This year's PHP Advent calendar has finished up and if you haven't gotten a chance to check out some of the great content in this year's edition, be sure to take a look at the full list. It incudes topics like:

• Front-end testing with SimpleTest
• Scalable applications
• Cross-origin ajax
• working with Chef
• Error handling
• Dates and Times

The articles are by several well-knowns both in the PHP community and outside. While you're there, be sure to check out some of the previous years too!

Padraic Brady has posted the third chapter of his "Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End" book. It focuses on the Models in the Model-View-Controller (MVC) applications.

Today Chapter 3, The Model, has entered the online book. Apart from some early jitters when PHPIDS (an intrusion detection system I use) lost the plot and commenced a vendetta against Opera, the new chapter is fully operational.

If you get these first chapters, you'll notice that there's some color coding going on with status labels. Padraic is using this to give you some feedback as to the level of completion a certain chapter is in. He notes:

I've decided to start noting in these announcements that these early Chapters are akin to drafts. While they are written as complete units, it's intended to revisit them every few weeks for improvement until a final version emerges to be forever immortalised as a first edition of the book.

Paul Reinheimer has posted about a contest in the making - a turn-based robot battle sort of game where PHP scripts compete against each other.

Just a quick announcement, in an effort to come up with a self scoring contest, I came up with the ridiculously simple concept of robots firing lasers at each other in a fictional arena. Each robot controlled by a different PHP script, and a central arena managing it all. It's basically a turn based game where your robots take turns for you.

You can check out more about the game and its rules over on the Web Bot Battle site. It defines how your bots should act and even has some examples for you to work from.

In a new post Jonathan Street mentions a new PEAR package that's an API for the Compete API:

After writing about the compete API Hiroki Akimoto contacted me mentioning a proposal he had made to PEAR. Our scripts each had strengths and we decided to combine our attempts and hopefully make something better. After a week or so we updated the proposal with the new code and after a little time for comments and a week for voting the proposal was accepted and on 30th July a new package, Services_Compete, was available on PEAR

This package (currently in an alpha release, version 0.1.0) acts as a wrapper class to connect to and use the Compete SnapShot API.

Well, the PHP Throwdown event has come and gone with all of the teams giving their best creating an application hoping to reach the top.

Wow, what can I say but w00t! The throwdown was a tremendous success and went off without any major problems. We're still compiling all the final projects and I'll be reporting some statistics about those (as in who was using what and how many competitors we had per category). I am excited to see what all has come of it.

There were also bloggers from about the web that covered the event either for themselves or for the team they were a part of.

Congrats to all of those who participated and we'll all be anxiously awaiting the results! OH, and if you didn't get a chance to participate this year, you can still grab a tshirt to remember the event by.

For those PHPers out there that use the vi editor for their coding travels, Bjarte Karlsen has posted something that might help you out - two configuration files that he uses to work with PHP files in vim.

In a recent chat on #phpc we started discussing vim and talking about vim setups. Surripui posted a blog entry about this asking for setups. I promised that i would post my setup so here it is.

The two files are his:

• .vimrc
• .vim/ftpplugin/php.vim

Between the two of these, the editor is able to correctly handle PHP files, syntax check files and tab complete function names. There's also a mention of using gsnippets for working with code templates.

It's always good to finish a rather large project, and Robert Peake shares his joy in this new post on his blog nothing that not only is the project off and running, but it was all created based on a best practices/standards-based approach with respect to PHP development.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

He notes several of the things they used along the way, including:

• Design patterns
• Ajax
• Optimization
• Coding standards
• Extreme programming tactics

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory -- we did it.

Continuing in the trend of completing documentation for projects, Sara Golemon has posted this information about completing the documentation for the libssh2 project.

After four months of (horribly boring and slow-paced) work, I've finally finished off the last of the libssh2 API documentation on the wiki. The material is still a bit rough and only helpful if you've already got the basics working (at which point you could have probably used the source documentation anyway). Next up I'll be working on a tutorial/example-usage section and maybe write up a few pages on basic secsh transport mechanics...

If you'd like to help contribute, check out the documentation wiki for the project and share your knowledge today!

Sometimes, just the idea of starting off a new project makes developers shy away from an idea. They think about everything they have to set up even before they get to the real work. Thankfully, there are solutions out there to help you get down to the real work real fast. For example, the ATK Code Generator, an application designed to simplify creation of an application to a few clicks. This new tutorial from Jorge Garifuna shows you how.

Developers can spend their time creating robust database schema and feed it to the ATK Code Generator to see instant web applications customized for the schema. Something that used to take months to create, has been cut to minutes and instant results.

He mentions specifically a three-step method to create an "application" around a database table. The user views the tables in the software, customizes the options for it, and clicks to have the ATK Code Generator build it out for them.

Also included in the post are links to the project's homepage, some documentation, and screenshots of the application at work.

Pierre has posted about an update to his zip extension he created and added to the pecl repository. This version is a complete rewrite, and uses libzip instead of zzlib.

It is 100% backward compatible, you can use your old code transparently.

For PHP 5.1.x and up: Add create, modify and write support, from files or strings, stream support (read only), OO interface

For PHP 4.x and 5.0.x: Better zip read support, broken zip files with zzlib may now work smoothly.

For the old APIs, you can read the good old PHP manual. There is no documentation yet, but the examples contain all new features. It is the very first releases, consider it as alpha.

He reminds developers that feedback is always welcome, and that it can be downloaded directly from the pecl site.