The PHP Grind

In an effort to spread PHP-RPC functionality around as much as possible, Evert Pot has suggested his code to three of the major sources for application development - the PEAR project, the Solar Framework and the Zend Framework.

I started the process to submit PHPRPC to the major frameworks. I feel like I should submit it to all the major frameworks, so I can make sure people can use PHP-RPC regardless of their framework of choice.

In PEAR, it has been submitted as a PEAR2 package, in the Solar Framework as an open ticket (so far) and in the Zend Framework as just an idea (no formal or informal kind of submission yet).

In a response to a response (from Arnold Daniels) on his article on the ActiveRecord pattern in PHP, Flinn Mueller has come back once again with more comments, both in response and to share some more opinion on the matter.

Today I saw a big traffic increase from my PHP and ActiveRecord post. It looks like PHPDeveloper posted a link to the article and response, so I’ve written a response to the Arnold’s wor(l)ds response post. Arnold’s post is insightful, references runkit and has a good implementation of a Sortable tasklist example in PHP.

Flinn breaks it out into a few different topics - things like:

• Ruby objects are (native) Ruby objects
• a brief look at “lineage” for both PHP and Ruby
• The usefulness of Ruby mix-ins
• Issues with static inheritance in PHP
• and some of his suggestions on what PHP6 really needs

Wolfgang Drews has posted about a new German professional PHP training and certification course being offered through phpzertifizierung.eu.

Great News, we have finally managed to develop and set up the first german speaking PHP Professional course for advanced PHPer! The course is packed in 2 Weeks, 12 sessions and 24 hours!

They have a great lineup of trainers including Tobias Schlitt, Christian Wenz, Kore Nordmann and Tobias Hauser. The course will run from the 20th of November until the 3rd of December and you can check out all of the great topics covered in this list posted to the training website.

DevShed finished up their series on creating a search engine for MySQL with PHP in this latest article, finishing off the application with its HTML frontend.

In the previous article I showed you how to spawn the results returned by a specific search query across different web pages, so in this last part of the series I’m going to complete this search application by fixing a concrete issue associated specifically with paginating MySQL data sets.

They review the code they’ve created so far for the search engine and push on with the creation of a web page generation class to handle the output of the paginated results.

On the SitePoint PHP blog, there’s a new post from Paul Annesley about his latest creation - a nine line unit tester for PHP, pTest.

I was recently working on a command line PHP tool, and didn’t have easy access to our normal PHP unit testing framework built around SimpleTest. [...] I didn’t need support for mock objects or complicated assertions - just a bare basic assertTrue() would do the trick.

He includes the code (of course) and an example of it in action, three tests with their assertions. It’s a simple little tool made of a simple purpose, a starting place for developers just learning unit testing to learn from.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there’s a review of some software that seeks to protect your application’s code by obfuscating its source - Iono.

What it does is take the source code and encodes it in a manner that makes it unreadable to humans. The code can then be safely distributed with your intellectual property intact. One of the applications that can be used to obfuscate and license your code is a combination of products called Iono and PHP Encoder by IonCube.

They look at the setup of the application, some of the requirements you’ll need to get it working and a quick description of how it works (a “shopping cart” for users to purchase license for your software). The integration of the application into your files (the other half of the equation) can be done with one of five different kinds of licenses (including per page and a local license covering all files).

In this new entry to his blog today, Chris Cassell shows how to create “magic methods” - ones that make use of overloading to do special things.

I’ve learned a lot of things from various open source frameworks, especially CakePHP. One of the most impressive things about Cake, and Ruby on Rails for that matter, is its magic methods in its data model class [...] I’ve implemented similar methods in the home-grown framework that I use at work. Here’s how to do it.

In his example, he gives both the PHP4 and PHP5 code to make a simple magic method class with a __call() function to handle undefined method calls. Using this, he maps a undefined method call to another method in the class (called findAllByColor and mapped to findAll with the right parameters).

In a new post today Alex Netkachov steps through how he added the PHP scripting engine to his metabase scriptMaps on an IIS 5.1 web server:

I spent a few days on investigating how to modify IIS metabase from script. What I need is to add PHP engine to IIS programmatically during installing PHP. [...] The metabase object can be enumerated and each item of the enumeration can be enumerated to. The elements of this hierarchy represent folders you can see in IIS management console.

He builds out the ScriptMaps functionality (a recursive “walk” function) and another function to add the PHP scripting engine onto that (addPhpIsapi). A word of warning from Alex, though:

This code now is the part of Jamp installer. But because this functionality is dangerous, this code is not run during default installer and it recommended to backup the metabase before running it.

Rob Allen has posted about more updates that have been made to his Zend Framework tutorial zip file - one now contains a copy of the framework, the other doesn’t.

This time, I’ve created two files: one with the Zend Framework (1.0.1) included and one without. The one without is much smaller at only 9KB, where as with the Framework, the zip is 2.2MB.

You can download the version with just the tutorial or with the combination directly from his websites. The tutorial has also been bumped up a version (to 1.4.4) with a few updates.