IBM developerWorks: A step-by-step guide to publishing your own PEAR channels
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As mentioned over on the Zend Developer Zone, the IBM developerWorks website has posted a a new tutorial with a hand-holding guide to the creation of your own PEAR channels.   This tutorial discusses channels, introduces and explains the channel.xml file, and demonstrates how to build a channel for distributing packages. Channels are ordinarily used to expose PEAR packages through the Internet, but enterprises can uses channels to make distribution of enterprise-specific PHP code easy.   You'll need to log in to the IBM developerWorks website to get to the good stuff (you do have a login, don't you?), but once you do, you'll find a guide that goes through:  what PEAR is and what PEAR channels are channel management (including the channel.xml file) building the XML-RPC methods publishing the channel installing and upgrading a test package and some troubleshooting hints and further resources
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Christopher Jones' Blog: Review: PHP Web ProgrammingCommunity News: PHP Conference BrasilWebReference.com: Creating a Custom RSS Feed with PHP and MySQLThe Shadow Fox Network: Create Dynamic URLs With Mod_Rewrite and PHP FunctionsJoshua Eichorn's Blog: Official WebThumb Contest rules publishedDevshed: PHP EmailHowTo Forge: Installing A LAMP System With Fedora Core 6ThinkPHP Blog: Oracle with PHP and PDODevShed: Creating an Administration Area for a Simple Threaded Discussion ForumDevShed: Setting up the Foundation for an Extensible Website Engine with PHP 5PHPBuilder.com: PEAR's HTML_QuickFormAndi Gutmans' Blog:  PHP and Database Connection PoolingInternational PHP Magazine: Poll Question: The Biggest Advantage of PHP 5 is?Greg Beaver's Blog: PhpDocumentor 1.3.1 is releasedAlexander Netkachev's Blog: Practical PHP events
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On the KillerPHP blog today, Stefan Mischook has written up a book review of a popular book from Sams Publishing - "PHP 5 in Practice" by Elliott White and Jonathan D. Eisenhamer.   This is a very good book, actually one of the best recipe books I've read period. You can tell that the authors are still actively writing code - you can feel it as you read the chapters.   The review also lists out some of the contents of the book including sample recipes and the "quick hits" section.
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With all of the recent talk about business cases for PHP, Ben Ramsey wanted to get some of his thoughts on the matter out and into his blog in a new post.   I don't believe anyone has ever published any white papers on PHP, giving it a business case, and while we have companies like Zend, OmniTI, and eZ Systems providing support for PHP, I haven't seen any documentation from them like this. So, last Thursday when Stuart Herbert announced his Google Group for developing a business case for PHP, I took notice and joined.   Definitely good to hear encouraging words about a project that could ultimately help out the language as a whole break into an area where the growth has been the slowest.
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Paul Jones will be one of the presenters at this year's php/db|works Conference happening up in Toronto this week and he's offering a teaser of his talk (here's the synopsis) for those interested - "Organizing Your PHP Projects".   Fans of Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" will recognize the kind of talk I have in store, although I don't have the time available to expound in detail the way Hazlitt does. The talk will consist of a one-sentence lesson for you to remember when deciding how to organize your PHP project, whether it's a library, an application, a CMS, or a framework. I'll then explain how to apply the One Lesson in your project, and the various follow-on effects the One Lesson will have on your project organization.   He also jokes that he'll be the only presenter to use references to livestock, Jimmy Hoffa, and Mir as a part of the talk. He's even included a slide of the presentation for even more info.
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Michael Kimsal points out the posting of the latest part of his "Grails for PHP developers" series to his blog site - Part Five of the series.   I've put up the latest installment in my "Grails for PHP developers".  Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I'm taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself.  Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you're not careful.  I'll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.   This new part of the series goes back and puts the spotlight on GRoovy, the base of the Groovy/Grails combo. He talks about working with variables and arrays as containers for multiple pieces of data and some possible gotchas that could come up along the way.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Job Posting: WorldNetJobs.com Seeks Expert PHP Developer (Multiple Locations - FL/MD/NY)Stefan Reuter's Blog: Profiling PHP ApplicationsRich Zygler's Blog: People work with WS-* web services in PHP? Why?PHPBuilder.com: Securing Data Sent Via GET RequestsKore Nordmann's Blog: Comparision of PHP image librariesJim Wynia's Blog:  WebDAV, PHP and YouPadraic Brady's Blog: Namespaces (or Yet Another Pointless Opinion Piece)Christopher Jones' Blog: PHP 5.2.5 RPMs with OCI8 and PDO_OCI are availableZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 29: PHP Women Podcast (Recorded Live)Evert Pot's Blog: PHP WebDAV Integration Library
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This month's issue of php|architect has been released and includes articles such as:  PHP5: Beyond the Objects The Ultimate PHP 5 Shopping Cart PHP and Databases Error Handling with PHP 5 and PEAR
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Greg Beaver, PEAR guru extraordinaire, has added a new post to his blog encouraging the use of the PEAR installer to help manage and deploy your website to a production server.   One of the most common tasks that we experience as web developers is synchronizing a development web server with a live site. There are many solutions that have been tried before. [...] However, every single method (described above) has the potential for immediate and catastrophic failure, even with a backup.   He suggests the use of the PEAR installer functionality along with version control to easily deploy a site, allowing for things file dependencies and versioning. So, if files are handled through that package, how is the database managed? Through another PEAR-related feature - the post-install database initialization the Installer makes possible. Check out Greg's post for the full details on how to get you and your site started.
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Christopher Jones has posted a review of one of the latest PHP-related books published by Packt Publishing - "PHP Oracle Web Development":   Yuli Vasiliev has put a lot of real-world PHP and Oracle experience into his book PHP Oracle Web Development.  The book's reviewer, Arup Nanda, was, amongst other things, Oracle's DBA of the Year in 2003. The result is an excellent book that joins the PHP and Oracle worlds together.   Christopher talks about some of what the book covers (like installation and code snippets) and the book's excellent focus on different topics, giving each it's own full coverage.
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Greg Beaver talks about a big push that he's making towards PEAR2 by working hard on an integral piece of the puzzle - the Pyrus installer.   I'm churning out code to turn its installer, Pyrus, from vaporware into actual code. Along these lines, there has been significant progress.  The code has been developed on PHP 5.2, but will most likely target PHP 5.3 with the introduction of namespaces.  Pyrus completely revamps the way things are done.   Greg mentions some of the functionality the installer will use including XMLReader/XMLWriter, namespaces and bits of functionality from the Standard PHP Library (SPL). He's released what he's developed so far via a PEAR channel with no other dependencies.
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of one of Packt Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings - "PHP Programming with PEAR".    For those who have been living under a virtual rock for a while now, PEAR is the "PHP Extension and Application Repository". In a nutshell, it is a collection of classes, it's a framework, and it's a distribution system. Most importantly though, it's an excellent place to find the classes you need so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. (Ok, beginner's time is over, I promise).   PHP Programming with PEAR, written by Stephen Schmidt, Carsten Lucke, Stoyan Stefanov and Aaron Wormus, takes a look at some important PEAR classes and how you can use them.     He mentions what the book covers (which packages) and highlights some of his favorite bits, including the chapter on web services.
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This month's edition of php|architect has been released - complete with the "return" of a sample article.
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Today, Pierre-Alain Joye has fomally announced his "retirement" from working with the PEAR project as a lead developer. He's making a shift to work mainly towards other graphics/imaging work he's been developing and to continue work with his current extensions (and a few new ones on the way).   I spoke with him on some of the things that had lead up to making this decision and he mentioned it as a two-fold reason: one was some personal conflict between other PEAR developers and himself and the other an issue of time and interest in the project. He still wants to see it succeed, but just doesn't see the time in his life right now to do his part. Pierre will continue to work with the PECL extensions and on the PHP internals groups to help improve and develope them towards future versions. Some of the extensions he lists as the ones currently in his development are things like GD, xmlwriter, Zip (of course), and filter.   It is just a normal process, things and people change. I would have preferred a slower switch, as I was working on my leave (giving lead for many of my packages to other friends).   Pierre's PEAR work can be seen on this page of his blog and includes all of his PEAR and PECL work as well as PHP internals and Pimp/Cairo/GD development work.   You can also check out the decision in his own words over on his blog.
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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The latest edition (December 2006 issue) of the International PHP Magazine has been released today.   Topics covered in this month's edition include:  Graeme Johnson and Zoe Slattery - "PHP - A Language Implementer's Perspective Elizabeth Naramore's "Freelancers Corner" Matthew Peters' look at the application Component Architecture (SCA) in PHP Arjen Lentz's look at Open Source solutions to more IT problems.  You can check out the full table of contents for the issue on their site or you can go over and download a full copy of your very own.
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.