Christopher Jones' Blog: Book Review: PHP Oracle Web Development
622362
Christopher Jones has posted a review of one of the latest PHP-related books published by Packt Publishing - "PHP Oracle Web Development":   Yuli Vasiliev has put a lot of real-world PHP and Oracle experience into his book PHP Oracle Web Development.  The book's reviewer, Arup Nanda, was, amongst other things, Oracle's DBA of the Year in 2003. The result is an excellent book that joins the PHP and Oracle worlds together.   Christopher talks about some of what the book covers (like installation and code snippets) and the book's excellent focus on different topics, giving each it's own full coverage.
230013
In this new article from DevShed.com, they provide a high-level introduction to PHP - what it is, where it came from, some of the sample features (of both PHP 4 and PHP 5), as well as some of the drawbacks for the language.
667385
Over on PHP Magazine's website today, there's a new review of a book that all PEAR users (and even those looking to get into it) will find quite helpful.
753153
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.
582158
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.
100030
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).
318713
On the KillerPHP blog today, Stefan Mischook has written up a book review of a popular book from Sams Publishing - "PHP 5 in Practice" by Elliott White and Jonathan D. Eisenhamer.   This is a very good book, actually one of the best recipe books I've read period. You can tell that the authors are still actively writing code - you can feel it as you read the chapters.   The review also lists out some of the contents of the book including sample recipes and the "quick hits" section.
473286
From a new PHPComplete.com entry: I have just discovered my new best friend. Addison-Wesley's Bruce Peren's Open Source Series is releasing a new book in late October, and I was sent a draft manuscript copy (basically, it's a large version of the book, though not in a finished format). I feel that I am a fairly experienced PHP programmer, and that I am capable at most tasks. However, I am still keenly aware that there is much more that I can learn about PHP. [...] And for the longest time, I was aprehensive about picking up any book simply because I didn't feel like it was going to be worth it.
59423
Christopher Jones has posted to his Oracle blog today about the release of a new beta for the PECL Oracle (OCI8) drivers for PHP.   I've created a PECL OCI8 1.3.1 Beta bundle of the code with Connection Pooling support that I mentioned in http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/2008/01/31.  You can get it from http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.  The README contains the details.   Of course, it's still in beta, so any testing and feedback is more than welcome. This bundle also includes several other "non-DRCP related bug fixes" including an issue that caused constant pinging for persistent connections.
622401
The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest poll conducted over this past week asking which, of their given options, is the best helpful hint for creating a web application in PHP.   Two of the options ranked higher than the rest with one (Page/object caching) coming out on top of the other (Don't save performance testing for the end of the project). The remainder of the votes were divided pretty evenly between the last three options: "Use multi result set queries to your database", "gzip compression", and "Tune your web server".   While you're in the polling mood, you should check out this week's new poll that wonders which of their options might be the biggest hindrance to PHP5's adoption in the community.
190663
Joshua Eichorn points out an interesting project in a new post to his blog today - quercus.   I found an interesting project, quercus that compiles PHP to Java Bytecode allowing it to run ontop of the Java Resin Application Server. It has a couple neat features, one being PHP6 compatible unicode support, the other being easy integration between Java and PHP code.   He gave it a shot and notes that the performance seems decent and allows you to compensate for some of the differences in the PHP API it supports and what you're using via a Java class. According to their site:   Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor.   It includes several extensions too, including the JSON library, APC, MySQL and Oracle support, and PDF functionality. Check out their Getting Started guide, documentation, or their wiki for more information.
451308
Over on the Zend Developer Zone today, Akash Mehta has written up  a review of a book from Packt Publishing, "PHP Web 2.0 Mashups" (by Shu-Wai Chow):    As it's title suggests, PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects is a demonstration of the various techniques available for developing mashups in PHP. Through a highly practical format, Shu-Wai takes the reader through a series of projects utilising different web services and APIs, while carefully exposing the reader to a wide variety of technologies and data formats.   With careful selection and shaping of language, the book is an extremely effective introduction to the world of mashup development with PHP.    Akash talks about the contents of the book (the different projects it covers) and how the book provides a version useful resource to those just getting into the mashup world - a reference guide to some of the popular data transfer methods/formats out there.
647262
In a new post to his blog today, Mike Potter talks about the WebORB for PHP software and a new feature based on Adobe technology - a Flex-based console.   [It] includes a service browser, as well as a number of useful examples, showing both the client side code (in Flex) and server side code in PHP. The getting started guide (again, built into the console or available on the web) provides a good tutorial for creating your first WebORB powered application.   He likes the project overall, but notes a small issue he has with starting a new project - a prompt to use the Flex Data Services. Overall, though, he has high hopes for the future of the project.
695727
As posted over on the Zend Developer Zone, Marc Gear has posted a new review over on his blog of the guide that php|architect magazine has created to help prepare developers for Zend's PHP 5 Certification.   I brought the book to make sure that my knowledge was sufficient to take the test [...] however, having read most of the book last night, I think it would be a good addition to my bookshelf, especially to lend to other developers on my team.   He briefly covers the topics in the book (including basics, functions, stream, security, etc) and a general impression of how the book presented them overall. His opinion of the resource is definitely a good one, summed up well by the above comments.   His only complaint was a small one (and not even about the content of the book) - that the spine was printed upside down so it looks a bit odd on the shelf.
758558
On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has posted his look at the Phrasebook series from Sams Publishing covering Javascript, MySQL, Apache, and, of course, PHP.   I get a lot of books to review. Currently the stack is about waist high and UPS hasn't been here this morning. So in an effort to trim down that stack of books, I'm going to talk about books 4 in one review.   He looks briefly at the contents for each of the books, pointing out specific areas they seemed particularly helpful in. He doesn't recommend them to someone trying to learn the language right off the mark. These are, as their title implies, just clips and handy snippets of information to help you get to where you're going. You have to know how to get on the road first, though...
45632
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.
255649
In a new post to his blog, Christopher Jones mentions some of the talks that he's going to give at the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo:   Oracle & PHP users: make sure you check out the Zend Conference.  I'll be given a couple of sessions, "Connection Pooling & Other Features for Data Scaling" and "Performance Tuning for PHP with Oracle Databases".  There are plenty of other great talks, too.   There's tons of other sessions happening during the conference including talks on:   best practices enterprise PHP the Zend Framework API design   Check out the official conference page for information on location, other sessions and registration.