Jim Plush's Blog: How to Install the MyBic Firebug PHP Debugger
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Asa follow-up from his previous announcement about the latest release of MyBic framework (including the Firebug debugger support), Jim Plush has made it even easier to get started by sharing this webcast he's created.   I did a quick little screencast on how to get rolling with the MyBic 2 Firebug PHP Debugger.    The screencast (mov) steps through the setup of the debugger support for the framework via the Firefox extension all set up custom to work magically with the MyBic framework.
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Giving it a second shot, Edin Kadribasic has posted another build using the new compiler from Microsoft because of some issues with the first one.   Well the first build proved to be somewhat less that a full success. It worked only on one computer: the one that was build on. Since this limits PHP use on the Windows platform I went ahead and read about Microsoft manifest files, SxS (side by side) assemblies and other wonderful stuff that Microsoft has provided for us in version 2005 of their development package.   The new build should be installable without any libraries from Microsoft and you can grab both of them directly from his site:  php-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip pecl-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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Chris Hartjes is taking on what he calls his "next foolish project" - a console for the CakePHP framework.   On the CakePHP mailing list, somebody familiar with Ruby on Rails' console functionality asked "why isn't there one of these in Cake?" [...] So I got to thinking about how to do this. On the surface, it seems the easiest way to do this is to write a PHP script that takes entries on the command line, run the input through an 'eval' statement. Sounds easy enough, and I could write that in a hurry. I think the trickiness comes in figuring out how to hook it into CakePHP so that you can access Models that already exist.   For those attending the Vancouver PHP Conference, attend his talk and you might get  amention of how far he's come with the idea. Otherwise, stay tuned to his blog for updates.
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John Mertic has a quick note on his blog about the latest release candidate for the Windows PHP installer (PHP5.2.0RC3) and some issues they've been having.    Rebuilt the installer for 5.2.0RC3. Edin was having problems building it so I'm going to do it and upload it; hopefully we can resolve the issue.   It's also noted that if you see issues with using the installer, try removing the previous PHP installation before running it again.
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PHP Magazine has a new link today to a tutorial covering Building and Installing PHP, Apache on Mac OS X 10.3.5 with GD
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A new note on the Internet Super Hero blog talks about a new improvement to the mysqlnd driver support a memory dump option for mysqli_debug.   Andrey has implemented a little mysqlnd only addition to mysqli_debug(): 'm' - dump memory information. It works like the other options described in PHP: Debugging ext/mysqli and mysqlnd with the only difference that it is only available with mysqlnd.   A comparison of the "before option 'm'" and "after option 'm'" is also included.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted the fifth and final installment of the series Stefan Priebsch has written up about debugging your application via the XDebug software.   Today, we will have a look at another great feature of xdebug - creating code coverage statistics. Code coverage statistics show how many times each line of the code has been executed. Conversely, they also show which lines of code have not been executed, which is in fact much more interesting.   He talks a bit about what code coverage is and how it can help you fine tune your application. He walks you through the installation of the two packages that will help out with running the reports - phing and PHPUnit. Using these, he shows how to create a simple unit test and a build file for phing that combine and, via the XDebug calls to xdebug_start_code_coverage, xdebug_stop_code_coverage and xdebug_get_code_coverage, are used to generate the output graphs and stats in a nice, easy to read interface.
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If you've been looking for more information on the phpAspect project but have been sad to note it having fallen by the wayside, you'll be happy to know that Willliam Candillon is alive and well and so is the project!   The first news concerns the windows developers, the windows build of PHP_Parse_Tree is finally available (click here to download)! [...] The second news is that my proposal "phpAspect eclipse plugin" for the Google Summer of Code 2007 under the mentoring of Gilles Vanwormhoudt has been accepted!   Be sure to keep an eye on the project's website and their Summer of Code page to keep up with the latest.
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As mentioned by Elizabeth Naramore on the php|architect site, there's a new version of the free debugger from the PhpEd folks that's been released and ready for download - version 2.15.5.   Updates in this latest version include:   All php versions from 4.3 up to 5.2 are supported Fixed problem with profiler denominator Pre-compiled binaries for Win32 and Linux Source code   It's not going to be quite as powerful as the one that comes with the full version of PhpEd, but it is still a very useful little app. download it for yourself and give it a try.
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Evolt.org has a new tutorial posted today concerning something that I still get a lot of questions about - creating a PHP Login System with Admin Features.
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Continuing on from the previous part of his series, Stefan Priebsch has posted part two of his look at using XDebug over at the Zend Developer Zone.   Welcome to the second installment of our five-part series of articles on xdebug, the PHP developer's swiss army knife extension. The installation of xdebug and its basic features were covered last week. This week, we will explore the tracing feature of xdebug.   He details what tracing is and how it's helpful (no more repetitive var_dumps!) in finding issues in your code. He shows how to set up a trace log, add the code to your application to pass debugging information off to the log and how to add additional information to the log to make narrowing down the error even easier.
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Derick Rethans has posted a new item to his blog about the release of the popular PHP debugging software's latest version XDebug 2.0.1.   This version comes with a few bug fixes but the main thing is greatly improved performance of Xdebug's Code Coverage functionality. To give an idea on what kind of improvement I'm talking, I am including very rough benchmark results.   He describes the benchmarks and gives the results - without code coverage and the pre/post of this new version (2.0.0 versus 2.0.1). The results are very impressive.
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For anyone that's had an issue with getting XDebug to work with the Debian linux distribution, you might want to check out this helpful hint Carsten Lucke has posted about.   This week I started to setup a Debian-based (Etch) web-server with PHP 5.2 in a virtual-machine with VMWare. Part of this setup was getting XDebug2 integrated. It's really awesome and my students definitely need to learn about it. [...] Building went well as usual but when I tried to integrate the extension inside php.ini it was all weird.   His system kept throwing him an error when he tried to load the shared module using the zend_extension directive, hand things happened. Loading it normally worked (so he knew it wasn't the module) and he finally figured out the problem:   But I need to enable it as Zend extension. Whatever. I finally used the full path to xdebug.so to load it [...] that worked.
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In this new entry on his blog, Jacob Santos is officialy ringing his own sort of death knell for phpBB in the form of recommending a move to FUDForum.   The development of phpBB 3 has been past due for a long time. In my humble and not so educated opinion, it has faded (or if it hasn't already, it will fade) into obscurity. The phpBB 2.x development line has been overtaken by other forum projects, including better security in their package. SMF offers many of the features that will appear in phpBB 3 and also offers phpBB ease of installation and use.   He goes on to talk about the "upcoming release" of phpBB 3 but reminds us of the fact that it might be "another 2 or 3 years" before the update. If they ever get it out, though, (and it lives up to expectations) it'll be great.   Jacob then looks at FUDForum (a project involving Ilia Alshanetsky) and praises it for its integration skills and simplicity. It even includes APIs to help integrate the install of FUDForum with the databases from other popular message boards.
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For those that weren't able to make it to Adobe's webcast for combining Flex and PHP for web developers, the host Mike Potter has posted the slides for your review.   The session is targeted at PHP developers starting out with Flex.  I'll show examples of how to connect to a PHP datasource using three different methods - REST web service, JSON and AMFPHP.  I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages to using each of them, and then show you how to extend your in browser application to the desktop using Adobe AIR.   You can find the slides here [pdf]. Also, if you want the full experience of the webcast and not just the slides, you can also sign up for the other session on July 17th.
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