Gadgetopia

php | architect: A print magazine for PHP developers.

PHP in contrast to Perl: As much as I adore PHP, this article makes a lot of good points when comparing PHP to Perl: PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations... PHP has inconsistent function naming... PHP has too many functions in the core I'll be the first to ...

A link I may come to regret showing Deane: DevX has an article on PHP-GTK, which provides PHP bindings to the GIMP Tool Kit, the foundation of the GNOME desktop environment. Now, PHP has begun to carve a space for itself in the standalone application arena as well with PHP-GTK. ...

PHP-Freelancers : PHP Jobs and Projects for PHP Programmers: Go get yourself a job. Kind of like eLance for PHP developers. Post a project, bid on a project, etc.

As long as we're on the subject of PHP tomfoolery, I found something else of interest. I was going to reply to Deane's last PHP post with a snide comment like "What's next, 3D graphics with PHP?". Then I found this: php_opengl is the bindings from opengl, glu, and glut ...

PHP Collaboration Project: Zend has announced that they're developing a new framework and "environment" for PHP. [...] the initial focus is on two areas: the creation of an open source Zend PHP Framework and engagement with the Eclipse Foundation around PHP. Having a PHP IDE and framework will empower PHP ...

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn t Matter: Jeff Atwood essentially closes the PHP sucks argument by agreeing with it, then explaining why it doesn t matter. The TIOBE community index I linked above? It s written in PHP. Wikipedia, which is likely to be on the first page of anything you search for ...

Phalanger - the PHP Language Compiler for .NET Framework: The idea of working with this is enough to make your head explode. [...] the object model in Phalanger enables to combine PHP objects with the .NET ones. It is possible to use a class written in PHP from a .NET ...

On PHP: There have been a lot of blogs jumping around on PHP in the last few days, and I've finally tracked it back to its source. Tim Bray -- one of the "pillars of the Web," if I can be so bold -- posted about PHP a week ago. ...

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP: Lo and behold, Microsoft has written a PHP extension. It s a data access component for SQL Server which PHP already has, so I guess I m not sure how it improves things, but it s pretty cool coming from Microsoft, anyway. The SQL Server Driver for PHP ...

Remember: PHP is scripting language!: Some good advice that people tend to forget. One of the oft-overlooked aspects of PHP is that you can write scripts in PHP to execute from the command line. I fell into the habit of writing data munging scripts in Perl, and web pages using ...

Hardened PHP: For when PHP just isn't secure enough. Hardened-PHP adds security hardening features to PHP to protect your servers on the one hand against a number of well known problems in hastily written PHP scripts and on the other hand against potential unknown vulnerabilities within the engine itself.

PHP Editor Review: Here's a site apparently devoted to nothing but PHP IDEs. What will they think of next?

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor: PHP 4 has officially been discontinued. No more updates after 12/31, and no more security patches after August 2008. Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is ...

The PHP Anthology: SitePoint writes some books now and again, and they appear to have come up with a big winner in "The PHP Anthology: Volumes 1 and 2." These books are written by PHP evangelist Harry Fuecks, who is to PHP what Ben Forta is to ColdFusion. I downloaded ...

PHP programming language: Some interesting history on PHP. It used to be a Perl wrapper? PHP was originally designed as a wrapper around Perl by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to display his resume information and collect some data, such as how many hits it was generating. Others first used "Personal ...

MozPHP: More and more, PHP is being seen as a command line and application scripting language. "MozPHP is a Mozilla PHP integration package. With MozPHP you can execute PHP scripts in Mozilla directly without the need for a local HTTP server. Currently the integration is one way, i.e. it is ...

Programming:PHP - Wikibooks: Wikibooks has an entire, free PHP book online. It's a work in progress, but still very usable.

PHP: URL Howto: This is a little known but great feature of the PHP Web site. If you write in a PHP.net URL, like http://www.php.net/links, first this URL is matched against the PHP.net pages. If there is a page named links.php, then you'll get that page immediately. This type of ...

phpPatterns(): A site devoted to PHP desgin patterns.

PHP version 5.0.0 has now officially been released, bringing a large number of long-overdue changes to PHP. The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features. XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library ...

Using Perl code from PHP: The possibilities here make my head spin. Problem is, I don't know if it's spinning in a good way or a bad way. The PHP Perl extension was implemented to allow the usage of Perl code from within PHP. It is a wrapper that embeds ...

Migrating from PHP to ASP.NET: Not biased, I'm sure. "This paper discusses the migration of PHP (PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor 4) to ASP.NET. It compares and contrasts the basic underlying syntax of PHP with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, as well as the underlying functionality and architecture of the two systems."

PHPkitchen - Come See What's Cookin': Another good looking PHP site.

l love Smarty, the PHP templating engine. It makes presentation development a lot simpler and more pleasant. However, there s always a guilt factor involved, because whenever you introduce an abstraction, you introduce processing overhead. Smarty is written in pure PHP, so there s extra processing post-parse, which will always slow things ...

I do some hairy Outlook and Exchange programming. Not by choice, but by force -- I have users that won't give up Outlook for any reason, and they want it to interoperate with our PHP-based database. I usually do my Outlook scripting in VBScript, since Outlook has a snazzy COM ...

A pro-PHP Rant: Harry Fuecks gives us a wonderful, glorious rant on why PHP is good, no matter how many beat-downs it takes -- and it's been beat down a lot lately. He starts with the simplicity and reliability... There are smallish sites I own / run, built on PHP, ...

php.internals: PHP 6.0 Wishlist: Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of PHP, has started to speculate about what they're going to do with PHP 6. I am wondering if it may not be time to break some more stuff and do a bit of spring cleaning. It would mean many apps would ...

ONLamp.com: A PHP Web Services Client: Handy tutorial on how to write a PHP client for the Amazon Web service using PEAR's SOAP module.

Recommended PHP reading list: IBM has turned into a big supporter of PHP lately. Here's their "PHP Reading List," which includes things like development environments (they recommend Xampp which rules), articles, blogs, books, magazines, etc. A bunch of really good resources. Via Slashdot.

Taking a look at ten different PHP frameworks: There are a lot of PHP frameworks floating around these days. I think the Ruby on Rails legacy (besides a ton of great apps) will be that it got everyone talking about frameworks again. This article compares ten PHP frameworks. Seagull seems ...

PHP Meet Mr. FireBug - PHP Debugging for Web 2.0: Another great little debugging extension for PHP. Like FirePHP, it has integration with FireBug, the greatest Firefox extension in recorded history. The real gem here is a great little screencast (QuickTime link) which shows how simple this thing is to ...

Back in the 1980s, when I was in high school, the reigning Chevy performance cars were the Camaro and the Corvette. They were almost the same, but worlds apart at the same time. Back then, you could get the Corvette and Camaro with near identical powertrains -- the 350 cid ...

PHP's "doggie" easter egg: There's a series of Easter Eggs in PHP, based on a specific querystring argument and value. An apparent easter egg in some versions of PHP will display a picture of a dog when any PHP script is loaded with a particular query string. Also: Apparently the ...

PHP Thumbnailer Class: This is probably the best dynamic thumbnailer I've ever seen for PHP. Extremely well-planned and executed. Nothing special -- just a shout out for some good code.

How the PHP acronym was reborn: Interesting post from one of the old-school PHP guys about ho the language came to be called PHP . There really wasn t much rhyme or reason to it. This is a quote from Rasmus back in 1998: I think I would prefer to just ...

PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits: This is very, very bad. Many popular PHP-based blogging, wiki and content management programs can be exploited through a security hole in the way PHP programs handle XML commands. The flaw allows an attacker to compromise a web server, and is found in ...

Product News > Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant > November 6, 2003">Open-Source Scripting Language Becoming Dominant: I guess I dispute that PHP is "little-known," but this is still good news. "PHP, a little-known open-source scripting language, is becoming dominant on Web sites, according to Netcraft.com, the U.K. surveyor of ...

Oracle and Zend announce general availability of Zend Core for Oracle: So, let's see, first Oracle buys a company responsible for a critical piece of MySQL, the database most commonly used with PHP. Now, Oracle and Zend -- the company behind PHP -- release a PHP platform tuned specifically for ...

PHP: Type Hinting: PHP 5.1 was just released and has introduced type hinting. Is this the first step down the road to a more strongly typed language? PHP 5 introduces Type Hinting. Functions are now able to force parameters to be objects (by specifying the name of the class in ...

GIS Mapping with PHP: A good tutorial on plotting map points with PHP. "In this article we will start with the absolute basics plotting a single location on a pre-drawn map of the world."

Practical PHP Programming: An entire book on PHP has been posted to the Web, free of charge. Apparently this book was edited and revised to become the O'Reilly book "PHP in a Nutshell." I paged through the book. It's quite comprehensive, and I learned about a bizarre function set I ...

A Complete List of PHP Template Engines? - SitePoint Community Forums: A good list of templating engines for PHP. "Conducting a small experiment. Been wondering "Just how many template engines does PHP have?". My guess is there's probably at least 50 Open Source template engines out there but was hoping ...

A lot of people want to roll their own search with Movable Type. Us, for instance Gadgetopia has a two-tiered search system based on whether the search term appears in the title, keywords, or body of the entry (see this post for more information). Our search is done in ...

Lead PHP Developer Quits: Someone big in the PHP team has quit in apparent protest over the continuing Middle East conflict. In this IRC excerpt, Jani Taskinen (profanely) expresses disgust over Israeli actions, and quits because PHP is run by Zend, an Israeli company. Here's his goodbye email. A sobering ...

Why the light has gone out on LAMP: This guy eloquently tears up MySQL and PHP. IMO, MySQL once filled a niche (cheap data store) that today is better filled by SQLite but has moved out of it into a area where it doesn't compete nearly as well (that of ...

PHP Programming Marathon Sponsored by Zend: They're giving away an illuminated keybord, a copy of Zend studio, and a year of hosting, to say nothing of the geek cred that would go along with winning this. "The Marathon organizers will send a PHP problem [...] which must be solved using ...

Open-source PHP applications that changed the world: A nice roll-up of the most influential PHP apps of the last 10 years, from phpMyAdmin in 1998 to Magneto last year. From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ...

The discipline of PHP: This is over a year old, but it's a nice rant on people who complain that PHP makes for messy code. [...] PHP doesn't dictate a development methodology (unlike Zope or J2EE); so it's entirely up to the developer whether he wants to be sloppy, or ...

Savant Template Engine: A good look at Savant, which is a template engine for PHP. Sort of. Comparing Savant to Smarty is difficult. Yes they are both template engines, but Savant does not compile its templates. Nor does it have its own built in scripting syntax. It uses PHP. Savant ...

log4php - log4j ported to PHP!: Log4j and Velocity were the only two things I liked about Java. Smarty can replace Velocity, and now Log4j is covered too. Log4php is a php port of Log4j, the most popular Java logging framework...Supports configuration through xml and properties file... Supports File, RollingFile, ...

Generate PDFs with PHP: Here's a solid how-to about generate PDFs from PHP. As someone who learned how to do this with no guide other than a function library and a boatload of trial-and-error, I can tell you that this one is worth your time.

PHP Coding Standard: I've been looking for a good PHP coding standards document beyond the PEAR standard which I thought was a little incomplete. This one, by Todd Hoff and Fredrik Kristiansen, is exhaustive and well thought-out. It's based on a common C++ standard from way back.

The PHP Scalability Myth: A well-reasoned and well-written argument for the scalability of PHP as opposed to Java. The theory is that even though Java may be faster to execute, J2EE has so many layers and abstractions that the end result is about the same. PHP is less architected, and ...

PHP: date_sunrise - Manual: I don't know how closely you all are looking at the PHP 5 function libraries, but I stumbled on this function today (and its sibling). date_sunset() returns the sunset time for a given day (specified as a timestamp) and location. The latitude, longitude and zenith parameters ...

Open Source: Open Source Scripting Made Easy: This is an article about PHP scripting tools that makes an important point: Commercial scripting languages have drawn success from powerful and widely used development tools: ASP has Visual Studio, ColdFusion has Macromedia's Dreamweaver, and JSP has a variety of tools from commercial ...

PDO - PHP Wiki: It took until version 5.1, but PHP is finally getting database abstraction. PDO provides a uniform data access interface, sporting advanced features such as prepared statements and bound parameters. PDO drivers are dynamically loadable and may be developed independently from the core, but still accessed using ...

R&OS: pdf class: Here's an insanely well-done PHP class for creating PDFs on the fly. Ridiculously simple. Written by a Kiwi, no less. We rule.

PHPMath.com: This is a pretty amazing site about using PHP to do advanced mathematics. With articles like "Real matrix vector products" and "Implement Bayesian inference using PHP, Part 2," I'm frankly a little scared. I'm glad someone does stuff like this, and I'm equally glad it's not me.

40 Tips for optimizing your php Code: This is a seemingly great list of PHP optimization tips. However, there s no context here or no discussion of why some of these techniques are supposedly faster. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of ...

FirePHP - Firefox Extension for PHP Development: This is a really interesting project. It's a PHP extension that will let you send information along with the response from your PHP script which is only viewable using the awesome Firebug Firefox extension. So it's like printing debugging stuff to the screen ...

PEAR Console Classes: Here's a tutorial on a fascinating little PEAR module that facilitates using PHP from the command line. It has methods for rendering tables, displaying progress bars, and doing color formatting on ANSI compliant terminals, this giving you some flexibility when developing PHP command line apps. Fascinating what ...

ONLamp.com: Common Style Mistakes, Part 1: Very solid two-part article (second installment is here) on solid PHP coding style. Well done. I learned a thing or two.

PHP Puts Mainframe Developers in Prime Time: PHP is apparently coming to a mainframe near you. The companies have not announced support for Zend Core for IBM on the z/OS operating system for the z/Series mainframe, but sources said that is the direction IBM is leaning toward. "Zend and IBM ...

Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites: This is a well-written, well-researched, but ultimately damning indictment of PHP's use in "large Web sites." The conclusion arrived at is that, in some circumstances at least, PHP's tendency to create more problems than it solves makes it an inappropriate choice. However, we ...

NuSphere phpED: Products: NuSphere: Here's a sharp-looking development package for PHP/MySQL. It includes an IDE, debugger, GUI for the database, etc. Nicely done for $299.

Qcodo - PHP Development Framework: I think you're going to see that phrase a lot in the future: "Rails for [insert language here]." I had heard that Cake was "Rails for PHP," but after watching some demos, I think the QCodo guys have actually obtained that title. It is a ...

Deane and I have been playing with eZPublish a lot lately, and while I enjoy eZPublish's great API, and the ability to quickly crank out a content-managed website, I dislike the idea of all the server gymnastics required just to bring up a home page. eZPublish gets around a lot ...

PHP: Autoloading Objects: Something I always liked about COM was that you could register a DLL on the server and call it from code without having to reference a specific location -- it was just "out there" somewhere, and the server knew where to find it. With PHP4 and older, ...

Friendster goes PHP: This is good news. I hate to dis Java, but, well, I hate it. Always have. ...on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via Tomcat) to PHP. The website doesn't look much different, but hopefully we can ...

Good and Bad PHP Code: While this is geared towards PHP, it s a good high-level discussion about what makes for good code in general. When interviewing a PHP developer candidate for a job at SitePoint, there is one question that I almost always ask, because their answer tells me so ...

PHP Certification for Hosts?: All Web hosts are not created equal. On a couple of occasions, I've agreed to a hosting account only to find out the hard way that one piece or another of a full PHP install wasn't available. How many web hosts provide any more detail than ...

Sokkit - Install Apache and PHP on Windows: A while back, we mentioned FoxServ as a great way to get Apache, MySQL, and PHP (AMP) running on Windows. It was really nothing more than an installer that got all those pieces working together for you, but this was still a ...

PHP Database Functions vs. PEAR::DB vs. ADOdb (and PDO): Joseph Scott does some testing to remind us that while database abstraction layers are nice, there is a performance price to be paid -- sometimes an expensive one. If you need performance over supporting multiple databases and use of PEAR packages ...

I've been spending some time working with Smarty lately. This is ostensibly a "templating language" for PHP. But I think it goes beyond that. I assert that Smarty has become a sub-language all by itself. (Update: I thought of a much better name for this: "sand-boxed PHP." That's what Smarty ...

PHP and Standards: arg_separator.output: A few months ago, I went ballistic on querystring arguments. I rambled on about how I hate them and go to ridiculous lengths to avoid them. I think I'm somewhat insane in this respect. Well, I found out today that PHP can be set to parse ...

PHP vs. ASP.NET: Oracle published this article on the Oracle Technology Network. In it, they compare PHP and ASP.NET for use with Oracle. Their verdict was pretty simple: "Use PHP." ...we must consider not simply the price tag of the initial investment, which, in the case of PHP, is obviously ...

PHP Marathon: The PHP Marathon is over. Here was the problem: Build a working tutorial platform for beginner, intermediate, and advanced programmers. (This is very practical and will be used by dotGeek, with credit given to you, the almighty winner.) The overall platform should work a lot like Zend.com sub ...

HTML 2 PHP - Convert your HTML Scripts to PHP: Here's a simple but handy little tool: drop a bunch of HTML into the input box and it will return it all surrounded by PHP print statements. So if you need to move an HTML block into a PHP code ...

HTACCESS Wrappers with PHP: Really interesting technique of using Apache directives to have Apache send Web requests to PHP scripts. You can do this already via auto_prepend and auto_append files, but it's interesting to see someone do this via Apache directive rather than php.ini configuration. To start off, make a ...

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There's a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language we'll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. ...

PHP Composer: I nominate this as the most uselessly cool programming tool I've ever seen. This class is meant to render images of the musical score of ring tones notes used in cellular phones, defined in the RTTL format. It parses the RTTL ring tones string to extract the information ...

Tidying up your HTML with PHP 5: The next version of PHP includes an extension for HTML Tidy, so you can have every HTML document perfectly formatted on its way out the door by applying HTML Tidy to the output buffer. When the Tidy extension is installed, it can be ...

PHP Becoming Mainstream: I've always been fascinating by an analysis of book sales as an indicator of language adoption. My "how much shelf space is it getting at Barnes and Noble" test correctly predicted the ascendance of both Python and Ruby. As such, I find this interesting. We've noticed that ...

I maintain a web site that runs off of a content management system. The whole deal is database driven, and the content is identified by numeric ID's. I wanted to know which items of content are actually being used on the site so I could get rid of the ones ...

An interesting Google ad appeared on the site today. It may still be there: That's probably wise, to go after people "working" for the competition. I wonder what their CTR is and how they qualify a "successful conversion."

Switching from PHP to Zope/Python: Here's a good, simple testimonial as to why one would use Zope over traditional scripting platforms. Zope is a beautifully integrated set of solutions to common web development problems. It works in a substantially different way to traditionally scripted web-applications. Think of it as a ...

eZ components: New competition for Zend PHP Framework: eZ Systems, makers of the ultra-awesome CMS eZ Publish, are expanding their offerings to include PHP components for general (non-CMS) use. This article at SitePoint opines that this is in direct competition to what Zend and Oracle are trying to do. While ...

Why do so many sites insist on re-printing official documentation? In particular, why is the PHP and PEAR documentation available on hundreds of sites across the Net? I was looking for some information on PEAR's DB_DataObject abstraction layer. Searching Google for "DB_DataObject" gives you the PEAR documentation first, of course, ...

PHP Apps on Mobile using PAMP: This looks really cool. If you’d like to work on your favorite PHP apps on your S60 phones, here’s PAMP - Personal Apache, MySQL and PHP. This is implemented on the Symbian OS using Open C, which is a set of industry-standard POSIX and ...

I monitor the 404s on this site, and I found an interesting one today. It was an inbound request to: /phpgwapi/setup/tables_update.inc.php?appdir=[deleted] "phpgwapi" is an open source groupware toolkit. It must have a recorded exploit, because the deleted part was a URL that someone was trying to get phpgwapi to remotely ...

PHPRunner - PHP code generator for your MySQL database: A few weeks ago, I talked about ASPRunner, which is a code-generation engine to build ASP pages to manage ODBC databases. At the end of that post, I whined that I wanted something similar for PHP/MySQL. Well... PHPRunner creates set of ...

PHP: Advanced Functions: I stumbled in this phenomenon today by accident. I was going nuts trying to find a bug until I realized I had declared a function inside another function. I couldn't figure out why the parser didn't fail...when I realized that what I did is completely legal. When ...

Introducing BunnyRegex: easy regular expressions, and mini-languages inside of PHP: Here's a great little regex library for PHP that uses a dead-simple syntax that someone should have thought of way, way before this. include("BunnyRegex.php"); $pattern = new BunnyRegex(); $pattern->bol() // ^ ->digit() // \d ->exactly(4) // {4} ->string('/') // / ...

Code Generation Network: A site devoted to automatic code generation. Full of articles, information, and links to tools that will write code for you. I was interested in janeBUILDER which promised: "janeBUILDER is a visual editor for PHP. JaneBUILDER allows you build complex PHP pages by dragging and dropping. The ...

One kink I ve recently noticed in a number of scripting languages geared towards producing web apps is the utter lack of support for XML Schema. I m surprised by this, since a good Schema validator can save a lot of code when used properly. For those who may not be familiar ...

GoPHP5.org - helping speed the transition to PHP 5.2: On the heels of our WordPress/PHP5 discussion yesterday and the PHP end-of-life announcement, this site is trying to get everyone to abandon PHP4 and break backwards compatibility. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any ...

Tidying up your HTML with PHP: This appears to be a PowerPoint converted to HTML, so the presentation is a little horrid, but the content is amazing. We've talked about HTML Tidy integration with PHP5 before, but this details here are fantastic. Yes, you know Tidy can make your HTML ...

ASP.Net on a Roll: O'Reilly indicates that ASP 2.0 is the hot technology these days. Based on book sales data, it looks like ASP.Net 2.0 is on fire, with ASP-related book sales up 53% since the same period a year ago, versus PHP, down 3%, and JSP, down 25%. Of ...

On PHP: Matt from WordPress fame gets all uppity on PHP5. Fast forward 3 more years and PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a complete flop. Most estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or at best the low teens, mostly gassed by marginal frameworks. Even ...

CSS Colors: Take Control Using PHP: Good article on how to use PHP (or any scripting language, really) to generate your CSS. While many web sites use powerful programming environments to create HTML, these same tools are usually ignored when it comes to creating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This article ...

eZ components 1.0 Release Candidate 1: The eZ Components that we discussed before have gone 1.0. eZ components is a collection of high quality independent building blocks for PHP application development that will both speed up development and reduce risks. An application can use one or more components effortlessly as ...

Someone (I don't know who), said "Half of intelligence is knowing the answer. The other half is knowing where to find the answer." In today's world, we all know how to find the answer. But has that made us less inclined to know the answer from memory? Google has just ...

I have a serious Web development neurosis: I hate querystring arguments. You know the garbage after the page name in a URL? Like this: page.php?thisArgument=thisValue&andThisArgument=thisValue I hate them. I think they're ugly, unweidly, and expose too much of your application to the world. This is an utterly irrational thing, I ...

Wasabi: In response to comments from his post yesterday (which we discussed), Joel has released information about Wasabi, which is a compiler they wrote so they code generate code for FogBugz in VBScript (for Windows) or PHP (for Linux). Fog Creek used to write in VBScript and automatically convert it ...

Note: This entry changed quite a bit in the 24 hours after it was published. I discovered a lot of stuff I'm ashamed to say I didn't know, I posted several updates to the end of the post, and I eventually changed the title. Quick survey: if you are a ...

Fired for Blogging: This is making the rounds pretty fast this morning so we're going to pile on just for fun. Joyce Park, author of the PHP Bible and architect of Friendster's new PHP platform, was fired for blogging about it.

PHP5: Coming Soon to a Web server Near You: A comprehensive look at the masterpiece that is PHP5. The author details all the changes with copious amounts of code to browse. Big changes are coming, including a complete revamp of XML handling that includes the ability to say, Make an ...

Is Perl Still Relevant?: An interesting answer from Tim O'Reilly about whether or not he thinks Perl is still relevant. In terms of the competitive landscape among programming languages, in addition to PHP, Python has long been gaining on Perl. From about 1/6 the size of the Perl market when ...

Roll Your Own Search Engine with ZendSearchLucene: The Zend Framework includes integration with Lucene, which is nice. Too many frameworks look right past full-text search. Zend_Search_Lucene is a php port of the Apache Lucene project, a full-text search engine framework. ZendSearchLucene promises a simple way to add search functionality to ...

Turck MMCache for PHP: PHP is blindingly fast as it is, but this is a pre-compiler that makes it almost 5x times faster, according to their benchmarks. I've seen a fair amount of independent opinions that this is a fantastic tool. It uses my favorite pricing model: free.

PHP 5 Adoption has Tipped!: The latest numbers from Zend on PHP5 adoption. In July over 74% of support tickets were by customers using PHP 5 (and remember we do support both versions). But is their analysis flawed? How accurately do support tickets indicate adoption, I wonder. Could it be ...

Datejs - A JavaScript Date Library: A fairly stunning Javascript date library that can parse human-readable date references ( last April 3 ) into datetime values. Comprehensive, yet simple, stealthy and fast. Datejs has passed all trials and is ready to strike. Datejs doesn t just parse strings, it slices them cleanly in ...

Movable Type doesn't have a content review system. You can write an entry and leave it in "Draft" status, but no one knows about it unless they go looking for it. In practice, this can be a pain. New authors to Gadgetopia are told to leave their first dozen or ...

Client-side PHP - The Daily WTF: I keep shaking my head, hoping this isn't actual code that someone wrote. Maybe if I refresh one more time, I'll find out it was just a bad dream. Gustavo Carvalho discovered what happens when XMLHttpRequest and the Eval() function in PHP are combined. ...

PHP Click Tracker - Track Ad Clicks Free: This little script claims to log what AdSense ads are being clicked on your site. It appears to put an event handler on clicks in the AdSense DIV, then looks for the words "go to" in the status bar when something is ...

Microsoft's PHP initiative: This is interesting. Microsoft has recently released the second technical preview release of FastCGI for IIS, a new component for Microsoft's Web server platform. This release is available immediately for download to Windows Vista, IIS including IIS 6.0 in Windows 2003 Server and IIS 5.1 in ...

opensourceCMS: This site has several dozen installed CMSs for you to play with: "This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to 'try out' some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be ...

I don't like content management systems that try to handle the displaying of content. I alluded to this last year, when I wrote: There are two sides to publishing Web content: First you create the content, store it, edit it, send it through workflow, get it approved, then stage it ...

InfoCentral: About five years ago, I wrote an application for my church to track people and families. I wrote about it here. I open-sourced it, and it got adopted by quite a few organizations. I went to check on it today, and I find that the site is still around, ...

ogo: Home: I think this project is admirable and necessary, but I think they'll have a tough time getting any traction. I really wish them the best. The ogo project aims to clean up PHP, starting with fixing the inconsistent (and difficult to remember) function names. PHP needs clear naming ...

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails: For some some odd reason, this post is very obscene, but still interesting. This guy set out to re-write cdbaby.com in Rails. But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn ...

Minutes PHP Developers Meeting: This really depresses me. The functionality of named parameters was suggested. Named parameters allow you to "skip" certain parameters to functions. [...] Discussion: We don't see the real need for named parameters, as they seem to violate PHP's KISS principle. It also makes for messier code. ...

Drupal Wins Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award: Drupal wins it all. After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, ...

I believe in presentation logic, I really do. Call me a hack, but formatting logic mixed into your presentation code isn t necessarily a bad thing. I started Web development in traditional ASP. And I sucked at it, believe me. I wrote some of the most ridiculously convoluted apps that were ...

Freetag - an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications: Found this via a trackback to my previous post about tagging. It's a ready-made API for implementing a tagging system in your app. Freetag is an easy tagging and folksonomy-enabled plugin for use with MySQL-PHP applications. It allows ...

Alex King just released Photos 4.0 (formerly known as Gallery). It's a web-based photo database for storing, cataloging, and retrieving photos, but NOT for publishing web galleries. It can import photos by the folder or one at a time, and stores a thumbnail of each image. It's designed for "Anyone ...

Fastest web language: Interesting thread over on Spolsky's forums on the perennial question: which Web language is the fastest? Some points that jumped out at me (all from different posters): Once you scale up to the point at which performance actually matters, the database is usually the bottleneck. Using efficient ...

GroupOrg - Features: Yesterday I mentioned that the PHPCollab project had forked. Today, I find out that my very own open source project, InfoCentral, which I handed off to someone else two years ago, has forked. There has been quite a bit of drama surrounding InfoCentral lately, with the guy ...

One thing keeping me from completely jumping ship from PHP to Rails is the absense of a Markdown equivalent. Oh, wait...

FoxServ Project: I'm surprised we haven't talked about FoxServ here before. FoxServ is an Apache / mySQL / PHP installer package for Windows. Unlike NuShpere or PHPTriad, FoxServ features the latest version of all included pacakges, user defined configuration during installation, PHP as a module, PEAR, and the Zend Optimizer. ...

Basic PHP Security[SQL INJECTION]: A quick look at the hack du jour: SQL injection attacks. A simple enough thing to defend against.

We've talked here before about Nvu -- the open-source WYSIWYG editor that wants to unseat FrontPage. I've played with it before, but -- despite my glowing reviews of the product -- I had never actually tried to build a site with it. However, this week, the preschool at my chuch ...

Much like my selfish use of this space to ask for a GMail invite, I'm now asking for a software recommendation. I'm building a Web site for our local Christian school, and we need a Web calendar. I'm not going to roll my own, so we're looking for open-source or ...

InfoCentral: A log time ago (like, four years), I wrote a piece of software called InfoCentral. It's a PHP/MySQL app to manage church congregations. "InfoCentral is a church management database written in PHP, using MySQL as its database backend. It is currently the only viable Open Source package for this ...

You Don't Have To Be Pretty To Be Successful: Joseph Scott has some commentary and a lot of good links on the state of the WordPress codebase. There are lots of good things about WP. It is fairly easy to install and from the user point of view it looks ...

Create ASP code for your database with ASPRunner: This is pretty good software. I downloaded the demo, walked through the wizard, and within 3 minutes (from download to finished interface) I had a complete set of pages to view, edit, add, print, search, and export a database table on my ...

Cheat Sheets: A nice set of cheat sheets for mod_rewrite, PHP, and CSS. Nicely done. (Warning: The CSS sheet was apparently written in a fantasy world where all browsers obey every last word of the spec. Real-world mileage will vary.)

Rails Envy: These guys are making Apple-esque adds comparing Rails to everything else ( Hi, I m Rails and I m PHP ). They re pretty good, and more or less spot-on. The end of #2 is an absolute riot. Via CMSWatch.

ImageMagick - Convert, Edit, and Compose Images: I just want to give a little recognition to ImageMagick, which is a free image manipulation library that's been around for years. I downloaded a new version the other day, and I'm so impressed at what it can do. ImageMagickTM 6.0.2 is a ...

The Ascendancy of Ruby: Someone made an innocent MetaFilter post about how much momentum Ruby has these days. The comments -- both pro-Ruby and otherwise -- have been heated and entertaining. Some good ones: Ruby seems to be caught up in some sort of blogger-positive-feedback-loop, its practically viral marketing. There's ...

Bill Gates recently went on a tour of colleges to encourage students to major in computer science. Apparently the number of declared computer science majors is declining, and Bill wants to shore up the numbers. I got to thinking about this, and I wonder if the plethora of really high-level ...

Announcing FogBugz On Demand: Fog Creek moves into the world of hosted software. I’m happy to announce that FogBugz On Demand is now available. This is a professionally-hosted version of FogBugz 5.0, previously only available as a download. In the end, $21 per user per month is not a phenomenal ...

I have a friend who programs in .Net (I referred to him in a prior post). We'll call him "Trevor." Trevor and I have epic arguments about the superiority of our chosen platforms. I use open-source, "scripting" languages -- PHP and Ruby, mainly -- while Trevor develops in .Net. Trevor ...

PrettyPrinter.de, an online pretty printer for PHP, Java, C , C, Perl, JavaScript, CSS: Here's a nice little service that will clean up your semicolon-and-bracket-type code. It's well-done, but I'd like to see it sniff functions and alphabetize them. Via Simon in a comment to this post.

Mason HQ: Welcome to Mason: Ever wanted to use Perl without CGI? Ever wanted to just embed Perl in HTML like PHP or ASP? Anyone? Seriously....anyone? Mason is a powerful Perl-based web site development and delivery engine. With Mason you can embed Perl code in your HTML and construct pages ...

This handy little site joins sites like php.net and A9 in offering "functionality by URL." Enter "whois.sc/" and any domain n