepts.   Eventually, he will be producing videos similar to these for all of the sections to help make things easier for the beginners out there.
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Paul Jones will be one of the presenters at this year's php/db|works Conference happening up in Toronto this week and he's offering a teaser of his talk (here's the synopsis) for those interested - "Organizing Your PHP Projects".   Fans of Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" will recognize the kind of talk I have in store, although I don't have the time available to expound in detail the way Hazlitt does. The talk will consist of a one-sentence lesson for you to remember when deciding how to organize your PHP project, whether it's a library, an application, a CMS, or a framework. I'll then explain how to apply the One Lesson in your project, and the various follow-on effects the One Lesson will have on your project organization.   He also jokes that he'll be the only presenter to use references to livestock, Jimmy Hoffa, and Mir as a part of the talk. He's even included a slide of the presentation for even more info.
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Ajax Magazine has posted a new interview with Joshua Eichorn, the author of the PEAR HTML_AJAX package about who he is, details on the package, and what's to come.    I have contacted Joshua Eichorn, author of HTML_AJAX for an interview and as promised here is the interview. I asked Joshua about AJAX, HTML_AJAX, his experience, projects, current status,future projects and much more.    The interviewer starts off with general questions - who is he, how did he get started in PHP - that sort of thing. There's a mention of the time that Joshua has worked on phpDocumentor as well as his involvement in a local user group. They move on to the harder questions, talking about "why PEAR?" and what's next for the package's development...