On the Ibuildings blog there's a quick new post from Joni Overbosch looking at Ivo Jansch's recently released new book, php|architect's Guide to Enterprise PHP Development.

Last year he confided in me, said he wanted to write a book. And he actually did, within the year, 275 pages describing the complete development life cycle. For each phase in the development cycle, Ivo describes the common pitfalls, ways to get around them and tools others use to keep things running smoothly.

You can find out more about the book on its website including a link to order a copy of your very own ($36 CAD for print and PDF, $32 CAD for just the PDF).

Brian DeShong has posted some of his "food for thought" on the development process that's behind the scenes of different PHP applications.

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking on development processes and quality, specifically for large-scale, professional PHP-based projects. [...] Generally speaking, my perception is that software development shops that really care about and emphasize quality have processes that consist of things such as writing use cases, unit testing and continuous integration.

He knows how he feels about all of this, be he wants to hear back from the community. How far does quality assurance go in your group? What kind of time/funding does this involve? Leave him a comment and let him know...

Over on the PHP Zone (from the DZone community site) there's a in-depth tutorial looking at the creation and management of an access control system (users, passwords and what they can do) in your PHP application. It's an excerpt from the Packt book PHP5 CMS Framework Development.

Many websites will want to control who has access to what. Once embarked on this route, it turns out there are many situations where access control is appropriate, and they can easily become very complex. So in this chapter we look at the most highly regarded model role-based access control and find ways to implement it. The aim is to achieve a flexible and efficient implementation that can be exploited by increasingly sophisticated software. To show what is going on, the example of a file repository extension is used.

They talk about some of the general considerations about access control (limiting the number of rules, common difficulties) and plenty of code/database schema to get you started.

Gyorgy Fekete has provided what he calls a complete guide to PHP development on Mac OS X in a recent blog entry.

Finally, I switched entirely to Mac. It is a little frustrating that there is not a complete resource on how to set up a web development enviroment on Mac OS X. The majority of tutorials are outdated. I will try to write this guide as complete as possible.

The guide provides basic installation instructions for PHP, MySQL (XAMPP or MAMP), the configuration of these two packages, throwing XDebug in to help with your debugging, installing Subversion and picking out your IDE of choice. He also suggests a somewhat optional step - setting up a Windows virtual machine to be able to test things out cross-platform without the need for a separate machine.

Stefan Priebsch has posted an overview of some of his experiences with test-driven development in PHP. Specifically, he talks about it in the context of a small CMS he's been working up.

The CMS I am using is a small engine that puts together (potentially multi-lingual) page content, templates, and a site structure, and creates semi-static pages. It does not have a sleek GUI frontend, because by nature I am not afraid of a text editor, and most of the time get quicker results by just writing HTML than fighting with one of these what-you-see-is-what-you-might-get HTML editors.

He talks about the configuration files containing the app's settings (inspired by the YAML Symfony uses) and his work towards the "best matching pattern" algorithm. This is where the TDD came in - he cheated a little with some base classes (tests first!) and then came up with the tests for checking template names and more complex template interactions.

The post includes drops of code here and there as well - examples of the unit tests and of the configuration files.

On the PHP::Impact blog, there's a new tutorial showing how to use the Phing build system to deploy your application.

A common way to automate development and deployment tasks is by writing shell scripts, however, Phing provides some advantages over shell scripts for task automation. [...] But, having a large collection of shell scripts can lead to a maintenance nightmare, reason why I decided to port some of them to PHP as Phing tasks. I chose Phing because it's simple, powerful and very easy to extend.

He talks about DbDeployTask (an optional task for database revisions) and how to use the system for Agile development practices.

Padraic Brady has posted about another OAuth library that he's started up, one that's ready to be integrated with the Zend Framework reborn as a Zend_OAuth component (see his proposal code).

I've spent some time over the last week, and I have completed an initial pass at writing an OAuth Consumer in PHP5. I'm biased, but it's a nice chunk of code capable of fairly routine POST based OAuth requests using either an Authorized header, or a raw url encoded POST request body. My main remaining task is final cleanup, included refactoring, rolling my final set of acceptance tests into PHPUnit from SimpleTest, and adding support for HTTP GET, RSA, and a storage API so tokens can be saved in the background rather than outside the API.

Example code is included showing how to connect to the ma.gnolia bookmarking service and grabbing the response body from the request. He has a few more things to finish up before it's ready to go (backend storage, reworking the handling of web service API interaction, etc).

Ivo Jansch has posted about the official release of his book hot from php|architect's presses, the Guide to Enterprise PHP Development.

It's true that it's one of the few books that's not about PHP code, but about the entire development life cycle. I owe a lot of thanks to Elizabeth Naramore and Marco Tabini of php|architect, for getting this book out. If you order the book, also check out its companion website. I will collect feedback on that site, and will regularly post errata or other updates.

Get more information (and grab yourself a copy) from the php|architect website - the print/PDF will cost about $30 CAD and the PDF only runs about $27 CAD.

The IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial (login required) showing how to use the Eclipse PDT functionality to debug scripts your PHP development.

The PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in, when installed with Eclipse Europa, gives you that ability to quickly write and debug PHP scripts and pages. PDT supports two debugging tools: XDebug and the Zend Debugger. Learn how to configure PDT for debugging PHP scripts and discover which perspectives you use when taking closer looks at your scripts.

You'll need to have a machine with PHP, Eclipse, Apache and the PHP Development Tools already installed to follow along (as well as a trial version of the Zend Studio Web Debugger). They also include the methods for setting up XDebug as the debugger.