Cody Caughlan's Blog: Database Migrations for PHP5
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Cody Caughlan has created a project that brings one of the popular features of Ruby on Rails to the world of PHP5 - database migrations.   One of the cool things I like about Ruby on Rails is the use of "migrations" for maintaining your DB. Migrations have proven to be pretty handy in keeping a local database in sync with the work of other developers. [...] Because migrations are incremental and they are done in a structured manner, it is a great way of pushing out new DB changes to the production database servers.   His framework, Ruckusing Migrations, is a modular framework that makes use of some of the more advanced features of PHP5. It's portable (via an adapter interface) and uses a generic task interface (task files) to load functionality into the framework. There's also plenty of API hooks to allow for a developer to easily create their own custom operations.   Check out the project homepage for more information.
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The PHPClasses.org website has posted their review of a Packt Publishing book covering PDO - "Learning PHP Data Objects" (by Dennis Poppel).   In Learning PHP Data Objects, the author, Dennis Popel, examines this new system and explains how to begin using PDO in development as a replacement for typical database drivers. The book is an excellent introduction to the data abstraction layer. It also provides essential insight into the inner workings of database interaction with PHP.   The review talks about the contents of the book, what PDO is/how it's used and how well the book hits the mark for its target audience.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Symfony Project: Book preview: read the Unit Tests chapterWebCheatSheet.com: Secure File Upload with PHPMichi Kono's Blog: The Best PHP Book Out ThereThe Bakery: Basic User Authentication in (CakePHP) 1.2.xPHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPDavid Coallier's Blog: Zend_Db Without PDO part #3 (SVN Repository)?Community News: PHPLondon Conference 2007 AnnouncedMatthew O'Phinney's Blog: Overloading arrays in PHP 5.2.0Ilia Alshanetsky's Blog: 5.2.1 RC3 Released for testingJob Posting: Telio Telecom AS Seeks Senior Web Developer (Oslo, Norway)The Bakery: LightTPD and CakePHP setup in subdirectoriesJob Posting: Yahoo! Seeks Address Book Front-End Engineer (Sunnyvale, CA)HowTo Forge: PHP Programming BasicsJob Posting: Blue State Digital Seeks PHP/AJAX developer for politcal/tech consulting (Boston, MA)Zend Developer Zone:  AJAX Chat Tutorial Part 7 : Usability Improvements
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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In an effort to somewhat unify the authors of the wide range of PHP database abstraction layers out there in the community, Lukas Smith has proposed a "doctrine miling list" for the discussion of things "like best practices, new discoveries, challenges, etc".    Now I am hoping that all of you are reading this. I know quite a few of you pretty well already (John, Hans, Manuel etc.). [...] So please everybody come out of the woodwork, send me a mail or post a comment.   While I think its fine for end users to also join the list, the goal is not to create a list for end users to ask questions, but more for people who actively develop database abstraction layers. End users should better go to the respective mailing lists.    Ian P. Christian has already stepped up to the plate and is offering a mailing list that you, the database abstraction developer can subscribe to - mailto:phpdbabstraction+subscribe@lists.pengus.net. Be sure to check out the comments for more great discussion.
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Ilia Alshanetsky, release manager for the current PHP5 series, has announced the posting of the latest release canidate - PHP 5.2.0. RC4.   Huzzah! The final release candidate of 5.2.0, RC4 is out, which means the final release is just around the corner. Given that this is a final release, this is the last chance to identify major issues or regressions. So, please test your code against this release to make sure that everything is working, and if not, let us know.   You can grab the files here:  BZipped GZipped
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Jacob Santos makes some of his own comments about the recent PHP5 adoption talk that's been going around in the PHP community (spurred on by comments made by Matt of the Wordpress project).   Matt brings up some good points. What might be limiting PHP 5 adoption, could just be the lack of interest in developers. [...] Up until reading his rant, I've lived in a box where everyone I've talked to, used and enjoyed PHP 5 and its vast extensions. Developing in PHP 5.0 was uneventfully, but you learn to appreciate PHP 5 with the core inclusion of PDO with PHP 5.1. PHP 5 is not without annoyances. In the core developers attempts to "better" the language, they made changes that broke code that previously worked.   He looks at a few of the items for debate surrounding the move from PHP4 to PHP5 including the extensions that come bundled with PHP5, solving the register_globals issue, and a brief mention of the Standard PHP Library.
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A quick post from janschneider.de talks about questions regarding the PHP5 compatibility of Horde, IMP, or other applications on the Horde mailing list
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In a note from Sebastian Bergmann's weblog today, he talks about the porting of some frameworks and tools from Java to PHP.
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In a new blog entry, Michael Kimsal points out a driver that Microsoft has released (during the end of last year) that allows PHP5 applications to connect directly to a SQL Server database.   This isn't replacing freetds any time soon.  I guess I'm still wondering what the market for "PHP apps deployed on Windows talking to SQL Server" really is - most of the shared hosting accounts I've seen, even on Windows, offer MySQL or Access as the database.    He also points out a video that was shot of the development team talking about the driver (here's their blog too).
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP.net: PHP 4 end of life announcementZend Developer Zone: Book Review: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHPStoyan Stefanov's Blog: phpBB front-end optimization - 1 hour workshopSitePoint PHP Blog: Win Cash for the best Facebook App!Elizabeth Naramore's Blog: July Edition of IPM PublishedJob Posting: ManicMelon.com Seeks Mid-Senior LAMP Web Application Developer (Overland Park, KS)Paul Jones' Blog: Solar Views and LayoutsCodeIgniter Blog: Version 1.5.4 ReleasedPHP-GTK Community Site: MkDevDVD (DVD Manager for Linux)Job Posting: Next Internet Seeks Senior Software Engineer (San Francisco, CA)
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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Michael Kimsal points out the posting of the latest part of his "Grails for PHP developers" series to his blog site - Part Five of the series.   I've put up the latest installment in my "Grails for PHP developers".  Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I'm taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself.  Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you're not careful.  I'll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.   This new part of the series goes back and puts the spotlight on GRoovy, the base of the Groovy/Grails combo. He talks about working with variables and arrays as containers for multiple pieces of data and some possible gotchas that could come up along the way.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest PHP community poll as voted on by visitors to their site. The question for this poll asked developers what they thought, of the choices on the list, was the most common mistake that PHP developers make.   Coming in at number one by an overwhelming lead was "Not escaping entities and SQL input" (a definite problem indeed) with the next highest option, "Not using a Framework" a full twenty percent lower. The next two options were closer (descending) - "Using old PHP versions" and "No or little use of Object Orientation".   There's a new poll this week for your consideration - this time asking which stage, of the five options, should come first in the development cycle of a typical content management system. Head on over and cast your vote today!
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David Coallier has posted about a database abstraction layer that he's been developing for PHP 5.2.x only systems and wants some opinions on his methods:   I made a very light DBAL that uses PHP5.2.x only (Since many people seem to want that) and it has the exact same DSN syntax as MDB2 for now and the query method are also called the same (No API Changes). [...] The main goal of the DBAL is to have a very effective and light way of switching RDBMS but also the possibility to change your DBAL to something more "0feature complete" as such as MDB2.   He includes the list of query method names and the types of databases that he wants it to support (as well as mentioning the fact that it would be unit tested for reliability).
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Ivo Jansch has a recent post made the other day that takes a look at one of the recent offerings from IBM targeted at PHP developers - the functionality to allow PHP to run on their System i platform.   Some of the developers at Ibuildings are working with PHP on IBM's System-i platform. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it has been called 'iSeries' for a while and it's basically a new name for the old AS/400. [...] Recently IBM and Zend have teamed up to port PHP to the i5/OS operating system. So far this port seems succesful; one of the reasons is perhaps that PHP is easier to adopt by traditional System-i developers than Java, which forces you to learn Object Oriented Programming.   He makes mention of the db2 database extension you can use to access the database as well as a "i5 toolkit" to help with the same. He even links to an article talking about it.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:IBM developerWorks: PHP frameworks, Part 1: Getting started with three popular frameworksWeb Development Blog: Tutorial: FTP Upload via cURLJoey's Blog: 8 Practical PHP Regular ExpressionsJeff Moore's Blog: Keywords and Language SimplicityAlessandro Crugnola's Blog: AMFPHP and mbstringTravis Swicegood's Blog: Why Inheritance SucksStefan Mischook's Blog: Creating Custom PHP Functions Video Tutorial - Part 3Johannes SchlÃ¼ter's Blog: PHP 5.3 UpdateInternet Super Hero Blog: mysqlnd to support PDO, mysqlnd in PHP 5.3Jacob Santos' Blog: Object Oriented Programming Isn't Easy