The PHP Grind

Jim Plush’s Blog: PHP Socket Tutorial Part 1

Jim Plush has posted part one of a series of tutorials covering the use of sockets in PHP:

Anyway, here is a link to Part I on my socket programming tutorial. This page is really aimed at getting you up to speed on what socket programming is all about and what all the commands refer to and what the parameters they take are geared to do. I’m planning on adding a section a week so we’ll see how that goes.

In this first part he looks at:

• the basic socket functions
• TCP and UDP protocols
• the creation of a socket server in PHP

In the end, there’s a code listing of a very simple socket server, one he illustrates the use of through a simple telnet to the localhost.

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Niall Kennedy’s Blog: Rasmus Lerdorf on scaling web apps with PHP

Niall Kennedy is attending this year’s OSCON as well, and brings us this new blog post covering another of Rasmus Lerdorf’s talks covering the scaling web applications in PHP.

Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O’Reilly’s Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency. The full slides from Rasmus’s talk are available online and I recorded audio of the entire session from the front row.

Niall also talks more about rich web applications, interaction models, and the use of http_load, the Valgrind emulation tool, prepared statements, the use of the APC, and the improved XML support included in PHP5.

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Ben Ramsey’s Blog: Project Hosting on Google Code

According to this post from Ben Ramsey there’s been an announcement about Google offering up free project hosting for all open source projects that would like it.

This service is similar to Sourceforge, but it’s done the Google way. Unique features:

• Simplicity, scalability, reliability
• Rebuilt Subversion on top of Bigtable
• Complete re-think of issue tracking

You can check out the service here and get started right away. There’s no approval process to wade through and a sample project can be found here. There’s tons of other features not mentioned here, so head over and find out what it can do for you and your project!

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SitePoint Web Tech Blog: OSCON 2006: Understanding ZFramework

Kevin Yank continues his coverage of this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention with this new post on the SitePoint Web Tech Blog - a look at John Coggeshall’s talk on “Understanding the Zend Framework”.

John Coggeshall is a respected name in the PHP world, and works as a technical consultant for Zend, and provided a fast-paced introduction to the Zend Framework as it currently exists in pre-release.

Kevin highlights some of the points that John made through out the talk including:

• a simple code demonstration of the Zend Framework functionality
• creating controllers and views
• using the Zend_InputFilter class
• using the Lucene searching functionality

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Tiffany Brown’s Blog: PHP quickie: is_numeric() versus ctype_digit()

In this new post Tiffany Brown shares a “PHP quickie” with her readers - using is_numeric versus ctype_digit.

The difference is subtle, but important one. Which function you use depends on the condition for which you’re testing.

is_numeric tests whether the string in question is a number. ctype_digit(), on the other hand, tests whether the string in question contains all numeric characters.

To help alleviate the confusion, she gives some code that does var_dumps of both methods, clearly showing the difference.

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