The PHP Grind

Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:

• AJAX Drop-down
• phpGDImage
• User Checker
• STC
• Property
• CpMailAddresses
• Microformats Parser
• PHP Forms Generation and Validation Class
• Image SQL manager
• punFramework

WebDevLogs.com points out a handy tool for those site owners out there that want to see what location on their site is getting the most use - ClickHeat.

Heatmap suddenly became popular when webmasters want to know where did the user click or look at. Websites like Crazy Egg, provides a heatmap generation system for webmasters. But most heatmap costs more than average adsense supported website can earn, those sites need a alternative.

ClickHeat requires PHP (5.1.6 and higher) with GD enabled to work. The post includes a sample image to show you what the end result looks like.

The Zend Developer Zone points out a post from Gaetano Giunta that compares several JSON libraries that can be used with PHP.

The recent release of php 5.2.0, which includes by default an extension for converting php values from and to the JSON format, is a good occasion for comparing the different existing php libraries which aim to provide the same capabilities.

Included in his “completely fair and balanced comparison” of the libraries were four choices:

• The lib (now part of PHP)
• The JSON lib
• The Zend_Json lib
• The Jsonrpc (and Json) extension

He’s created a feature matrix for the four options that includes things like encoding support, failed decoding vs NULL value, and extra features that might be included.

There’s loads of other stats presented as well, including bar charts for the speed comparison, code examples, and encoding/decoding test results.

From the IBM Online Training Center (DevX.com) comes a new article covering the integration of PHP into a SOA solution:

With its fast deployment cycles, PHP is ideal for companies short on skilled programming resources and/or facing tight time to market deadlines. PHP’s features and benefits are so compelling it should be considered for your SOA solutions.

They talk about the PHP integration kit that IBM offers to make using PHP as simple as plugging in things in the right places and how that would fit in with a “Service Component Architecture” and “Service Data Objects”. They even give a simple example of a SCA component that works much like a PHP class.

They wrap up the article with a look at some asynchronous messaging with PHP - using the SAM extension to communicate messages back to the server for common tasks (like putting text messages in a queue).

As Brett Bieber mentions in this new blog entry, there’s been an OS X release of the Chiara_PEAR_Server package (a “droplet”).

This is a Mac OS X droplet for PEAR developers that run Chiara_PEAR_Server. This little droplet just takes in your PEAR Package .tgz and it will release it to Chiara_PEAR_Server.

He idea of the droplet is to automate the packaging process for a tgz file to post it out to a PEAR channel server. Sounds quite handy - check it out for yourself by grabbing the source from svn.saltybeagle.com.

Game programmers using OpenGL have often been forced to make a choice between using a library that is platform independent but doesn t use all the available resources or powerful but platform dependent. Simple Directmedia Layer SML offers a third way. This article will give you a taste of its capabilities….

Automate Software Builds with Visual Build Pro Easily create an automated, repeatable process for building and deploying software.

In a new article on the Zend Developer Zone, Ed Finkler talks a bit about the newly released version of the PHPSecInfo package (version 0.1.2) and what some of the future plans for it are.

New release, new plans! First off, a new build of PHPSecInfo is out. Version 0.1.2, build 20061218. Per usual, get your new version from http://phpsec.org/projects/phpsecinfo/.

New features include:

• Code is now licensed under “New BSD” license. See LICENSE
• fix bug in post_max_size check where upload_max_size value was being checked
• Now providing an md5 hash for releases

And some of the plans for the future include more detailed test results, a web-based “glossary” of howtos on fixing problems, and more tests for more cases.

If you’d like to contribute tests or other resources to the project, head over to its homepage and let them know.

In the constant pursuit of exploring what else is out there, Jeff Moore took a look at using PDO and MDB2 in some of his scripts and tried it out in a simple test program:

I was just putting together a small test program and I thought I would try using PDO. I really haven’t done anything serious with PDO, just try it a couple times. Unfortunately, this didn’t work and it took me a few minutes to figure out why. Actually, I still don’t know exactly why it doesn’t work, but I did find a way to make it work.

He found PDO slightly different to work with than what he was used to so he moved on to MDB2 to see how the same code would fare there. Things worked smoothly there, handling the prepared statements he wanted to use perfectly.

Derick Rethans has posted a release announcement about the latest Release Candidate for the XDebug debugger utility - xdebug 2.0.0RC2.

There are not many new things in this version but there are lots of bug fixes. The display of stack traces has been optimized a bit more, you can find a screen shot of that here below. Instead of showing the full path and function arguments it instead shows only the file name, and the type of argument. If you hover your mouse of the items the full path and full variables’ contents appear.

You can check out a screenshot of the application’s interface on his blog and head over to the XDebug site to get the latest download and complete information on using the tool in your scripts.

Demian Turner has announced on the PHPKitchen blog today the release of the latest version of Seagull - 0.6.1.

Version 0.6.1 of the Seagull framework was released last week, download it here. There’s been a gap of 4 months since the last release due to the main devs being busy with contracts, nevertheless quite a few important fixes and improvements have been added to the project.

Some of the improvements included in this release are:

• errors encountered in production mode are handled more gracefully
• added possibility of passing arbitrary args to CLI requests
• the comment module enhanced with Akismet integration and captcha
• the library cache can now be controlled using the standard Config gui
• many PEAR and translation updates

You can check out the full Changelog here or just head straight for the downloads to get and install the latest.