Stoyan Stefanov's Blog: Simultaneous HTTP requests in PHP with cURL
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On his blog today, Stoyan Stefanov has a howto posted on a trick he figured out to get a PHP script to grab data from multiple resources at one time - with cURL.   The basic idea of a Web 2.0-style "mashup" is that you consume data from several services, often from different providers and combine them in interesting ways. This means you often need to do more than one HTTP request to a service or services. [...] Using the curl_multi* family of cURL functions you can make those requests simultaneously. This way your app is as slow as the slowest request, as opposed to the sum of all requests. And that's something.   He includes example code that loops through a given array of resources and executes the fetch, brining the results back into a result array. To illustrate, he also includes two types of examples of fetching content - one for GET and another for POST.
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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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In this new post on the PHP Security Blog, Stefan Esser brings up an interesting issue when dealing with web applications - being able to bind a script/application to a different port on the local machine.   Unfortunately the ability to bind yourself to a port and receive connections is a threat to webapplications installed on different virtual hosts on the same IP, even if other security measures in place, like tight filesystem permissions or executing PHP script with the permission of the owner.   He gives an example in PHP of how this can happen and one of the scary side effects of having it in the same domain - the cookie information is passed in. It's a simple concept that could have very bad consequences in the wrong hands.    Additionally, you don't even have to create it in PHP either. As cyberlot mentions, it could be created in any language that has socket functions. Be sure to check out the comments for more thoughts and comments on the post.
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Mike Willbanks has posted an introduction he's written up giving some helpful hints at tuning your servers and PHP applications for performance.   The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.  He talks about a few different aspects:  PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc) RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving) HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode eighteen of their PHP Abstract podcast series - another episode from Davey Shafik. This time he goes on an "API rant".   Todays special guest is Davey Shafik. If you are a regular listener of PHP Abstract, you will recognize Davey's name from previous podcasts. For those of you new to PHP Abstract, Davey is a full time PHP Developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. He is an author of both magazine articles and books. Davey keeps his mind sharp by trying to tackle problems from his unique perspective. Today, Davey is going to rant a bit about APIs.   The show can either be downloaded directly, listen to the show via the built-in web player, or you can subscribe to the podcast's feed to get this and more great content from PHP Abstract.
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Paul Meagher has just submitted the link to his latest article over on the IBM DeveloperWorks website - Conduct Web experiments with PHP: Part 1.
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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On the PHP Security Blog, there's three new posts that Stefan Esser has written up that demonstrate some of the more destructive uses of Javascript that he's found:  JavaScript/HTML Portscanning and HTTP Auth Bruteforcing HTTP Auth in Firefox with JavaScript JavaScript Scanning and expose_php=On    While the first two are interesting, it's the last of these that most directly applies to PHP. He gives a simple "proof of concept" that checks to see if the embedded image is the correct "size" to be related to a webserver running PHP with the expose_php setting set to "on".
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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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Joshua Eichorn has posted some slides that he presented at a local PHP User Group meeting just passed that serve as an introduction to PEAR.   I'm hoping to improve the slides a bit and give this presentation at lots of other places. If any PHP User groups on the west coast would like me to do a presentation about PEAR drop my a line.   To help further the cause of PEAR, he's also offering the slides in an archived file for presentation anywhere.
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Ben Ramsey has posted a (quick) new items over on his blog that looks at solving two problems he was having with his blog - the now non-functional Flickr feed and a sorting problem with array_multisort.   I recently upgraded a few things around here (in particular, an upgrade to PHP 5.2), and I noticed two issues that occurred after the upgrade. [...] I easily solved both of these issues.   The correction to the Flickr feed involved changing the namespace information for his request (adding a trailing slash) because the SimpleXML functionality got a bit more particular about the format.   The problem with array_multisort involved adding in a parameter that was implied in previous PHP versions, SORT_STRING, to get his code correctly working.
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In a new posting on Chris Shiflett's weblog today, he shares with the world a little bit of what he's written for php|architect - a free version of one of his columns: Security Corner: Session Fixation.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:The Bakery: Six New Articles/Tutorials PostedEvert Pot's Blog: PHP: Arrays vs. ObjectsDevArticles: Learning AJAXInternet Super Hero: PHP: mysqli_fetch_all()David Coallier's Blog: PHP Namespaces (Part 1: Basic usage & gotchas)I/O Reader: 15 Cool Things & 12 Things to Dislike About PHPProPHP Podcast: Newscast - August 16, 2007PHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPSite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 08.17.2007PRADO Watch Blog: PRADO Watch: Interview With Timani Tunduwani - Why I Moved From CakePHP to PRADO
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A great presentation by Ilia Alshanetsky from the International PHP Conference 2004. The only thing I would like to point out is that MMCache is still being actively developed, as evidenced by the CVS activity at sourceforge.  PS: You might need to use Mozilla to view this. IE sometimes doesn't work properly. I thought IE was a defacto standard :-)