In a recent blog post Chris Hartjes is asking the community (more specifically the CakePHP community) for their opinions on his thoughts for a deployment method for CakePHP apps.

While I really prefer to use tools like this for deployment, I understand that not everyone wants to mess with standalone programs and configuration files. I've been asked before about Cake-specific deployment techniques, so I figure the easiest way is to see about adding a task to the Cake console.

His idea consists of two new commands - "cake deploy config" and "cake deploy" to make it simple to set up and directly deploy applications without having to go to outside software.

The PHP-GTK Community Site has posted about an issue that's been found with PHP-GTK on a Windows Vista machine that can cause problems with how the OS handles memory (by Wim Stockman).

My work station is WinXp system and my friend where I had to create it for has the new Vista and somewhere over 9000 pictures to be managed. On my system everything worked fine, but on my friends system i always got the error can not open file.

Further testing revealed that it was the OS at fault - Vista wasn't handling the memory usage for the application correctly. When it was run directly from the file explorer (versus in the PHP-GTK console) though, it worked just fine.

Paul Jones is happy to announce that the Solar PHP framework he develops on has made it to the next major stage in its development - Solar 1.0.0 alpha 1 release.

After more months of breaks, changes, additions, and refactoring, I'm (finallly) at the point where I'm ready to call the Solar framework for PHP 5 feature-complete. The first of this feature-complete series is the new Solar-1.0.0alpha1 release as of Sunday, 11 Nov, 2007. We now have at least 80% of everything you would need to build web-based and cli-based applications. This is a big milestone for the project.

Some of the "highlights" of this new release he mentions include:

• The new Solar_Controller_Console and Solar_Controller_Command classes are analagous to front and page controllers, respectively, for the command line.
• The new Solar_Filter class combines validating and sanitizing.
• We've moved a lot of the core functions of the Solar arch-class to their own static classes
• Lots of changes in the Solar_Sql package related to database portability

There's also a new ORM system he mentions - mainly the major addition of Solar_Sql_Model (and its friends). Check out the community wiki for the new functionality to get started.

As mentioned by Elizabeth Naramore on the php|architect website today, the CakePHP porject has launched their own live/podcast series, The Show to highlight different happenings in the project's community.

The Show was conceived after core developer Nate Abele and I recorded a podcast for php|architect with our good friend Paul Reinheimer. We had so much fun doing the podcast, that we decided to keep it going for the CakePHP community. The Show was born.

The show is broadcast live, but you can always to get the shows if you can't make it for the live event. Questions are welcomed during the show via Skype, IRC (#cakephp-live on Freenode) and telephone.

Two episodes of the show have already aired - the polit, an Introduction to CakePHP 1.2 and a look at Writing Console Applications.

On his blog today, Chris Hartjes has a quick screencast he's created showing off an interactive testing console he's worked up for use with the CakePHP framework.

I had suggested in an email to the CakePHP mailing list that an interactive console for doing testing of Models would be good. While at php|tek I spent a lot of time with the CakePHP guys talking about this. Out of it came some more ideas (like the ability to test your routes) and they even implemented a console that spits out API information for you. Very cool stuff. So, I decided to do a little screencast demo of a very early alpha version of the interactive console.

The screencast shows Chris running a test on his own classes, including demonstrating the built-in help the app offers.

Chris Hartjes is taking on what he calls his "next foolish project" - a console for the CakePHP framework.

On the CakePHP mailing list, somebody familiar with Ruby on Rails' console functionality asked "why isn't there one of these in Cake?" [...] So I got to thinking about how to do this. On the surface, it seems the easiest way to do this is to write a PHP script that takes entries on the command line, run the input through an 'eval' statement. Sounds easy enough, and I could write that in a hurry. I think the trickiness comes in figuring out how to hook it into CakePHP so that you can access Models that already exist.

For those attending the Vancouver PHP Conference, attend his talk and you might get amention of how far he's come with the idea. Otherwise, stay tuned to his blog for updates.

PHP-GTKers working in English-related applications, don't have a problem with debugging messages output to a console when debugging, but applications on a more international front have issues with their output. But help has been found in this new post on the Riff Blog - a method for correctly encoding PHP-GTK applications.

PHP scripts are typically stored under UTF-8 encoding to limit i18n headaches, while the console in which their output will be displayed is normally configured to some regional encoding, like IBM850 in Windows/XP French.

So we need a workaround...

He splits the process out into a few steps, each with its own explanation and code:

• Builtin tools
• Buffering
• Flushing
• PHP-GTK is not PHP for the Web
• Auto-flushing

All wrapped up with a final solution - using the iconv functionality in combination with some output buffering to correctly display the message.

On his blog today, Richard Heyes notes that he's created a new class that combines some of the most common console-script functionality into once place - Console.

Just added a new class called Console, which wraps up some common Console script related functionality. All the methods are static, and it's PHP5 only. Methods include:

• Console::Pause()
• Console::BooleanQuestion()
• Console::ClearScreen()
• Console::GetLine()
• Console::ShowMenu()

You can grab a copy of the class here as well as an example of its usage, showing how to build a menu and have the user input their information...

From this new post on DynamicWebPages.de today comes information about a new project launched by Andreas Demmer - the debugConsole.

The debugConsole is a new, with PHP5 crafted tool for debugging and extending applications on live-servers without compromising the actual traffic.

With simple PHP functions you can inspect variables, watch changes in variables over the whole runtime, measure partial runtimes, set checkpoints and write logfiles. Adittionally, the debugConsole replaces the PHP errorhandling so that notices, warnings and errors are shown in a popup too, instead of displaying them in the application to be debugged.

All of the output from the script is formatted, color-coded, and passed over to a Javascript popup. It even includes functionality for it to show for developers but not for regular visitors to the site...