Freek Van der Herten has an article posted to his site showing how you can use the Browsershot package to convert web pages to images with a bit of PHP.

Browsershot is a package that can easily convert any webpage into a image. Under the hood the conversion is made possible new headless options in Chrome 59. In this post I’d like to show you how you can use Browsershot v2.

He starts with a bit of history about the package and the recent switch from PhantomJS (a now abandoned project) over to Chrome's screenshot handling for creating the web page captures. He then shows how to install Chrome 59, the first version to include this feature, into a unix-based environment. Next comes the package and some example code of it in use: making a simple capture, setting the window size, manipulate the image post-capture and change it to grayscale.

On the QaFoo blog they've posted an article sharing a quick testing tip when using Phake to test APIs where the calls don't return any data.

Today I want to share a simple trick for the excellent Mocking library Phake (I wrote about it before) when testing state on APIs that don't return values.

Testing becomes harder when you are using command / query separation in your code and service operations don't return values anymore. If your command method creates objects and passes them down the stack, then you usually want to make assertions on the nature of the changes.

He gives an example of a class that creates an Order object and saves it but doesn't return a value. He shows how to update this with Phake in the test to capture and verify that the calls are correctly made and the number of products on the order is correct.

In this recent article from ServerSide Magazine they look at a security issue that can be hard to detect if you're not sure what you're looking for - session hijacking - and how you can help to prevent it on your site.

A must have for the attacker in a session hijack is the Session Identifier so he can impersonate the attack. Let’s presume for example that you have your website hosted on a shared hosting on which PHP is installed as an Apache module, thing that makes session files belong to the web user, in other words: accessible.

He breaks it out into three potential kinds of session hijack methods - prediction, capture and fixation - with definitions for each. He also makes recommendations of some secure practices to follow to help prevent some of these issues (like not trusting users, using $_COOKIE and $_SESSION correctly and using a security token too along with the session ID).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new tutorial (from Matthew Weier O'Phinney) about a handy feature of the Zend Framework's view layer - view helpers that can be added in and reused across an application to do some pretty cool stuff.

A View Helper is simply a class that follows particular naming conventions, When attached to a view object, you can call the helper as if it were a method of the view object itself. The View object retains helper instances, which means that they retain states between calls.

View helpers can be use to do things like manipulate view data for more complex operations and carrying over data between two views, limiting the number of fetches that have to be done. He shows how to create a simple helper - My_Helper_FooBar - that just appends "fooBar " to whatever's passed in. He also talks about some of the default view helpers (like form fields), partials, the doctype() helper, capturing/caching content to be used later and the use of placeholders.

On Cesarodas.com, Saddor as created a simple class to help with caching information in a PHP application - specifically when it comes to capturing output (like HTML generated for the page).

Usually we need to find a way to help php to reduce the number of query to a database, because as a friend told me: "Most of time php is awaiting for a database to response". And that is wasted resource (time, processor, main memory). The developer need to find a way to store some pages until it changes or something like that. There are many cache classes over there, but exist many problems, I will focus on two problems. Implementation and concurrence.

His gCache class uses capture/endcapture methods to define where the content starts and ends and, once the information is stored, checks with a valid method and echoes the content if it's been cached. An example of the class in action is also included.

On Cesarodas.com, Saddor as created a simple class to help with caching information in a PHP application - specifically when it comes to capturing output (like HTML generated for the page).

Usually we need to find a way to help php to reduce the number of query to a database, because as a friend told me: "Most of time php is awaiting for a database to response". And that is wasted resource (time, processor, main memory). The developer need to find a way to store some pages until it changes or something like that. There are many cache classes over there, but exist many problems, I will focus on two problems. Implementation and concurrence.

His gCache class uses capture/endcapture methods to define where the content starts and ends and, once the information is stored, checks with a valid method and echoes the content if it's been cached. An example of the class in action is also included.

In a new blog post today, Pierre-Alain Joye shows a method for doing a screen capture with just PHP and the GD functionality (an updated library, a DLL).

To get a snapshot of a HTML page, a window or a complete screen was always something tricky to do in PHP. For one of my current projects, I had to check that our changes did not affect visually any page. An easy way to achieve this goal is to compare the rendered pages in the browsers itself, easy and time consuming (for a human being :D).

That's why I finally sit down and implemented imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow . They capture respectively the whole screen or a window (using its handle).

He includes a few examples including grabbing a default screenshot, grabbing just the contents of a certain application (like Internet Explorer), and grabbing a fullscreened IE window too.

In a new blog post today, Pierre-Alain Joye shows a method for doing a screen capture with just PHP and the GD functionality (an updated library, a DLL).

To get a snapshot of a HTML page, a window or a complete screen was always something tricky to do in PHP. For one of my current projects, I had to check that our changes did not affect visually any page. An easy way to achieve this goal is to compare the rendered pages in the browsers itself, easy and time consuming (for a human being :D).

That's why I finally sit down and implemented imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow . They capture respectively the whole screen or a window (using its handle).

He includes a few examples including grabbing a default screenshot, grabbing just the contents of a certain application (like Internet Explorer), and grabbing a fullscreened IE window too.