Cal Evans over on the Zend Developer Zone has another of his infamous (well, okay - not infamous, but definitely good) interviews with people all around the PHP community. This time, it’s a chat with Ed Finkler, a developer over at CERIAS concerning the new security tool designed to help even the security-clueless to protect themselves and their system.
Intrigued as much by this project, as I was by the fact that Ed wrote me and told me it was time for me to interview him, I called Ed and we talked about the project.
They talk about where the idea for the tool came from, one of the targets for the use of the project (those on shared hosting), and the mention that it is modular in design and they are more than happy to have developers work up tests to be sure things are working 100% correctly.
The October 2006 issue of the International PHP Magazine has been officially publised and is now available on their website (or, if you have a subscription, is on its way to you).
Articles in this month’s edition include:
- The PHP OO Candy Store – Part I by Tobias Schlitt and Kore Nordmann
- Elizabeth Naramore’s Freelancer’s Corner
- Working with PHP and SAP by Stoyan Stefanov
- Marc Isikoff starting from scratch with the Beginner’s Guide to PHP
You can check out the full table of contents on their site or just head over and subscribe to this great publication always jammed full of everything PHP.
On his Oracle blog, Christopher Jones has posted a brief review of a book from Oracle spotlighting “PHP Web Programming”, from author Michael McLaughlin.
Michael McLaughlin calls his new book PHP Web Programming an enabling book. I’d go further and call it a desert island book. It is the only thing you’d need to carry. It has much reference material strategically placed in the text, well thought out examples, and teaches how to build applications.
Christopher mentions some of the contents of the book - HTTP authentication, the POSIX file function,strings/objects, error handling, etc - it has it all. It especially has detailed information about using PHP with Oracle - PL/SQL, LOBs, REF CURSORS, and much more. It comes with a CD of code and applications, everything you’d need to get a PHP/Oracle installation up and running including the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition, Zend Core for Oracle’s PHP stack, and the Apache web server.
After having attended this year’s DC PHP Conference, Chris Shiflett has come back with his own recap of the event including talks given and people met.
This past Thursday, I attended the DC PHP Conference. Since I was only there for a day, I’m sure I missed a lot, but I did manage to do some of the things on my list.
Talks hhe mentions were Mike Naberenzy’s look at Getting Started with the Zend Framework and Eli White’s High Volume PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques talk. He also mentions meeting David Recordon from VeriSign and some work that Damien Seguy on tracking statistics on open phpinfo pages (about half still have register globals on!).
In his latest, Andrei Zmievski talks a bit about an article over on the Ohloh.net website (statistics site that analyzes the source of Open Source applications) titled “PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast”.
So far they’ve indexed over 3,000 projects and their conclusion seems to be that among Web scripting languages, PHP is the undisputed champion (as measured by the LOC count).
He also notes that they’ve discovered something interesting - despite the lowering numbers of developers/projects being done with PHP, the code and applications seem to be growing still. Andrei interprets this as a positive move for developers away from the “reinvent the wheel” school of thought to a more “find something that works already and go from there”.
Check out the original article for more information on the stats and some charts to show the trends.