Java and PHP to exchange sweet nothings
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SugarCRM plans modesty layer SugarCon 2008 SugarCRM, one of the open source community's darlings, is taking steps towards improve interoperability between its PHP architecture and Java.â¦
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The results of the latest poll from the International PHP Magazine are in. The question this time asked which, of the options given, were your favorites in the Smyfony project's feature set. There was a clear winner above all of the others - the scaffolding that it makes so simple.   Some of the other options that were included but didn't get nearly as many votes were:  Simple templating and helpers Multilingualism and I18N support Object model and MVC separation Ajax support  Following at a distant second was the "Object model and MVC separation" choice (and to others, "Enterprise ready" and "Ajax support" nipping close at its heels).   Be sure to cast your vote in this week's poll that asks your opinion on some of the rules that the PHP Throwdown has set in place. Vote for the one that you think fits best with the spirit of the competition.
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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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In a new post on the Splitbrain blog today about creating and working with Semacode and QR Codes, specifically with PHP functionality.   I was more interested in Semacode, because it looks somehow cooler than QR in my opinion. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any free (beer and speech) PHP library to create these codes.   He did, however, find a Javascript port (from a C library) to harvest the logic from and create his own PHP class to handle the semacode creation. He notes that it's probably still a bit buggy but is offering it for download to whoever might want to mess around with it.
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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Related to an issue from a previous post, Greg Beaver has posted a solution to his Relax NG schema problem in PHP.   Shortly after my last blog post, I got a very helpful email from Rob Richards, who offered to help me with my trials and tribulations. He took a quick look at the schema for package.xml, and a sample package.xml and was able to find two small tweaks to make parsing actually work (gasp). This changes everything. I am abandoning the creation of a relax NG schema in favor of the battle-tested xsd. The error messages for xsd validation are far clearer than the rng ones.   The code included shows how much simpler the error messages are with the XSD validation option versus the RNG ones.
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Sean Coates has created a simple version of a popular bit of Perl functionality and shares the code in hi slatest post - the "pie" ability to perform a search and replace, line by line, through a file using a regular expression.   I've often found myself looking for a PHP equivalent. Not to do simple substitutions, of course, but complex ones. And since I'm most comfortable with PHP, and a I have a huge library of snippets that I can dig out to quell a problem that I may have solved years ago, I've been meaning to fill this void for a while.   So, one evening, he came home and hashed out this version of the script. He includes the code in the post...it works on the command line and pulls in a file (though STDIN) and loops through the buffered version to perform the regex replace.
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On Splitbrain.org, there's a new post that points out a script he's created to make adding comments to any PHP script possible - My Two Cents.    I recently updated My Two Cents. My Two Cents (or MTC) is a simple PHP class to add comments to any PHP driven site. It is was written with simplicity in mind but still has some strong features and is easily tweakable. It consists of a single PHP file and can be added with just a few lines of code.    The post also describes some of the functionality it comes with, including a CAPTCHA mechanism and a blacklist feature to help reduce spam. There's also a bit of multi-language support included as well.
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Zend has a new download for those out there interested in using PHP on a Sun Java System Web Server - the PHP Enabler for the Java System Web Server.
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Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interesting article over on the CIO magazine website that has some in the PHP community a bit up in arms about comments it makes towards the language.   The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.   Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:   Security and PHP Working with PHP and the shell Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)   These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.
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PHP isn't exclusively for Web pages. You can use it like Perl for cron jobs and other tasks.
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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.
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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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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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Despite opinions from some of the PHP community, interoperability between PHP applications isn't is such a bad state - at least According to Aaron Wormus:    The fact of the matter is that it's not such a big deal. Porting a plugin from Wordpress to Serendipity is usually trivial, and as we see more web-services based plugins (stuff like the awesome askimet) the task becomes simpler and simpler.   Interoperability is overrated, the more you think of it the more complex it gets. As you start throwing in new factors into the equation (how will this interoperate with a java/c# application) you start to develop monsters like JSR 170 which solve a lot of problems on paper, but in reality are too unwieldy to be truly useful.    He even lists out some of his "steps to interoperability" to help speed things along (like "use as much abstract code as possible" and "use services").
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In this new blog post today, Evert Pot shares some thoughts on a custom solution he was looking to create as an alternative for PHP's serialize function.   I wanted to build this as a helper class for a draft-PHP-RPC server. The reason I needed a custom one was because I wanted to make sure I would be able to spit out PHP4-compatible serialized data, and in the future, when its ported to PHP6, also PHP5-compatible data.   He came across several issues in the development process including the slowness of his method compared to serialize() and a lack of a way to tell if two variables reference the same data. If you'd like to check out what he has so far, he's made the code available for download.
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In a new post, Elizabeth Smith talks about "perverting Windows" to work with desktop PHP applications via an interesting library - Winbinder.   Writing desktop applications with PHP is considered to be idiotic by many people, but personally I think it's a lot of fun and can be useful. [...] There are more solutions for desktop apps with PHP than people probably realize. [...] So why isn't there a Win32 GUI wrapper for PHP? Well, there is...kind of.   She mentions a few issues she has with the Winbinder software - including lacking support for PHP5 and non-threadsafe code. She's falling back more and more on the "I can write an extension for that" mentality, though and has plans for the future:   Eventually I hope to have a WinUi, WinGdi, and WinSys (processes, threading, registry, et al) to put in pecl. There are some win32 only extensions in PECL, but win32std is the only one I've actually had use for, or even got working properly, and there's no agreement among them in naming convention, API design, or even functions vs. classes. So here I am, playing.