The PHP Grind

InfoWorld: Zend readies PHP applications framework

As Cal Evans points out on the Zend Developer Zone today, InfoWorld has posted an article that takes a pretty high-level approach to the Zend Framework:

Zend Technologies plans to release its Zend Framework 1.0 product by late May, a company official said at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday.

[…] “The goal of the Zend Framework was to provide a very, very easy-to-use, well-established and supported framework,” Gutmans said. But he did note that there are more than 40 PHP frameworks available, including Symfony, Prado, and CakePHP.

The article also mentions the new release will include PDF support with future plans for OpenOffice and Microsoft Office support as well.

You can find all of the information you’ll need about the current state of the Zend Framework on the project’s website.

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php|architect: Pro::PHP Podcast - Interview with Ed Finkler

In a new installation of the Pro::PHP Podcast just released, Paul Reinheimer sits down and talks with Ed Finkler, “web and security archive administrator”.

Ed Finkler is also a primary developer on the PHPSecInfo project, an effort to help bring a baseline of security to developers and their applications:

PhpSecInfo provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement. It is not a replacement for secure development techniques, and does not do any kind of code or app auditing, but can be a useful tool in a multilayered security approach.

Check out some of Ed’s own comments about the interview in this new blog entry.

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O’Reilly: Code As Data: Reflection in PHP

On O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com website today, there’s a new tutorial that focuses on something new to PHP’s functionality as of the PHP 5 releases - the Reflection API - and examples of using “code as data”.

However, this can get difficult very quickly, as modern “P” languages often are quite complex, and creating a solid set of regular expressions to describe PHP or Perl would be very difficult. Many syntax highlighters have problems relating to here documents and other special cases. It would be better to let the language’s own parser take care of the hard part, as it already knows how to parse itself. In PHP (version 5 and later), we can use the Reflection API to do this.

As they explain, the Reflection API allows PHP code to look at other PHP code and find out things about it - things like function information, where and what objects are made and much more. In their code example, they create a class to parse a class, grabbing what type each of the methods are, their names, what parameters they take in, and finally, outputting the results as an XML document.

Then, using an Ajax frontend to call some backend scripts (corresponding to grabbing various data about a file) to perform some tests on their sample class, including the creation of a class to build the tests themselves.

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Greg Bulmash’s Blog: Creating A Simple Rating Script With PHP And MySQL

Sometimes, when you’re building an application, simpler is better. At least, that’s how Greg Bulmash approached it in his new post about creating a simple rating script for your site with PHP and MySQL.

There are lots of pre-packaged scripts out there to do almost anything you want, but in my experience a lot of them either do too much or don’t do enough. Finding that Goldilocks style of “just right” takes a lot of searching and experimenting, or just plain hacking of existing scripts. But for simple functions, writing your own script that does exactly what you want can often be quicker and more satisfying.

He goes through what a rating system is and can be used for before getting to the code (as well as other things that could be tacked on at the end to make it a bit more complex). Then, it’s on to the code - first the database layout, then the script to store the rating the visitor gave the item, and the script that shows the averaged results.

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Adding Processes to HTML DB Applications

In this second part of a three-part series covering HTML DB applications you will learn about processes. This article is excerpted from chapter 13 of the em Oracle HTML DB Handbook em written by Lawrence Linnemeyer and Bradley Brown McGraw-Hill 2 6 ISBN 72257687 ….

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