Fri 29 Feb 2008
The Pro::PHP Podcast from php|architect has posted its latest episode - their newscast for February 29th, 2008.
We’ve had yet another round of technical problems with the podcast. […] What’s going on with P3?
Check out this latest episode either by downloading it directly or by subscribing to their feed and getting the latest episodes delivered right to your machine.
Fri 29 Feb 2008
Michael Ross has written up (and gotten posted to Slashdot) a review of a book from APress “Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP”:
Because learning and using most of these technologies can be rather challenging to a Web developer, perhaps the best way to get started doing so is by using all of them to create a single Web-based application, with no pretense at mastering any one of them. This is the approach taken in Quentin Zervaas’s book, Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP.”
The book (see its web page here) covers lots of different technologies and seeks to be pretty comprehensive and, at around 570 pages, crams as much between its covers as it can. He goes through some parts of the book specifically but glosses over some for the sake of the length of the review.
Fri 29 Feb 2008
Andi Gutmans has some great news for Ubuntu users - the Zend Framework will be included in a future version of the linux distribution (Hardy Heron, Ubntu 8).
We are very proud to be an integral part of the Ubuntu distribution going forward. This is an important step towards making Zend Framework accessible to a broader audience and by working closely with the MOTUs we are able to ensure a positive end-user experience.
Andi also points out some of the stats from the framework’s life so far: 4M downloads of Zend Framework, 500K of them unique and only growing stronger.
Thu 28 Feb 2008
Ben Ramsey has recently blogged about some of the research and bit of development that he’s done to add “more correct” functionality to the Zend Framework for working with RESTful interfaces - proper PUT and DELETE support.
I’ve recently been wrapped up in an effort to design and implement a RESTful API using the Atom Protocol for a project at work. We are using the Zend Framework as the underlying framework for the project, so, in order to follow the Atom Protocol, I needed to support the HTTP methods PUT and DELETE
Since the Zend Framework has been playing such a prominent role in the development, he’s been digging into the Zend_Rest_Server component code and isn’t too happy about its support for PUT and DELETE. As a result, he’s proposed methods that might help resolve things such as isGet, isDelete, isOptions and getEntityBody. He’ even created a patch to make the needed changes.
Wed 27 Feb 2008
John Bristowe from Microsoft Canada talks about a new initiative from Microsoft to help .NET developers further their career.
Wed 27 Feb 2008
Two different posts on the Zend Developer Zone today announce two different events surrounding Zend’s framework - the release of the latest stable version, 1.0.4 and the posting of the latest Release Candidate, 1.5RC1.
About the Zend Framework 1.0.4 release:
It is our pleasure to announce the release of Zend Framework 1.0.4! You can download this new mini-release now from the Zend Framework download site. With this mini-release we bid a fond farewell to the 1.0 branch as we move on to the 1.5 release.
And about the Release Candidate:
This obviously marks a very important step towards a high-quality, thoroughly tested 1.5 GA release. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release in any way: with patches/check ins, documentation/translations, and bug reports.
You can grab this new Candidate from the download site as well.
Wed 27 Feb 2008
The PHP-GTK Community website has pointed out a small application, a cross-platform microblogging client called Nitwit.
Features include cross-platform functionality (Linux/Windows/Mac OSX), the ability to work on many protocols (like Jabber/Twitter/Jaiku) and it includes multilanguage support.
You can find out more about this simple little application on the Nitwit site as well as down load the latest version. There’s also a discussion area that’s been set up to allow developers and users to throw in their comments.
Wed 27 Feb 2008
On his blog today, Mike Willbanks has started up a new series that will look at various caching techniques that are available to PHP developers now:
Welcome to the first edition of the PHP performance series, a new series that I will be explaining ways to gain efficiencies and squeezing more performance out of your applications. This first edition, caching techniques, focuses on ways to cache data to optimize your current sites. Some of the concepts here are fairly easy to implement while others may take strategic design in the architecture of your application.
The methods he looks at this time are:
Wed 27 Feb 2008
Tiffany Brown shares a quick function she whipped up to create dropdown menus from the contents of a newline separated text file (or files).
I developed this PHP function for a project I’m working on. I’m posting it here in case I need it again, or in case you find it handy.
The function turns each line into an option tag making defining custom menus based on the contents of dynamically-given text files easy.
This could also be easily adapted to create navigations menus at the top of your pages with a few modifications to the HTML tags being used and some CSS to change the look of the list.
Tue 26 Feb 2008
DevShed has started up a new tutorial series today with part one of their overview of the DOM extension that’s included with PHP5:
Simply put, the DOM XML extension, as its name suggests, will permit you to work on XML documents by way of the DOM API. […] In this article series I’ll be discussing some of its most relevant methods and properties and accompanying all of these explanations with concise and instructive hands-on examples.
They look at using the DOM to create new documents, modify documents by adding additional nodes and converting over a SimpleXML document to be manipulated.