PHP NEWS

Zend Developer Zone: Joel Spolsky to Keynote at ZendCon '07 [2007-08-03 21:42:42] The Zend Developer Zone has announced today that Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software) will be presenting the keynote at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo: I'm excited to announce that Joel Spolsky, author, CEO, and blogger extraordinaire has consented to be one of the keynote speakers at ZendCon '07. Joel is not a PHP developer but he knows a lot about hiring good developers and building good software. It's the latter of the two that he will be talking about at ZendCon. You can check out more about Joel's talk on the ZDZ post and check out more about the conference on the official ZendCon 2007 page (including how to register).

Mike Naberezny's Blog: Wrapping PHP Functions for Testability [2007-08-03 21:41:41] Mike Naberezny has a new post today about one of the easiest ways he's found to "wrap up" those functions in your code that make the unit testing for your application break when you run it: One of the problems that hampers the testability of PHP code is the coupling created by accessing all of the PHP global functions. This happens often because a large number of useful extensions are accessed only through global functions. He gives the example of an LDAP connect script that, because it requires an external LDAP server to connect to and return a response from, would break the tests. His way around the problem is to use an extension versus just calling the object itself (code included) through a ExtensionProxy. Then, it's a simple matter of calling the proxy object with the type parameter for the function to be called and evaluating the response of the proxy instead of the actual call.

Tobias Schlitt's Blog: PHP@FrOSCon - Timetable online! [2007-07-26 04:06:09] As mentioned by Tobias Schlitt today, the FrOSCon timetable has been posted including the speaker list for both days of the event. Speakers for this year's event include: + Sebastian Bergmann - PHP Testing with PHPUnit + Jan Lehnardt - Next generation data storage with CouchDb + Derick Rethans - PHP's Dirty Secrets + Kore Nordmann - Tagging Topics of other talks to be presented include things like XUL theory, application deployment, personal information management and web services. Check out the full schedule and get ready to head over to Sankt Augustin August 25th and 26th for the fun.

IBM developerWorks: Turn SQL into XML with PHP [2007-07-26 04:04:23] On the IBM developerWorks site today, there's a new tutorial by Vikram Vaswani walking through the use of the XML_Query2XML PEAR package to pull data from your SQL database and push it into an XML structure. Ever wished for an easy way to transform SQL result sets into XML? It's a PEAR package named XML_Query2XML, and it provides a comprehensive framework to efficiently turn the results of a database query into a customizable XML document. This article introduces the package, and demonstrates useful real-world applications, including using it with XSL and XPath, combining it with data from external Web services, and creating database dump files. They go through the installation and the steps to create the XML: + Convert SQL to XML + Transform XML output with XSL + Customize XML output + Work with SQL joins + Filter SQL records with XPath + Merge data from multiple sources + Create database backups

Andrew Johnstone's Blog: MySQL & PHP Performance Optimization Tips [2007-07-26 04:02:06] Andrew Johnstone has posted a few handy tips to help you find out where in your application a certain kind of issue might lie - MySQL/PHP performance problems. In high performance web applications you will always have bottlenecks within your application. Identifying these bottlenecks and optimizing is a tedious task and typically show themselves underload. A single bad/unindexed query can bring a server to its knees. A large number of rows will also help to highlight any poor queries, and on very large datasets you may come to the point where you may have to make decisions whether to denormilize database schema. One of his recommendations is to run an EXPLAIN on each of the pages, showing what kinds of queries are being run and how long they could take. Once you've found that there is an issue somewhere, then you can move on to his next tip - using mysqlreport and mytop to watch the processes. He includes some sample commands to run, but there's more detailed information in a guide on hackmysql.com.

SEO Expert Blog: Amazon Wish Lists with SimpleXML [2007-07-23 20:12:00] On the SEO Expert Blog today, there's a new tutorial showing hos to consume the XML provided by the Amazon wish list service with the help of PHP5's SimpleXML functionality. With PHP5 XML processing finally became easy thanks to the SimpleXML functions, that convert an XML document to an object that can be processed using property selectors and array iterators. A few days ago I integrated my Amazon wish list on this site with very few lines of code as you will see when you read the rest of this brief tutorial. He walks through the connection both creating the XML request and handling the XML response to output the resulting images (books) linked to their Amazon pages.

Mambo Foundation Blog: Baking Mambo [2007-07-23 20:11:23] on what to base the next version of their software on - the CakePHP PHP framework. After a great deal of research the Mambo team has decided to utilize the CakePHP framework for Mambo 5. CakePHP is a rapidly evolving, mature, and feature rich PHP framework. The project is backed by an official Foundation (http://cakefoundation.org/) much like the Mambo project itself. We believe this is an important criterion as it helps assure the project will remain active and community minded. They include an overview of some of the features of the framework they plan to use including their flexible license, the simplicity of the development process and several "hot features" like built-in validation, access control lists and flexible view caching.

Joakim Nygard's Blog: Timezones in MySQL and PHP [2007-07-23 20:10:33] On his blog today, Joakim Nygard has posted about the use (or disuse) of time zones in PHP: The problem with not handling timezones correctly is not apparent in the usual case of the webserver and the database server being in the same timezone. [...] Often a specific timezone is assumed for displaying date and time. This could very well be incorrect for a large number of visitors. If the database server is in yet another timezone, things begin to get out of sync. He mentions the time zone functionality that MySQL offers too, but notes that it cannot be relied on either. Thankfully, there's is a bit of hope in PHP5 (as of 5.1 in fact) - the date_default_timezine_set function. He includes an example of the function in use, making it simple to get the correct date and time automatically with the date() function without having to do any hacks to discover the correct time zone.

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