PHP Community Magazine

NetBeans IDE 6.9 M1 Released

2010-02-17T07:05:48Z

NetBeans just announced the first milestone of 6.9 release which should be final for Summer 2010. Most notable feature in NetBeans 6.9 for PHP developers is the integration of Zend Framework (see our PHP Frameworks trends) in addition to an enhanced code formatting options. NetBeans IDE is really fast and lots of developers using Eclipse PDT should consider giving a try to NetBeans.

NetBeans PHP IDE include already a plugin for Symfony frameworks; more new features in this release include :

- Error badges : easily recognize files having errors directly from Projects view
- Symfony projects with custom directory structure supported
- Improved PHPDoc in Code Completion
- Formatting - the setting for formatting PHP code was extended and there are categories : Tabs and Indents, Braces, New lines, and spaces.

You can read more details on new features available in this milestone at NetBeans wiki.

RedBeanPHP 1.0 Released, Easy Object Database

2010-02-14T06:45:46Z

RedBeanPHP is a zero-config, easy-to-use object database for PHP and an ORM tool. It works very simply. Just create bean objects and throw them at RedBean. RedBean will analyze your objects and infer a readable, comfortable data scheme from it and create all required tables and columns on the fly. RedBean is not schemaless, it makes neat tables and columns for you, but on the fly without any configuration.

RedBean try to change the way you use ORM by eliminating the complexity of the configuration part. RedBean store objects only, and can manage object relations as well. The core of RedBean is very minimalistic for an ORM, but functionnality could be easily extended with plugins, already included : Transparent Locking, Caching and Automatic Database Optimization and Cleaning.

RedBeanPHP is open source released under BSD license. Also available for download with RedBean : RedShoe a compact PHP script that automatically syncs MySQL databases for RedBean; RedUNIT a set of Unit tests to confirm that RedBean works according to specifications; and Pre-packaged since it works well with other frameworks such Zend framework, Shozu... etc. Version 1.1 already available for download in the nightly build page and include support for SQLite 3.

More information and download at http://www.redbeanphp.com

PHP Job Market Overview (US) by Odin

2010-02-10T09:52:56Z

OdinJobs have a interesting resources for PHP developers, an US job market overview for PHP related jobs. Beside that data are available for 2008-2009 only you can have an idea about salary range of PHP related jobs in different US states. I have found many new jobs from the website search but unfortunately it's not yet available in the market overview.

According to Odin's PHP Salary Histogram salaries are between from $20K to $180K, while average salary range around $70K. Notice that Odin collects jobs from job boards, corporate websites, groups etc.

PHP jobs demand in US seems concentrated mainly in New York, Illinois, Texas, California, and Massachusetts, with a peak in California with 28229 jobs overall. But from a salary point of view, Idaho got the highest salaries with $100K median salary, followed by Washington, Arkansas, California, and Massachusetts.

More trends available at Odin PHP Job Market overview

PHP in Arabic, Interview with Khaled Al-Shamaa

2009-11-18T05:58:54Z

Manuel Lemos - phpclasses.org - posted an interview with Khaled Al-Shamaa, one of the very known PHP figures in the Arab world especially for his book "PHP and the Arabic language" and his classes around Arabic language usage within PHP. In the interview Khaled talked about himself, his experience, projects mainly with PHP and ar-php project.

Arabic is a language spoken in many countries. The number of PHP developers from countries that use the Arabic language has been growing a lot. Currently it represents almost 2% of the users that access the PHPClasses site.

Ready? Set? Code! Elance Introduces New Code Testing Platform And Sponsors PHP "Code-off"

2009-11-17T05:48:54Z

Skill Testing Partner ExpertRating Launches New Code Testing Platform Exclusively On Elance

Mountain View, Calif. (November 17, 2009) - Elance, where companies hire and manage independent workers and teams online, announced today an expansion of its skill testing platform to augment Elance's existing 250 skill tests. The new Code Tests, developed in collaboration with partner ExpertRating, provide technical experts new ways to demonstrate their expertise in writing and debugging leading programming languages such as PHP and SQL.

To launch Code Tests, Elance is simultaneously announcing a 14 day "code-off" in PHP - currently the programming skill in highest demand on Elance -- offering $250 and a full-year premium membership to each of the coders who score in the Top 10 for PHP programming.

Information Technology is the largest category of work on Elance. The November edition of the monthly "Elance Work Index" shows that PHP programming has retained its #1 spot of skills in demand across all categories. "PHP continues to be the hottest technical skill on Elance. The addition of these new Code Tests gives employers yet another way to be certain that the talent they find on Elance has the skills required to get great results," said Jon Diller, VP of Elance's Provider Network. "Meanwhile, the best coders in the market can now further distinguish themselves to help them get paid for what they do best."

The new Code Tests require the test taker to work with actual code to solve a problem. Each test is made up of 10 questions with a time limit for completing the entire test with recommended time allocations for each question. The test taker will be scored on whether they are able to solve the problem in the allotted time, how concisely the code is written, and how efficiently it uses system resources. "We are pleased to partner with Elance and provide programmers with an opportunity to demonstrate verifiable expertise for key technology skills such as PHP, SQL and many more," said Ravi Saundh, Co-Founder of ExpertRating (www.ExpertRating.com).

Windows Cache Extension for PHP Released

2009-09-01T20:23:26Z

Microsoft IIS team released today the first beta of the Windows Cache extension for PHP (WinCache 1.0) for PHP 5.2 and 5.3. The new cache extension is a PHP accelerator that aims to increase PHP applications speed running on windows platform. The extension doesn't require any code change, it just need to be enabled in IIS. WinCache have many directives that could be enabled/disabled in php.ini and six utility functions to return extension-specific information about the cache internals.

Joe Stagner, posted an introduction to the windows cache extension and pointed to some notes about compatibilities :

The extension can only be used with non-thread-safe builds of PHP
The extension can only be used when IIS is configured to run PHP via FastCGI
The Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP 5.3 can only be used with the x86 VC9 build of PHP 5.3.

The Windows Cache Extension includes 3 different types of caches. The following describes the purpose of each cache type and the benefits it provides.

Move That Bus

2009-08-30T21:34:21Z

Here is a very good reading for the weekend, Jason Austin and Garrison Locke shared their experience on Zend DevZone since they discovered PHP the first time in 98, passing by their PHP 4 certification, ZendCon, Zend Framework, ... etc. Some of the interesting point they mentioned :

- Using Classes is not Object Oriented Design
- Never edit code on the server
- A sign with the aphorism "Do not reinvent the wheel until you know everything there is to know about wheels" was prominently displayed in our office.

Read Move That Bus at DevZone.

Twitalytic, Archiving, Curating, and Threading Tweets

2009-08-23T08:25:32Z

Gina Trapani, of LifeHacker, released an alpha preview of a new PHP web application Twitalytic which aims to provide Twitter data crawler, replies archiver, and statistics generator. After crawling your tweets, Twitalytic will provide a web interface with some key stats about your followers, friends, tweets, and replies. You can also export all your tweets in a text file, in addition to an extended view of tweets with conversation, mutual friends, ... etc. You can get also more details about your followers : most followed, least likely, earliest and former.

I realize there are ten dozen Twitter applications out there that do much of this, and possibly better. Creating yet another Twitter app is probably the most clich� development undertaking of the year, but I�ve had a ball using this little thing to teach myself a few things about the Twitter API, OAuth, and jQuery and brush up on my PHP and MySQL skills.

Twitalytic came also with a public timeline of your tweets with replies. As mentioned Gina, this is not ready yet for production, but if you have ideas or time you can contribute and improve the project. Gina did not mention any license for the code, I don't know if you can use the Creative Commons on her blog or better ask for more details about it.

PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services, bridge for PHP developers to .NET through REST

2009-08-21T17:44:36Z

Interoperability @ Microsoft have just announced today a new bridge for PHP developers to .NET through REST : PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services. ADO.NET Data Services have been recently added to the .NET Framework, it offer a simple way to expose any sort of data in a RESTful way. The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services is an open source project funded by Microsoft and developed by Persistent Systems. The blog post came with a sample demo showing how to run the PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET to create the PHP proxy classes, then to query over the data service and display data.

PHP Toolkit for ADO .NET Data Services enables PHP developers to access data services created using ADO .NET Data Services framework. The goal is to provide the similar functionality as .NET library to access and modify the data and its relationship using URIs which points to pieces of data integrated with the web.

Usage require PHP5 installed and configured on the machine where the ADO.NET Data Services toolkit is installed. Download PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services from codeplex.

Lighty2Go, A Lightweight Portable LiMP Stack

2009-08-19T08:36:25Z

After WAMP and LAMP, what about a lightweight portable development stack with Lighttpd, MySQL and PHP ? Lighty2Go is a portable LiMP stack on a stick for windows based on the WLMP project, and LiMP stands for LightTPD, MySQL & PHP. The downloaded package is 12.5MB for version 1.5.2 which came with pre-installed and ready to use : LightTPD 1.4.20, MySQL 5.0.67, PHP 5.2.6, MiniPerl 5.8.8, OpenSSL 0.9.8i, and phpMyAdmin 3.0.1.1.

Since it's about portable software, probably a SQLiteManager could be a great plus if it will be included in future releases. Lighty2Go provide a tray tool to help start/stop the server and change settings.

JoobsBox, Open Source PHP Job Board

2009-08-18T12:36:35Z

Do you use a job board on your website ? Or planning to use or develop a job board ? JoobsBox is a powerful open source PHP Job board solution that you can use or build on it. JoobsBox is very flexible and support plugins and themes. The solution came already with five bundled plugins (Logger, iphone, Google Analytics, Twitter, XSSandStuff) and a default theme. JoobsBox is based on Zend Framework and provide a complete administration panel to manage jobs in different categories. There are more interesting features mainly RSS feeds, SEO friendly URLs, multi language support, easy installation, configurable categories order.

JoobsBox is a new project at its alpha stage so if you are interested you can extends its functionalities with plugins for example to support payments and make some profit from your job board. Require PHP 5.2.4+, Zend Framework and MySQL. Released under a New BSD License.

TwitterData and PHP

2009-08-03T07:07:11Z

Alexey Zakhlestins created php-twitterdata, a small library for working with Twitterdata in PHP. The idea is to embded machine-readable data in twitter that could be parsed and used in other applications. From Twitter Data website :

Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time by powerful new kinds of applications built on the Twitter platform. Here is an example Twitter Data message:
I love the #twitterdata proposal! $vote +1
The part with the dollar sign, $vote +1, is a piece of data embedded using the Twitter Data format.

A sample usage of PHP-TwitterData :

Twitter applications could be more fun with TwitterData especially that you could easily parse and use data embdded in tweets directly in your application. Be sure to check Alexey's post, he provides details on working with the library and using TwitterData_Message, TwitterData_Frame and TwitterData_Tuple classes. The library is released under a MIT-style license.

WebMesh Framework 0.13 and WebMesh Newsletter Case Study released

2009-07-24T04:41:07Z

Just released today: WebMesh Framework 0.13 and WebMesh Newsletter case study. WebMesh Framework is strongly based on PHP5 and proposes a standard structure for PHP projects with intention of

Force a better organization of the your project classes.
Encourage the use of the PHP version 5.
Increase the code reuse level

The framework offer the following features in the latest version:

Several abstractions to make developer's life easier including : HTTP Encapsulation, emails, collections, image manipulating, I/O facilities, socket encapsulation, UI components and more.
Implementation of the pattern MVC (Model2) where:

Model layer can uses persistence package with the dataobject sub package or adaptations for another frameworks
View layer using Smarty template framework or another framework that you to prefer to integrate in this layer and
Controller layer using Action classes centralized in one FrontController and some features such as ActionMessages and actions implemented based in the CRUD operations (Apache Struts 1.3.x like)

Support for i18n using properties files.
Configured using properties files.
Provides a persistence API extending the DB_DataObject library of the PEAR repository. Offer persist data in Relational Databases or in a XML files.
Integration with Smarty (used in MVC implementation), Log4PHP, PEAR and J4avaScript libraries and components.
Provides WebMesh Newsletter that implements a simple newsletter sender application based in the latest version of the WebMesh Framework (0.13) and serve to understand better how to use this framework.

More information and download at http://webmesh.sourceforge.net/

SabreDAV 0.9 Released

2009-07-22T22:31:39Z

Evert Pot have just released version 0.9 of SabreDAV, a PHP solution to integrate WebDAV with your existing web application. From 0.8 to 0.9 API change are minimal but it's recommended to upgrade. SabreDAV is currently considered feature complete. SabreDAV will turn 1.0 after a few months of real-world testing. Released under New BSD License.

SabreDAV features include :

Fully WebDAV compliant
Supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS/X, DavFSv2, Cadaver, Netdrive.
Passing all Litmus tests
Supporting class 1, 2 and 3 webdav servers
Locking support
Custom property support
Supports: RFC2518 and revisions from RFC4918
Has built-in support for (basic/digest) authentication (RFC2617)

PHP Namespaces Basics Tutorial

2009-07-13T19:21:06Z

Sitepoint have a new article today introducing to PHP Namespaces, one of the latest addition in PHP 5.3. In the article Craig Buckler show why do we need namespaces and how to use it in your code with samples on how to call it in your PHP application. This is the first part of the "How to use PHP Namespaces" serie so expect more coming soon.

Namespaces are one of the most significant changes in PHP 5.3. They will be familiar to C# and Java developers, and they are likely to change the structure of PHP applications for the better.