Roy Ganor's Blog:  1 Community, Dozen programmers, 1186 bugs & one quest for transcendent PHP editor
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Roy Ganor, a committer on the Eclipse PDT project has written up a post from an insider's perspective on the whole thing and the path that led them to a stable 1.0 release.   Today the PDT project community consists of about 30 users that are daily involved, and about 300 users that are weekly involved, and about 13,000 users that are monthly involved in the project . Remarkable! by any mean of open-source project.   He talks about initial feelings about the move towards PHP, how the community grew surrounding the project and the level of integration that the project has with both the Eclipse software and with the Eclipse community.
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Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.   I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.   The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.   Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Clay Loveless' Blog: Monitor PHP Extension Releases with Y! PipesCommunity News: New PHP5 Framework Release - WebMeshJob Posting: HedgeCo Networks Seeks Web Design/Programming Intern (Palm Beach, FL)Community News: FirePHP Firefox PHP ExtensionWeb Development Blog: Dynamic thumbnails from websitesSebastian Bergmann's Blog: phpOpenTracker Logo ContestJob Posting: Yahoo! Seeks PHP/LAMP DevelopersRob Allen's Blog: Zend Framework Tutorial for 0.7Hannes Magnusson's Blog: PHP.net frontpage changesZend Developer Zone: PHP in Action - Chapter 7, Design Patterns. Part - IJob Posting: WAMU 88.5, American University Radio Seeks Web Developer (Washington, DC)Richard Lord's Blog: Managing 404 errors in the Zend FrameworkTerry Chay's Blog: Clever HTTPDaniel Krook's Blog: A DB2 driver for CakePHPZend Developer Zone: PHP: Performance, Scalability, and Web Services Podcast
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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
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Reinhold Weber has put together a list of signs (40 in all on his "programming list of shame") that you're a lousy PHP programmer. Here's a sampling:   don't see the need and/or benefits of a good programming IDE like Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT have never used some form of version control like Subclipse don't use a consistent methodology don't use test-driven development don't return content but echo or print it from your functions or classes return HTML, not data, strings, or objects. don't allow intelligent error handling you think reusable software equals/requires your code to be OOP   Now granted, some of them are a bit more high level than others, but if you're not headed towards a lot of these, you might change paths, hop out of that comfort zone and branch out into the community and the language a little bit more.
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Josh Sharp has posted a new article to his blog advocating something that there's still a lot of controversy around in the PHP community - frameworks (when to use them and when to not).   PHP's ease of use is also its downfall. Because there are less restrictions on the structure of the code you write, it's much easier to write bad code. But there is a solution: use a framework. [...] Of course, if you're not taken with any of the packages above you can also write your own framework, which I've done and will talk about in the next few posts. But for now, let's have a look at the common benefits of a framework.   He's broken it out to talk about the usual framework structure, MVC and how a framework can enforce good code standards. He also mentions some happy side benefits of their use including making for "pretty URLs" and the helpers that most of the frameworks come with.
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Ben Ramsey, a speaker at both the Zend/PHP Conference 2006 and the International PHP Conference 2006, has posted a monster wrap up for both events to his blog today.   This post is long overdue, but I was finally able to sit down and type out my thoughts about the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo and the International PHP Conference.    First up is his look at the Zend conference - largely a good experience. He specifically mentions the talk from Rob Richards, the "Extending PHP" tutorial session (with Sara and Marcus), and the infamous misunderstanding about his laptop bag (which was resolved shortly after the conference had concluded).   His experience with the International PHP Conference went equally well, despite the location of the event being slightly more out of the way than some liked. He comments on the excellent conference materials provided, the types of attendees, and some of the talks he attended - Aaron Wormus' "Mastering enterprise-level PHP tools PEAR, PhpDocumentor and testing" and Sata Golemon's "Navigating Streams" being among them. If you like to check them out, he's also posted some photos of the conference and a night out around the town he took.
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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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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Zend Developer Zone: php|works - Day Two WrapupDevShed: Invoice Management in a PHP Invoicing SystemJared White's Blog: Developer Preview 2 of Willowgarden has been released todayZend Developer Zone: php|works - Day One WrapupP&aacute;draic Brady's Blog: PFP II: Return of Patterns For PHPPHPHacks.com: Generate OpenOffice documents with PHPThinkPHP Blog: SQL injections for dummies - and how to fix themILoveJackDaniels.com: Regular Expressions Cheat SheetDevShed: Tracking Website Statistics with PHPJob Posting: Red Ventures Seeks Mid/Sr Web Developer (Charlotte, NC)Scott Mattocks' Blog: PHP-GTK News #22Community News: Senza Limiti Acquires Ajax-based PHP Grid, Plans to Open Source ItAlexander Netkachev's Blog: Installing Propel object persistence layer for Web applicationDevShed: Main Methods of the DirectoryIterator Class in PHP 5Ilia Alshanetsky's Blog: PHP 5.2.0 RC4 Released!
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In a new post to his blog, Chris Hartjes, spurred on by an article in the latest edition of php|architect magazine (covering protecting your code), has shared a few opinions starting with a certain paragraph near the end.   To start, I will focus on the paragraph above. What I get out of that is that if only your source was closed and hidden from prying eyes, it would not have bugs in it. Which is, of course, total nonsense. Code has bugs because it's open and they feel safer? There are two kinds of bugs: application bugs (which is the code I would write) and system bugs (in this case, bugs that that appear from PHP itself). I'm sorry, but there is nothing I can do if there is a bug in PHP that causes my application to crash except to point this bug out to the people who have the ability to fix it.   He goes on to talk more about how protection like this (the article talks about using the IonCube Encoder) will not stop someone if they're really determine to get at the code underneath the encryption. His only suggestion is to make an application good enough that people wouldn't want to try to steal it as much and would rather pay for their version.   Encode your stuff if you want, but be aware that the minute you choose to do that you are telling your customers "I don't trust you" and I have a hard time understanding a business model that assumes people are going to want to steal the stuff you sell.
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Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".   I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.   He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).   He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.
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This month's edition of PHP Magazine has been released!
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As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, Jaybill McCarthy has written up a Blog post about ten of the PHP myths that are common on the web and the facts that dismiss them.   I am a PHP developer. Maybe even a halfway decent one. As such, I often find myself engaged in conversations on the subject of web application development in general and PHP in particular. I am continually flustered by the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods that technical and non-technical people alike hold about this humble programming language.   Some of the points included in his "top ten" list are things like "PHP Encourages Sloppy Code", "PHP is slow because itÃ¢ÂÂs interpreted" and "PHP apps all look the same".
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Roy Ganor has posted a new article on the Zend Developer Zone about code refactoring, what it's good for and how it can help you and your code.   At first, refactoring seemed to me to be magic, over the years I have come to view it as more of a trick, and today refactoring is integrated into my development environment and used frequently and quickly. Using the refactoring functionality, in addition to other tools, I can sculpt the code to improve legibility and maintainability.   He talks about why PHP developers should jump on getting to refactoring their code, the different forms of refactoring, code examples showing it at work and some development tools/resources you can use to dig a little deeper.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has a little reminder posted to his blog today about two posts from planet-debian and Apache that refer to clones/references in PHP4 and PHP5 and some of the misconceptions presented there.   Reading planet-debian and Apache (from Sven and David), I catched two posts about clones and references in php4 and php5. I do not think it is worth to explain again everything here as Sara wrote a very good post already, check it out here.   He mentions his annoyance with articles/posts like these and the impact that it has on PHP as well as the person posting.   I wonder when the OS community in general will be mature enough to stop bitching at each other. And that's valid for PHP developers, gnome-kde and other well established wars.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Splitbrain.org: Add comments to any PHP scriptRyan Malesevich's Blog: Separate Trackbacks from Comments RevisitedDeveloperTutorials.com: Inserting An Array Into A DatabaseSymfony Blog: The Definitive Guide to Symfony and symfony 1.0 RC1 releasedSoledad Pendaes' Blog: PHP will never have a (real) Rails-like frameworkJSLabs Blog:  A web server in PHPRobert Swarthout's Blog: PHP frontend to Subversion (SVN)Christopher Jones' Blog: OCI8 1.2.3 Patch is Available on PECLDotVoid.com: Parsing the user agent string using PHPPaul Jones' Blog: Solar 0.26.0 Released, and New WebsitePierre-Alain Joye's Blog: Zip 1.8.5, small bug fixes releaseZend Developer Zone: Zend Monthly Newsletter - JanuaryMike Potter's Blog: Flash, Flex and PHP Just Got A Huge BoostJonathan Snook's Blog: Review: PHP SolutionsOracle Technology Network: Creating an Ajax Process Using PHP and Oracle