An Introduction to Sockets in PHP

Working with low-level sockets can be a painful task in PHP. Fortunately, PHP offers a nice library of socket handling functions to make your life easier. If you do a lot of network programming in PHP, you will want to check out this three-part series, which starts with the basics and takes you through more advanced approaches. This article is the first one in the series.

Read more at www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP...

PHP IDE Debug Protocol

Lately there were many questions and comments on blogs and in PHP related forums regarding the debugger protocol, which will be used in the PHP IDE project at Eclipse.org. For those of you who are not familiar with the ' debug protocol ' term or do not know what I am talking about here is a short explanation. PHP IDE Debug Protocol

Making AJAX development easier

AJAX has the power to make your site more compelling and more dynamic, but AJAX development is often complicated, with much of the development time spent working around browser quirks and the fragility of AJAX components. Trust us, we know--the development of our own AJAX apps, like Google Maps and Google Calendar, caused us no small amount of AJAX-induced frustration.

Making AJAX development easier

Creating ZIP and TAR archives on the fly with PHP

In this tutorial you will learn how to create ZIP and TAR archives dynamically using PHP and the PEAR::Archive_Zip and PEAR::Archive_Tar packages.

Creating ZIP and TAR archives on the fly with PHP

PHP Optimization

Php optimization is the skill of fine tuning an application to extract maximum performance with minimum server load. Many of my clients in the past have wondered why I spend extra hours just to get the script execution time to be cut down by 1 second.

PHP Optimization

PHP GAINS IN THE TIOBE PROGRAMMING COMMUNITY INDEX

The TIOBE Programming Community Index has been updated for April 2006 showing their view on the status of programming languages in the development community. PHP moves up a spot from 5th to 4th. The long-in-the-tooth C fades back a bit relinquishing 1st place to Java, while C++ gains on its brethren with PHP biting on its heels (a margin of 0.02 between their percentages). PHP has a higher climb rate so expect another big move in the coming year.

PHP : Zend Framework

PHP Powers the WebNow, the world's most popular web programming language gets even better with an easy to use framework for developing the next generation of web applications.

Read more at framework.zend.com/

PHP Documentation

PHP Documentation - little collection of the docs,tutorials and howtos related to Linux/Unix programming, system administration and web development. PHP Documentation

Read more at www.php.net/docs.php

PHP 5.1.4

PHP 5.1.4 fixes critical error in PHP 5.1.3 with the $_POST array.
All people that has upgraded to PHP 5.1.3 are recommended to download upgrade to PHP 5.1.4 from official PHP.net site:

Download PHP 5.1.4

Completely free web design contract - checked in 2006 by qualified lawyers

Although not directly PHP-related, I'm aware that a lot of people who look over this blog are freelance or part time coders. It's always important to make sure that both you and your client stand on the same level, and as such, MediaSurgery have been kind enough to release their web design contract (checked by a lawyer) for free. The contract is available in both Open Office and Microsoft Word formats. Go get it!

Completely free web design contract - checked in 2006 by qualified lawyers

PHP 5.1.3. Release Announcement

The PHP development team is proud to announce the release of PHP 5.1.3. This release combines small number of feature enhancements with a significant amount of bug fixes and resolves a number of security issues. All PHP users are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible.

The security issues resolved include the following:

• Disallow certain characters in session names.
• Fixed a buffer overflow inside the wordwrap() function.
• Prevent jumps to parent directory via the 2nd parameter of the tempnam() function.
• Enforce safe_mode for the source parameter of the copy() function.
• Fixed cross-site scripting inside the phpinfo() function.
• Fixed offset/length parameter validation inside the substr_compare() function.
• Fixed a heap corruption inside the session extension.
• Fixed a bug that would allow variable to survive unset().

The feature enhancements include the following notables:

• The use of the var keyword to declare properties no longer raises a deprecation E_STRICT.
• FastCGI interface was completely reimplemented.
• Multitude of improvements to the SPL, SimpleXML, GD, CURL and Reflection extensions.
• Support for many additional date formats added to the strtotime() function.
• A number of performance improvements added to the engine and the core extensions.
• Added imap_savebody() that allows message body to be written to a file.
• Added lchown() and lchgrp() to change user/group ownership of symlinks.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE library to version 6.6

The release also includes over 120 bug fixes with a focus on:

• Make auto_globals_jit work without too many INI changes.
• Fixed tiger hash algorithm generating wrong results on big endian platforms.
• Fixed a number of errors in the SOAP extension.
• Fixed recursion handling in the serialize() functionality.
• Make is_*() function account of open_basedir restrictions.
• Fixed a number of crashes in the DOM and PDO extensions.
• Addressed a number of regressions in the strtotime() function.
• Make memory_limit work in Win32 systems.
• Fixed a deadlock in the sqlite extension caused by the sqlite_fetch_column_types() function.
• Fixed memory leaks in the realpath() cache.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.1.3, see the ChangeLog

Dipping a Toe into Rapid Application Development for PHP

Dipping a Toe into Rapid Application Development for PHP: "[Summary]



As Andi Gutmans presented at his php|tek keynote, and reinforced by IBM in their showing of QEDWiki, there is indeed a place in PHP for the Rapid Application Development. As part of Andi’s keynote, he spoke about component architectures and showed a quick demo of what that might look like in the future. He did so with a proof of concept called phpBlox. Now, don’t get too excited, it looks nice and worked for the demo, but we are still only at the beginning of the Road to RAD."

Google Maps

The Google Maps API supports the same browsers as the Google Local site. Since different applications require different behaviors for users with incompatible browsers, the Maps API provides a global method (GBrowserIsCompatible()) to check compatibility, but it does not have any automatic behavior when it detects an incompatible browser. The script http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2 can be parsed in almost every browser without errors, so you can safely include that script before checking for compatibility.

Read more at googleblog.blogspot.com...

Openomy PHP API

Openomy is an online file system. You can store files on Openomy and access them from any computer. Openomy organizes files and users via tags (as opposed to folders). You can choose to keep your files guarded by Openomy, or allow certain outside applications (of your choice) to do new and interesting things with your data.

Openomy PHP API

A WEEK IN PHPWORLD #3

Welcome back to the third edition of "a week in phpworld" - my subjective view at the highlights that happened last week in the phpworld.

PHP's World

Ilia Alshanetsky finally released the third Release Candidate for PHP 5.1.3 on friday. Somehow confusing to me, that one can't find the fix of the security-holes that lead to the "unofficial" RC3 i reported about last week in the ChangeLog of RC3. Instead you find them in the ChangeLog of RC2 - a RC that was actually released at end of march but now is timed to 6th of april. Confused now, too? However, Ilia asked the community once more to test the RC3 as much as possible - looking to release a final version of PHP 5.1.3 this week thursday. You can find the source download as usual at Ilias php.net-home and the binaries for windows at Edin's php.net-home.
Some other good news come from : Scott Mattocks announced a Release plan for PHP-GTK 2-alpha1 in the weekly PHP-GTK News. According to this plan, there are only three main-issues left preventing an immediately release. First there is a review for some patches needed , next some windows-bugs has to be fixed and last there is a need for update of the packaging script.

A WEEK IN PHPWORLD #3

Flash Lite 2

Flash Lite 2 Performance optimization.it is important to consider application performance and optimization from the beginning of each project for creating Flash Lite content for mobile phones.

Read more at cellphonesclub.com/wp/

PHP Hosting

Free PHP Hosting

Introduction to PHP Objects, Part 1

I'll be introducing one of the more interesting and useful methods of writing PHP scripts -- the object-oriented method. Those of you who might have experience with an object-oriented programming language such as Java or even C++ will find themselves right at home with most of the concepts I'll begin outlining here. However, be warned -- PHP objects have a mixture of C++ and Java, making them a little different than what you might be used to. In any case, let's get started with the basics.

Introduction to PHP Objects, Part 1

Object Oriented PHP: Paging Result Sets

If as a PHP developer you find yourself writing the same code again and again, or dealing with an increasingly stifling array of custom functions and include files in your script, it's probably time you looked into Object Oriented Programming (OOP). OOP has truly come into its own over the past 5 years or so. The world over, application and Web developers alike have discovered the merits of this type of software design, and now it's your turn!

In this article, I'll teach you the basic principles and features of Object Oriented Programming that exist in the PHP language, and take you through a few simple examples so you can see how it all works. We'll then take this newfound knowledge and apply it to a practical problem. Together, we'll create a reusable component that will handle the splitting of MySQL result sets into pages.

Object Oriented PHP

PHP Performance: lighttpd vs apache

PHP Performance

lighttpd + fastcgi is more than 25% faster than apache + mod_php4.
For static files we already know that lighttpd is 4-6 times faster.

whenpenguinsattack: lighttpd vs apache