PHP Web Services Blog: Payload the Way You Want with PHP5 built-in SOAP
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The PHP Web Services blog has a helpful hint on getting a custom SOAP request all ready to go:   How do you get this [custom] XML to be output by the SoapClient?   Using the SoapVar method and a few newly created objects, making a custom structure is simple. It's just a matter of encoding the object and setting it with the base() method in the PHP SOAP extension. Check out the blog post for an example of both the custom XML and the code to produce it.
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Sandro Groganz has a quick note posted on his blog about the online availability of the text of his article "PHP 5 Enterprise Edition".   I just found that my article entitled "PHP 5 Enterprise Edition" is now available online. It has initially been published in the International PHP Magazine.   He quotes a bit from the introduction to give you an idea of what the article's about, but defers the rest of the article to the International PHP Magazine website. There's lots of good content, screenshots, layouts and plenty of related links as well.
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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
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If you missed the Zend Webcast talking about "Advanced PHP Solutions" with Zeev Suaski, ComputerWorld has your chance to grab the download from it.   PHP continues to enjoy phenomenal growth becoming the de-facto standard for enterprise Web applications. With the introduction of PHP 5, PHP has reached new levels of support for Web Services, XML and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) meeting the robust demands of the enterprise environment. Learn how you can achieve scalability, performance, availability and reliability for your enterprise-class PHP applications with advanced PHP solutions from Zend Technologies.   In the webcast, Zeev talks about integrating web services, tracking and improving the response times in your application, scaling your applications, and troubleshooting applications down to the exact line of code.
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Gerd Schauffelberger writes on the PHP-Tools Blog today about the contents of the latest issue from the German PHP Magazine, specifically an article covering the PEAR package HTML_AJAX.   This article's target is (1st) to give a brief introduction to AJAX and how things work from Javascript an PHP side in contrary. Also (2nd) I wanted to show that you actually don't have to muck around with a mess of Javascript (browser compatibility issues and such) because it's it is all done by the Joshua Eichorn's HTML_AJAX framework.    The article doesn't build up an entire application (as Gerd mentions) but it does provide you a good base to work from and gives you a good direction to head from to learn more about this powerful package.
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Hannes Magnusson has posted about more updates that are being made to the PHP.net website today, including an upgrade to the "conference teaser" patch and the introduction of a new box to like directly to the latest releases on the front page.    Since I moved the 'current releases' info into "a giant" includable array, living in include/version.inc, we can now provide a simple XML feed (or whatever) for you to parse to get the latest release info simpler and more accurately...   What do you think? Is it worth it? What kind of format would you want it in?    He wants your feedback on this last point - would having an XML feed for just the version info be that useful? Or would it just be yet another RSS feed to add to the list to keep up with the new PHP releases?
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Manfred Weber points out a new blog post from Jan Kneschke concerning the creation of and the idea of typesafe objects in PHP via doc-comments and the Reflection API.   From Jan:   I always disliked the way PHP handles Objects. There is no way to assign a type to properties. Validators have to be glued against the fields externally and you can't just generate a Object-Description (like WSDL) from a object either.   Because of this he's looked into an alternate solution - the typesafe objects. Since, by defauly, PHP's addition of object properties is pretty freeform, making things typesafe is a little difficult. His suggestion, though, uses a combination of comments in the code (declaring what the type of the property should be) and the Reflection API built in to PHP to "look back" at the comments and ensure the type of the property is correct. He even includes examples - a simple one about throwing an error, generating XML this way, and making safe encoded SQL statements.
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Sara Golemon brings us some news from the front about PHP6 in her latest blog entry today.   While everyone else has been busily gearing up for the release of PHP 5.2 and the new features that are going to come with it, Andrei and his small band of merry babelonians (yours truly included) have been making inroads on preparing PHP6 for a preview release. In the past week we've managed to roughly double the number of builtin functions (those which are part of the main distribution) that have been reviewed for unicode safety, either flagging them as good or upgrading their functionality   She also talks about what kinds of functions this entailed and how far along they are total (around 22%). She also encourages anyone that wants to get involved to help to jump right in.
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DevShed has posted the third part of their series looking at accessing the Yahoo! web services via PHP5 scripts. This time it's a focus on using the image search capabilities.   In this third chapter of the series, I'm going to continue exploring in detail other helpful web services offered by Yahoo!, such as those focusing on searching images and videos. Also, I will demonstrate how they can be queried directly from a basic PHP 5 application and process the corresponding search results by utilizing the same group of array handling functions that you saw in the previous article of the series.   Just like in previous articles of the series, they make a simple class that connect to the Yahoo! web services and request search details back about their queries (like "Madonna").
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This month's issue of php|architect has been released and includes articles such as:  PHP5: Beyond the Objects The Ultimate PHP 5 Shopping Cart PHP and Databases Error Handling with PHP 5 and PEAR
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Tobias Schlitt has a great (long) post responding to a proposal made on the php.internals mailing list for the inclusion of "taint mode" in upcoming PHP versions.   Tobias starts with an overview of what "taint mode" is so that everyone's on the same page. His example involves the incoming and outgoing data usually involved in an application and how the incoming can be the most problematic when it comes to the values inside. This is where taint mode can come to the rescue. At its most basic level, it's a method for, assuming everything coming in is "tainted", creating a mechanism to automatically clean the data before it's even touched.   With the basics down, Tobias looks back to the proposal for a few additional comments. He considers the proposal a great way to introduce the functionality to the language. There are some draw backs he mentions, though, including the additional overhead of working through every inputted value.   Overall, I think this whole thing would be a great addition to PHP and I hope this could come for 6.0. What do you think?   You can also check out some other opinions on the matter:  "Tainted mode" pour php on the Kamelot Blog
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On the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans talks about one of the presenters of the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo - Ben Ramsey. He asked Ben some questions about the conference and a talk that he'll be giving - "XML & Web Services with PHP (An Overview)".   Ben Ramsey will be speaking on "XML & Web Services with PHP (An Overview)" at the upcoming Zend/PHPConference and Expo. Since I hang out with Ben in the freenode.net #phpc channel I thought it would be cool to talk to him for a bit about his session.   They talk about why Ben is passionate about web services, the two popular protocols for using these services - SOAP and REST, and which one of them Ben prefers.
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On the PHP in Action Blog, there's a new post today that shares some tips for testing your web applications with some simple tests.   I just started listing the techniques I've learned when writing tests to exercise the web interface of a PHP application. This is from my experience and my personal preferences; it's not the final word or necessarily right for everyone.  He suggests:  Use SimpleTest's Web tester if you can Test the web output using regular expressions Use element IDs or names to test links, forms and fields Log HTTP requests in the application
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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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Andrei Zmievski has posted something new to his blog today about a feature of PHP6 that's finally been hammered down - HTTP input (request) decoding.   There have been no fewer than 4 different proposals floated before, but this one combines flexibility, performance, intuitiveness, and minimal architectural changes, and has only a couple of small drawbacks. Let's take a closer look.   He details the functionality - what it is, what's been decided on, and the advantages of the method. The basic approach is a "lazy" one where PHP will only store the request when it comes in, no filtering or anything, until you want to do something with it (i.e. get it via $_GET, $_POST, etc). When the request for data is made, PHP looks at the encoding settings and formats the data accordingly.   Advantages he mentions for this method include removing the guess-work on PHP's part for which encoding the request is and that it removes some of the overhead by not processing the data until it's actually needed.
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DevShed has posted the second and last part of a series of two articles based around the Composite design pattern - using it to work with strings in PHP5.   Are you a PHP developer who wants to improve your skills in pattern-based programming in PHP? If the answer to this question is a emphatic yes, then you should begin reading this article now! Welcome to the final part of the series "Implementing the composite pattern with PHP 5." Comprised of two instructive tutorials, this series walks you through the basic concepts of this important design pattern, and shows you how to apply it with some educational examples.   They start by defining a simple StringProcessor class as an abstract interface to build from. From there, they create two other classes - the SingleStringProcessor and the MultipleStringProcessor. Each of these takes in either a single file or multiple filenames and spits back out the value of the string and the length of the string.
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PHP isn't exclusively for Web pages. You can use it like Perl for cron jobs and other tasks.