This new post from Jon Lebensold (on the KillerPHP blog) introduces you to a handy feature of the Zend Framework – View Helpers.
In summary, View Helpers are great for encapsulating forms, grids and other functionality that could eventually be bound to a different data source or even be pushed back to the user through a simple AJAX call.
Example code on how to use them is included showing a sample helper that adds Ajax functionality to a form’s submit and pushes the response values back out into a div on the page.
Lukas Smith has posted some ominous thoughts about the future of the LAMP stack in the online development world – specifically asking if the popularity of the grouping could be what might ultimately cause its downfall.
The issue is that there is simply not enough top qualified talent that knows LAMP well enough to hire. Or maybe its just too hard to find them? It seems all the good guys are already hired. As a result companies end up looking for other technology, not because they actually believe that these technologies are any better or worth the license fees that these usually require to be paid up…
He suggests two things that could be possible lead-ins to the “demise” of LAMP – the fact that LAMP just isn’t taught along side other languages in school and that, since PHP is only just now getting into the offices of the “major players”, there hasn’t been enough time to prove to them that PHP has worth in their business.
Be sure to check out some of the great comments on this one.
Carl and Richard chat with Andy Leonard about database testing.
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.
The Bakery (for the CakePHP framework) has several new articles/helpers/components they’ve posted about lately – here’s the list:
Check out The Bakery for more information on these and other great CakePHP-related items.
Tobias Schlitt mentioned today that the book from him and fellow co-author Kore Nordmann, a guide to the eZ Components framework, has been made the featured book of the month over on DynamicWebPages.de.
On the website you now find a picture of the book in a very prominent place and an extensive recension (German) linked from there.
You can find out more about the book and pick up your own copy from Amazon.
The Open SUSE group has released an update for a list of their software to bring their PHP4 and PHP5 packages up to date.
php5 was updated to version 5.2.5 to fix several security
vulnerabilities. For php4 on SLES9 the patches were backported.
You can find out more about the issues corrected as well as links to the packages that have been updated in the advisory message.
Kirk Munro stops by to talk about PowerGUI, a free tool from Quest Software for PowerShell, including a beautiful script editor!
Arnold Daniels has a suggestion for developers out there to help improve the performance of their applications – check your loops.
So you have a script which is not performing the way you want to. The first thing you should do it try to find out what the problem is. There are some tools out there that can help you.
He mentions the profiler in Zend Studio as well as the one in XDebug. If you can’t install those, however, he has another suggestion – FirePHP (a tool that can help time execution times in a simple and easy to include way.
With tools in hand, he offers a few suggestions as to what to check for and do in your applications:
- Get the data ready before going into the loop
- Don’t do things in the loop, you can also do outside it
- Use create_function to aid you
- Be careful with abstraction in loops
- Sometimes you can prevent loops altogether
- Last resort: write an extension
Pierre-Alain Joye has posted an example of one way to use the XDebug software – to debug the symfony framework or any other script (with the help of vim).
Xdebug is one of the best debugger and profiler for php (maybe the only good one in open source 
. The only problem is its lack of dedicated client. The only problem is its lack of dedicated client, however there is many plugins for many IDE or editors like Eclipse PDT or weaverslave and even for my favourite editor, Vim.
He quickyl runs through the installation of XDebug in your installation and the script needed to set up the debugging in vim. All that’s left is to add the “XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1″ flag to the end of your script name and letting the information flow in.