After reading this thread, I thought I'd spend some time writing about what I feel are some measures you can take to landing a job in PHP. This first part is going to concentrate on the kind of technical matters I think any PHP developer should at least have knowledge of, if not some kind of experience.

He suggests: as much programming experience as possible, experience with the full development lifecycle, knowing how to work with external libraries and frameworks, being able to adapt to development tools, knowing web application security, and some work with web services and a touch of system administration. He's not saying that you have to have all of these - just that the more you know, the better off you could be.

I'm certainly not the only person who has been blogging about this, but I thought I'd mention that a feature freeze is coming up for the next CakePHP 1.2 release, codenamed 'DV'. My very modest contribution this time around is a patch to fix a problem with running 'cake bake' on Windows, where it was mangling the app path that a user would enter. Ticket 4495 if anyone is interested.

He makes a few recommendations about how to get involved in the project, but also mentions some of the "trouble in paradise" that's been happening on the mailing list (not friendly for beginners?) and about the direction of the project.

I've just install the last version of PHP6 dev and I've decided to test the famous new feature, the PHP Unicode Support. I will not explain new things about PHP6 or Unicode or TextIterator, it's just my discoveries test on this features.

He steps through the process he followed - enabling Unicode support, testing various output methods (including just an echo and using the TextIterator) as well as some of the manipulation methods (next/first/current) that can be used to get certain characters out of a string.

Who's that with the catchy URL that's getting all the clicks?

Why, it's del.icio.us! No matter where you are on the "Web 2.0" lash or backlash, the pervasive influence of this little bookmark aggregator can't be denied.

The site offers a myriad ways of accessing its database, from HTML and RSS feeds, to JSON data, to browser integration of various types. Let's take a look at the public API, which offers flexible and easy access to del.icio.us.

In his example, he creates a script that, given the contents of an email message, filters out the URL, breaks it into its parts and sends it off to the del.icio.us API to be bookmarked under his account.]]> Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:04:10 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9118 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9118 Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.

The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.

You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.

I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community

He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords.

Though not too meaningful, it is interesting to see how the different languages stack up in the number of reserved words you can't use for anything else. So, does that mean that Perl is the list limiting?

As of February 22, 2007, I have called an official referendum on the future of PEAR. There is a news item on the front page of pear.php.net with the same instructions in this message. This election is only open to PEAR developers who have contributed to the development of a PEAR package at any time in history, but you must have the ability to log in at pear.php.net, and must have "pear.dev" karma.

There's three options - "don't change anything", Greg's constitution, or Anant Narayanan's constitution. The results will pick the path that PEAR will follow and the future of the project. If you have access and the pear.dev karma, head over here and cast your vote today.

You might have noticed that I changed the title of this blog to "ThinkingPHP and beyond" a couple days ago. I did that because currently I'm thinking a lot about where go with it. I definetly want to stay focused on PHP in general, but I feel like I (and a lot of other php developers) actually work with a lot more technologies then "just" php. So I'd like to talk about that as well.

Some of the other topics Felix is considering talking about include PHP coding practices, web standards/usability/accessibility, web services, and agile development topics. Keep an eye out here for more to come from this great blog - we'll always post the latest.

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.