Updated: 2009-10-19 16:41:27
If you'd like to keep up with a daily recap of some of the things going on around this year's ZendCon conference, Eli White, Editor-in-Chief of the Zend Developer Zone, will be posting videos all week long about the event.
He's added T-2 Days and T-1 Days so far and you can keep up with more of the video posts as they come out on this page of the Zend Developer Zone website.
Updated: 2009-10-19 15:51:21
Hasin Hayder has a new post talking about the new memcached extension for PHP (memcached from PECL) and how it can be used to store sessions data.
Many of you already know that managing session is a critical task for web applications, specially when you want to avoid I/O hop and also a significant load over your database by writing a custom session handler. [...] This is why a central session manager is very important for your application to scale.
He walks you through the whole process - installation, setting up memcached instances and getting the extension installed and working with your PHP installation. By adding two lines to your php.ini file, the sessions can quickly and easily be stored in memcache instead of on the local server.
Updated: 2009-10-19 15:27:44
Next in a series of video blogs from ZendCon 2009. It’s Tutorial day! The conference officially kicks off today with 10 tutorial sessions.
Updated: 2009-10-19 14:36:10
In this recent post to his blog Padraic Brady starts his look at the Pubsubhubbub protocol (PuSH), how it compares to rssCloud and how to get started using it.
This article explores both of these sides ([the Publisher in Part 1 and] the Subscriber in Part 2), and introduces the basic code to get each working. The article also opens with a general introduction to this new protocol which you will definitely be hearing more about (especially if you run a blog) and contrasts it to its nearest rival, rssCloud.
He talks about the differences between it and the rssCloud functionality and gives an example of its use with the Zend_Feed_Pubsubhubbub Zend Framework component. His sample shows how to set up a publisher andn define topic and hub URLs for the service to use.
Updated: 2009-10-19 13:03:55
Latest PEAR Releases:
HTTP_OAuth 0.1.4
Auth 1.6.2
VFS 0.3.0
Updated: 2009-10-18 17:28:35
The daily video blog of ZendCon 2009 continues. It’s now only 1 day until ZendCon officially kicks off with tutorial day.
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Updated: 2009-10-17 17:54:47
First entry in a daily video blog from ZendCon 2009. It’s 2 days until ZendCon starts!
Updated: 2009-10-17 12:26:19
Samuel Folkes has posted a few of his ideas on the tool(s) that every PHP developer needs to have on his belt to make their work easy and more effective.
Quite often, I am asked the question "What tools do I need for PHP development?". [...] For those who will listen, I have one very simple answer to that question: Aside from a server running PHP and a text editor, you need absolutely nothing. That answer may seem extreme but its the truth. Lets break it down.
Samuel suggests that, while the choices for IDE, debuggers and other tools for PHP development are too many to count, nothing is as good and clean as a basic text editor (his choice is Notepad++). There are a few things that can make your code more effective like phpDocumentor or PHPUnit, but those are more about good coding practices than how you develop.
Updated: 2009-10-17 01:09:00
Brandon Savage has a new post to his blog today with a few tips on some "micro" optimizations you can make to your PHP applications to improve performance and make for better maintainability.
Micro optimization doesn't work. So why, then, is this post called "micro optimizations that matter"? The optimizations below could be described as micro - not in the little amounts of performance improved, but in the very minute (if any) changes required to your code to make use of them. All of these optimizations are standard optimizations you should consider, and all of them will offer considerable performance enhancements.
Instead of the usual tips that might save you a millionth of a second here and there, Brandon suggests some smaller things like caching data, removing manual error logging, using a CDN and adding in an autoloader.
Updated: 2009-10-17 00:22:00
As mentioned by the Zend Developer Zone, the PHP Barcelona Conference for 2009 is just around the corner!
The PHP Barcelona User Group is proud to announce that the PHP Barcelona Conference 2009 is here, and it is arriving bigger than ever! Two days, three parallel tracks of talks and workshops, and some of the biggest names and companies in the industry covering the hottest subjects to date. [...] Discover the newest evolution of the most popular scripting language and its intimate bonding with security, stability and scalability, and how its integration with cutting edge technology make it one of the most powerful and state of the art building blocks for robust applications.
The event will be happening October 30th and 31st at the Citilab and registration is still open. The price is 50 Euro for both days of the event and only 30 Euro for a single day pass. You can find out more on the conference website.
Updated: 2009-10-16 15:45:03
Jani Hartikainen has posted some of his opinions about code commenting in a response to this post from James Carr claiming that code comments on fresh code is a bad idea.
James puts it quite well: When you write comments, it would be much better idea to just talk with your coworkers about it. He uses "excuses" as an example - code which does something that you need to explain, or says something like "Here we do X but we should really do Y" While I partially agree - if you're not sure which approach you should use, or whether your approach is correct, talking with your coworkers is definitely a good idea.
Jani talks a bit about what he considers good and bad commenting - non-redundant, descriptive and sometimes difficult to remember to do correctly.
Updated: 2009-10-16 14:30:03
Keith Casey has posted a review of the php|architect book "PHP Design Patterns" by Jason Sweat to his blog today.
Diving into the book itself, Jason covers 16 Design Patterns. He covers the basic ones like the dreaded and horribly abused and misused Singleton to the more advanced Active Record and Table Data Gateway. While he covers all of them to a good depth, there are a number that deserve special mention.
These "mentionables" include the Strategy, Observer and Mock Object patterns - all three Jason covers well with some good examples included. Overall, he found the book good, but needing some work in some areas (like in updated code samples).
Updated: 2009-10-16 06:00:26
On developer.com today they've posted the third part of their series about getting your own home-brew PHP MVC application framework up and running.
Welcome to the third part of our voyage into the world of MVC. Our mission: To build an MVC framework that is: Simple, Extensible, Lightweight, Versatile, Fast-loading, Self Templating
In this new part the look at exception handling, create a simple "hello world" example and things to watch out for in their simple framework's current state - like the access control issues it might face.
Updated: 2009-10-15 23:46:30
The PHP Barcelona User Group is proud to announce that the PHP Barcelona Conference 2009 is here, and it is arriving bigger than ever! Two days, three parallel tracks of talks and workshops, and some of the biggest names and companies in the industry covering the hottest subjects to date.
Updated: 2009-10-15 14:55:04
As reported
last month , Zend Framework has started hosting a monthly "bug hunt": an
effort to resolve issues against the framework. This month's bug hunt is
today and tomorrow.
The individual who helps resolve or assist in resolving the most issues
during each month's bug hunt days will receive a Zend Framework t-shirt!
Last month's winner was Padraic Brady.
Updated: 2009-10-14 22:05:39
New from WebReference.com there's the first part of a tutorial series looking at working with object-oriented programming in PHP:
Updated: 2009-10-13 23:58:39
Ever got lost in a sea of code, overwhelmed by the complexity of your application? Good news, there's an app for that!
Visualize, navigate and search PHP code with nWire for PHP, a plugin for Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio 7. nWire provides innovative code analysis for large scale and enterprise PHP applications, enabling significant development cost reduction.
Updated: 2009-10-13 17:57:03
The Zend Framework team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of
the 1.9.4 release. This release is the fourth maintenance release in the 1.9
series.
You may download it from the Zend Framework site .
Updated: 2009-10-05 18:35:33
Version 0.9.0 of the Apache Solr extension has just been released. The Apache Solr extension is an extremely fast, light-weight, feature-rich library that allows PHP developers to communicate easily and efficiently with Apache Solr server instances using an object-oriented API. It effectively simplifies the process of interacting with Apache Solr using PHP.
Updated: 2009-10-05 08:19:15
ZendCon is now only two weeks away, and we’ve been hard at work in preparing for it. We’ve got a number of things in the works that we hope you are going to really enjoy!
Updated: 2009-10-03 16:53:17
I created a small extension to the Zend_Controller_Action that allows mapping request parameters to method parameters for clean and intuitive parameter passing from request to the action methods.
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Updated: 2009-10-02 08:57:57
In a recent post to his blog Rafael Dohms reminds readers to not forget about the security of their applications because it can be "a huge mistake which can take a turn for the worse."
Updated: 2009-09-30 21:50:02
In a new post to his PHP in Action blog Dagfinn asks the question "is bad code good for you?" He wonders if bad code really is a good thing and how it can be split out from the good parts of your application.
Updated: 2009-09-29 19:30:28
A brand new conference is on the horizon! PHP Benelux, one of the largest PHP user groups, is hosting a conference of their own in Antwerp, Belgium, on Saturday January 30th. They’ve announced their Call for Papers is open until October 31st.
Updated: 2009-09-29 17:03:45
ConFoo.ca, the spiritual successor to PHP Quebec, is happening March 10-12, 2010, and has announced their Call for Papers is open until November 13th.
Updated: 2009-09-29 16:17:53
Presenting the latest edition of The ZendCon Sessions. The podcast that rebroadcasts sessions/talks from the last ZendCon PHP Conference. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and features Chris Shiflett giving his talk: “Security Centered Design”
Updated: 2009-09-28 06:24:14
Stefan Koopmanschap has let us know that the first phpBenelux conference (happening in 2010) has been announced !
Updated: 2009-09-25 18:24:50
According to the latest post on his blog Brandon Savage thinks interfaces rock . He includes an example or two of how type hinting can help you enforce and predict what sort of methods are defined in other classes.
Updated: 2009-09-23 21:20:20
A number of industry leaders have comes together and made an announcement. A new Simple Cloud API is being developed for PHP, that will create an easy way to interface with any number of cloud services. The current contributors to this project include Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, Nirvanix, and GoGrid.
