On DZone.com today there's a new post that welcomes those coming from Java over to PHP with a few recommendations and suggestions about what's different and some things they might find familiar in the transition.

We are welcoming some new colleagues that come from a Java background in the Onebip team, both from the development and operations field. Here's a primer on learning PHP in this situation, that you may find useful when introducing similar people in your PHP-based projects.

He breaks it up into a few sections:

• the "absolute basics" (like the differences in variable handling)
• things to not care about (like procedural PHP or the installation of Apache+PHP)
• how to "write to a graph" (things like PDO, DateTime)
• things to watch out for (like == vs === and some php.ini settings)

He also recommends doing some coding katas with TDD to give you a "crash course" in the language and help you learn from more than just reading.

PHPClasses.org has posted the latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series - episode #29, Should PHP be Copying the Java features and practices?.

Particularly since version 5.0, PHP has been copying many of Java features and practices of Java programmers. This means that if Java programmers practices tend to be bureacratic and less productive, PHP programmers that use those features or adopt those Java practices may also become less productive. This was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Michael Kimsal on the episode 29 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

There's also a bit of discussion about adding generics to PHP and using OAuth in PHP. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by watching the video of the recording. You can also subscribe to their feed to get the latest in the podcast series.

Matt Frost has posted a two part series of some of his experiences in setting up Selenium to execute it in a VM and run tests on your application.

I was a little scared when it came to setting up Selenium, I figured it was going to be difficult to setup and configure. So I was pleasantly surprised when it really wasn't. So here are a few of the mistakes I made; since I use Vagrant to do all my development I actually grabbed Selenium and started from there. Not a good place to start, although as I found out later; not a total dead end.

He includes the initial setup of things like PHPUnit and the Selenium .jar file as well as a sample test that loads a page and checks the title of the page. His second post shows how to set it up in the VM (using Vagrant, xvfb to capture the output and Firefox to execute the tests).

In his latest post Chad Minick shares some thoughts as to why he thinks PHP frameworks are obsolete and how, despite there still being a use for them, a lot of them are just trying to solve the same problems all over again.

Now before I start getting hate mail, let me explain that I still think there is a market for PHP frameworks. I think if you have a moderately low traffic site that's going to live on shared hosting, and is basically a CRUD application on top of MySQL, disregard this article, it probably isn't for you. However, I've seen so many projects start out with that scope. They either grow or the developer/client wants to add more fancy new features they are starting to see elsewhere on the web. Then I see all these PHP developers hacking things that the PHP stack really isn't meant to do.

He takes some of the core features of several of the popular frameworks out there and breaks them out into a list of technologies that do that work themselves (such as "Web Server", "Dependency Management", "Caching" and "Messaging"). He points to a Java/Scala framework, Play as an example of having several of these technologies built-in where you don't have to have a whole other set of skills to use them effectively. It's an interesting idea but seems a little NIH to me.

According to this new post on Nerds Central, there's been speculation that Facebook, needing even more of a performance boost than hiphop gave them, is moving into using PHP in a JVM.

The presence of Facebook engineers at the JVM Language Summit in San-Francisco along with their interest in implementing PHP using invoke-dynamic on the JVM is a the shock. The main seismic event will be nothing less than the complete removal of interpretors from main stream general purpose programming.

He talks some about the JVM environment (and the Magik project) as well as wondering about what sort of performance boost it might actually give.

So Are Facebook Doing The Right Thing? Yes! The rise and rise of Javascript over the last 4 years as shown us just how powerful JIT compilation of once interpreted languages can be. The fall and fail of complete re-writes has shown us just how unrealistic it is to completely move a working system from one language to another. Facebook has a stupid amount of PHP and so it is by far the most sensible thing to port that to mlvm. Actually it should be pretty easy.

On his Reflective Thought blog Luis Atencio takes a look at the current state of dependency injection in PHP and shares a simple refactor from non-DI to code that uses it as a service locator.

If you have worked with frameworks such as Spring or Google Guice, you will understand the power and flexibility that dependency injection provides your humongous code base. [...] One quick drawback that I see is that the stateless nature of PHP makes things like object containers not very practical.

He proposes a slightly different kind of dependency injection system, one more akin to what's provided in the Java world where annotation and reflection are components of the integration. He provides a code sample of how this would look and points to Java's JSR-330 standard for some of the annotation examples (like "@inject" or "@scope").

On PHPMaster.com today, they've started a new series about integrating two popular technologies - PHP and the Android OS - in this new tutorial from Matthew Turland. He'll show both sides of the code needed to get your Android app talking to a PHP backend.

This two-part article will guide you through the process of building an efficient PHP-based REST web service to be consumed by an Android-based application. Some of the concepts presented here are also applicable to other mobile platforms, such as iOS. I assume you already know the basics of PHP and Android development and that you have a suitable development environments set up for both. I'll focus mainly on showing you how to handle data serialization and compression in both environments.

In this first part, he starts from the client side, creating the code (Java) that's needed to create the connection to the backend. He stets it up as a background task so its execution won't block the main app from working. He shows how to execute it, running an "on create" method and checking to ensure the network is available for the request.

On DZone.com Giorgio Sironi shares what he describes as his "standard PHP setup" - the tools and standards he commonly uses when developing his projects.

Last week I passed a day speeding up a Java and Ruby oriented team which started developing a PHP application: not only a standard project structure was required, but also some hints on the default tools and process to work with it. Here's what I thought was crucial during the setup, based on the question of my Rubyist colleague. Of course one of the most visible differences is the language itself, but there is a lot more tacit knowledge to share.

Things mentioned in the post include: development tools (like IDEs), the language itself and similarities to other languages, a standardized project setup, a good testing methodology and a bit of discussion about using external libraries.

Lukas Smith has put together a recent post to his blog with some thoughts on standardization of interfaces in PHP applications to help improve code quality and interoperability.

In my previous blog post I was brainstorming the possibility of collaboration between various frameworks to define a set of common interfaces. But I kind of failed to explain why this would be useful. Herman's "rebuttal" made this omission on my part quite clear. [...] That being said the open questions left in my previous blog might still prevent this idea to take off, even if I manage to convince the general community that the above mentioned negative effects are not such a significant concern.

He talks first about some of the things he sees PHP as having done right (citing its popularity) and contrasts it to Java based on the standards they impose. He goes on to mention how interfaces, introduced early enough in the process, can help with the "best tool for the job" idea (with an example involving Symfony2, Zend Framework and Doctrine).

New on DZone.com's Web Builder Zone, there's an article from Giorgio Sironi comparing Struts to the Zend Framework (Struts, of course, being a standard Java MVC framework that's quite popular in that community).

This article is intended to be useful for who experiences a transition between Java and PHP, but also to learn what could be imported in a framework from the other. Keep in mind that in the PHP world using a framework is probably still not considered the default option (going with or without frameworks is a choice which is out of the scope of what I want to discuss today instead.) Let's see what surprises you when jumping from Zend Framework to Struts, or the other way around.

He compares them against each other mentioning things like the single servelet vs front controller idea, action classes vs action controllers, persistence, JSP vs embedded PHP and tag libraries vs view helpers.