Community News: Forage - A Search Abstraction Layer
562776
A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:    Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.    On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.    He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").   You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.
374321
Functional Languages seem to be pushing for the title of the next cool thing.  Talks and tutorials about them are starting to show up in conferences and conventions, books about them are hitting the shelves, people are even asking about talking about them in blogs and mailing lists devoted to some of the current hot languages.
703914
On his blog, Stuart Herbert has a quick tip showing how to mimic a feature of Ruby on Rails:   I'm still working on the next article in my series looking at PHP on servers, so in the mean time, check out this simple way to emulate Ruby's nice way of handling separate getter, setter and state query methods in PHP.   He admits his example isn't as elegant as the Ruby method, but it does get the job done. Code for the method is included in his post ready for cut and pasting.
336950
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).
466917
This third and final article in the Metasploit series covers the msfcli scripting interface as well as the intuitive web interface to the Framework. The article also discusses what's new with version 2.2, and then introduces the exploit development process through an example.
121333
We need a search engine to find all the search engines. Two more Web-query services launched recently, Accoona and Blingo; their initial performance, however, suggests
458208
Second place has been revealed in Nick Halstead's programming competition - and the 2nd place mark goes to Evan Chiu.   So second place, more drum rolls.. goes to Evan Chiu. Evan's solution revolved around a well implemented breadth first search which was wrapped up in a neat class. It was also quite well presented and the HTML was all w3c compliant.   In Evan's solution, he opted for a single "solve" method to handle the heart of the transition - an implementation of the "Breadth First Search method. If you'd like to see the full code, you can check it out here.
445025
Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Stijn Leenknegt's Blog: [PHP6] function-return-array idea!GeesNotNerds Blog: Free PHP + Ajax chat appStefan Mischook's Blog: Object Oriented PHP Tutorial Updated - Steps 18 - 22Dave Dash's Blog: SymfonyCampWebDigity.com: PHP geotargeting techniquesEtienne Kneuss' Blog: Late Static Bindings ExplainedDevShed: Handling Static Data with PHP 5PHP-Learn-It.com: Cooking Cookies with PHPMichael Kimsal's Blog: PHP PredictionJob Posting: Steinman Recruiting Seeks Senior Developer (Littleton, CO)
142698
Xerox&#8217;s FactSpotter isn&#8217;t a mainstream search tool that will debut as a challenge to present day search engines. But the features packed into it may well pave the way for an ideal search tool that is built on the concept of connecting data rather than collecting data.  Collecting data is what mainstream engines do today [...]
546713
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.
683443
IBM has created a free semantic e-mail search engine aimed at users of the company&#39;s Lotus Notes software and Microsoft Outlook.The engine, called IOPES (IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search), allows users to search their mail based on concepts, such as dates and phone numbers, according to IBM. It also allows searchers to define their own concepts.Once the software is installed, it indexes and analyzes the user&#39;s e-mail store. Searches are conducted through a browser interface that delivers results through a stripped-down, Google-like interface.Users can enter simple keyword-based queries or ones using basic natural language constructions. For example, to find e-mails from a friend named Mark Smith, you could simply enter &quot;from Mark Smith.&quot;But to find only the e-mails Smith sent in a certain month, a query might be constructed as &quot;Mark from January 2007.&quot; You could find his phone number by typing &quot;Smith&#39;s phone number.&quot;The results don&#39;t show a list of e-mail headers or display the messages in full. Instead, the software extracts the passage it believes contains the right answer, and highlights what it deems to be the specific information requested, such as a phone number.Users can also search for attachments with search results providing direct links to the documents in question.E-mail is a good target for developing a semantic search engine because users frequently repeat certain phrasings and words and repeatedly exchange the same type of information. &quot;There is a fairly large number of things that are so e-mail specific,&quot; said Shivakumar Vaithyanathan, the project&#39;s technical lead.Researchers in a number of IBM labs worked on the project for the past year and a half, according to Vaithyanathan. The product has been quietly available on the company&#39;s alphaWorks site for a couple of months, but only now is IBM attempting to drive widespread adoption, according to a spokeswoman.&quot;To be able to solve all these problems in some meaningful way, we want some feedback,&quot; Vaithyanathan said.IBM also released the tool internally to its employees and said it has received mostly positive responses.
50254
This interview is the beginning of a series on search engines. We'll briefly look at their history, and delve into some of the techniques of optimizing Web sites for search engines. By Lee Underwood. 0812
90155
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.
583590
The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
124078
I think I've mentioned this before but on Saturday Feb 12th I'll be talking  about the Jakarta FeedParser at CodeCon  in San Francisco.  I published an outline  of the talk on the FeedParser wiki.  I'm hoping to have a 0.5 release done before then and havepotentially another suprise in the works.
699584
Are kid-friendly search engines worth using, or are they better served by the major engines?
575210
Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP-Coding-Practices.com: How I Turned A Slow Array Sort Into A Quick One Using Quicksort AlgorithmZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 4: Planning ProgrammingWeb Development Blog: Save bandwidth with PHProxy and ip2nationJob Posting: Assembleron Ltd Seeks PHP 5/MySQL/Ajax Developers (Reading, UK)PÃ¡draic Brady's Blog: Complex Views with the Zend Framework - Part 6: Setting The TerminologyThe Bakery: Four New Articles - Load Balancing, Request Info, UUID Behavior & Upload ThumbnailsCommunity News: PEAR Installer version 1.6.0 releasedChristopher Kunz's Blog: Building PHP with cURL and libmysqlclient5DevShed: Working with Prepared Queries with PDO Objects in PHP 5Secunia.com: rPath update for gd, php, php-mysql, and php-pgsql