As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone today, there’s a new article posted over on the TMCNet.com website about the support and cooperation that IBM is giving PHPers all over the world running System i machines.
Over the past year, Zend and IBM have worked together to make Zend’s popular PHP products available for V5R3 and V5R4 versions of i5/OS. Zend Core for i5/OS is a fully tested and enhanced version of open source PHP; Zend Platform for i5/OS is a PHP production environment that improves application management and performance; and Zend Studio for i5/OS is a PHP Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that includes all of the components necessary to support the lifecycle of PHP applications created on i5/OS.
Mark Shearer, general manager IBM System i also notes that one of the goals of the cooperative effort was one they’ve met successfully so far – to bring tools to System i users to allow them to quickly and easily develop applications in their environment.
The article also includes a small list of companies already using this technology including Parts Depot, MedDirect and HarrisData.
In the CakePHP blog, The Bakery, there are three new items posted – all three tutorials on different topics:
- The first is a tutorial that shows how to integrate PHPTAL templates into a Cake application (via a custom PhptalView class)
- Next up is a simple one – the creation of a helper to work with multiple checkboxes in a form .
- Lastly, there’s a tutorial that shows an implementation for a counterCache object in a simple application.
Be sure to check out The Bakery for more great tutorials and articles like this.
Secunia has new advisory posted today about a WordPress vulnerability that’s been found surrounding the use of the myGallery plugin:
GolD_M has discovered a vulnerability in the myGallery plugin for WordPress, which can be exploited by malicious people to disclose sensitive information and to compromise a vulnerable system.
Input passed to the “myPath” parameter in myfunctions/mygallerybrowser.php is not properly verified before being used to include files. This can be exploited to include arbitrary files from local or external resources.
This issue is confirmed on WordPress 1.2.1 but other versions might be affected. It’s recommended that users upgrade to the latest version of the blogging software to prevent issues. As of the writing of this release, though, the only upgrade is to the beta version 1.4.b5.
As mentioned in a new post to the CodeIgniter blog today, they’ve added several new features and enhancements to their (recently relaunched) website.
Besides other small enhancements, they’ve added to main features:
Be sure to check out all of the great content on the rest of the site too with great info like a user guide to help you get started, forums to find help, and even some video tutorials to make learning the framework even easier.
The Stubbles framework team has released the latest version of their framework today – Stubbles 0.1.0:
The Stubbles team is proud to announce the release of Stubbles 0.1.0. This release is a first alpha version and contains the basic features of Stubbles like the Extended Reflection API, XML handling with XMLStreamWriter and XMLSerializer, Logging, Event handling, support for filtering and validating user input and session handling. The release additionally contains parts of packages that we announced to be in the next milestone 0.2.0.
The Stubbles framework is one that seeks to “combine your favorite features from other programming languages and frameworks” and is flexible enough to allow for easy interfacing with other frameworks/components like PEAR or the Zend Framework.
As noted on the security update website, Secunia.com, Debian users can now update this distributions with the latest patches for both versions, PHP4 and PHP5.
Debian has issued an update for php4/php5. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions, malicious users to disclose potentially sensitive information or compromise a vulnerable system, and by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.
Links to the advisory posts (that include the links to download the updated packages):
It is recommended that Debian users update their installations immediately so as to avoid any kind of security issue that might result from the vulnerability.
In a new post on the PHPKitchen blog, there’s information about the latest release of their framework – version 0.6.2 of the Seagull Framework.
The main focus of 0.6.2 has been managing module resources so that they are completely independent from the core framework and are easy to install. To that end, everything a module might need can now be bundled in a single archive which can be unzipped in the modules directory, and Seagull will take care of everything else during the install process.
Modules can now additionally contain any template or data resources, which include HTML, CSS, js and a range of data files. With the possibility of adding additional include paths, and config or setup files on a per-module basis, it’s much easier to incorporate advanced features into your projects without touching the core.
They list out some of the new core features the framework now has to offer including:
- web-based installer now easier to use (Dmitri Lakachauskis)
- Improved Ajax integration with Prototype with new docs added (Julien Casanova)
- Added ability to add custom data to your modules, makes it easier to diverge from svn code, create file called data.custom.my.sql for this purpose
- Input URL parsing strategies now configurable
- Added an overlay debug block, displays system info
Along with these, there’s also a few new module improvements including enhanced RSS support, allowing members to select their own theme, and an Ajax username check included.
You can download this latest version from the Seagull Project’s homepage and get documentation/help from the forums or the mailing list.
In an effort to add to the ever-growing list of “keeping it simple” benchmarks out there, Hasin Hayder presents his own results for the task of fining the number of times a word occurs in a given string.
Today I was just thinking what are the possible ways to count the occurrence of a specific word inside a string. I found some possible ways finally and I just benchmarked them. Wanna see the result?? – for sure you will find it interesting too.
Methods range from a simple split() and count() call out to using the regular expression functions to locate the matches. After running it four times (to check for accuracy), he the stats were pretty much the same. It looks like the substr+count method was the fastest overall with last place falling to the array function method.
Christian Stocker points out a handy patch for the PHP XSLT functionality today – one that allows you to test to see where in the transformation the most time is spent.
Look no further than this patch to the PHP XSL extension. It uses the built in profiler of libxslt to get the information which template was called how many times and how much time was spent in them. It may help in improving the speed of your XSLT transformations, like a PHP debugger can help in profiling your PHP scripts.
Besides the link, he also includes a simple sample script that uses the setProfiling function to write out to a text file the stats of the transformation. He also includes a (very beta) patch to the libxslt functionality itself to make it easier to not only time the overall execution of the xslt, but also allows for timing of other individual templates that might be included.
In an effort to provide as much information and code about the PHP builds as possible, Edin Kadribasic (with some help from John Mertic) has created some new abilities for the snapshot build process:
Up till now we provided only the debug pack for the latest snap but several people have asked if it was possible to make one available for each snap that was provided on the site. The PECL bundle and the installer were not provided at all (although pecl4win site provides a build of PECL extensions).
As a result, he’s generated and posted these packages for the latest PHP releases:
He also makes a request to other PHP-ers out there for suggestions of how to include these builds on the Downloads page right alongside the normal PHP downloads.