Padraic Brady has posted about a part of his PHPSpec library, the domain specific language.

PHPSpec implements a domain specific language (DSL) in PHP for specifying the behaviour of functional units such as methods and objects. The purpose of a DSL was to move away from the xUnit style declaration of tests towards a specification language centred on describing behaviour.

He illustrates with a bowling example - described with a sample class (with a itShouldScore0ForGutterGame test) and how to use it to fit his proposal:

My proposal therefore is to re-implement the current programming language DSL as a specification language - i.e. a new (extremely limited and narrow!) language capable of being parsed by PHPSpec into its PHP equivalent. [...] Using a specification DSL, we can simply ignore the existence of classes in PHP (well, the pretense is nice). Instead the DSL would incorporate a syntax for denoting shared behaviours.

Damien Seguy has submitted the latest PHP usage statistics for the results of April 2008.

Highlights in this month's edition include:

• PHP 5.2.6 is growing up fast, thanks to no PHP 5.3
• PHP 5 reaches 38.93% of PHP market share, up 2%
• They passed the mark of 30 millions domain tested this month

You can get the full stats (including the numbers and some great graphs) from the Nexen.net website - full stats, evolution stats.

John Rockefeller has a tip he'd like to share with all of the other PHP developers out there - a little method he's come up with to host multiple domains off of the same code.

This is really handy for those of us who have the same code handling multiple sites or multiple sub-domains. A case in point: When I coded NetBoardz (my free forum hosting service now defunct), I had one codebase handling all 250 forums. How? Simple. When the code runs, it determines which site the user is loading and does different things (like using different databases) dynamically.

He shows the two key points to dividing things up - grabbing the domain and subdomain they were trying to access. This can be fed into a script that can switch things like layout or even functionality based on which site they've chosen.

Ken Guest, in a response to another post from a different blogger, has posted some of his own validation replacements for the regular expression method the other blogger chose.

I've noticed that Richard Heyes, who professes himself to be a php guru, deleted my comment on his "Some common regular expressions" posting which simply pointed out his expressions didn't quite do the job and suggested a few PEAR packages that should be used instead of the expressions that he proffered

His examples have the benefit of what he calls "defense in depth" - the functionality to catch a bit more than just a regular expression can alone. His examples include PEAR_Validate for email addresses, Net_CheckIP2 for IP addresses and the Validate_UK package for the sort code and telephone numbers.

Damien Seguy has submitted this month's update to the Nexen.net PHP statistics for the month of December 2007:

PHP adoption statistics for December 2007 are released. Here are the monthly highlights:

• PHP 5 is now running on 27.8% of the servers
• PHP 5.2 usage will pass PHP 4.3 by April
• PHP 5.2.5 is 8.7% of the PHP 5 market

You can get more information on this month's stats over on the Nexen.net website - the evolution stats and the full stats for December 2007.

On the Spindrop blog today, Dave Dash posts about how he used the sfDoctrine plugin functionality to match allowed email domains for their website's registration.

I'm a co-founder at an online finance web site and I'm in charge with building out the site. Our rollout strategy is to let a a handful of companies at a time, so we're limiting registration based on your company's email address. I decided to follow the bandwagon and use PHP Doctrine.

His example code sets up the company information in objects that are validated against from a validateSignup (and match) function in the application.

Damien Seguy has kept up the good work and has posted this month's PHP statistics for the past month's data (April 2007).

Here are the PHP stats for March 2007. To learn about methodology, read la section phpversion. 10.1 millions servers hosted on 2.3 millions IP were surveyed during December, and 22.8 were used for stats : domaines without web sites, those unreachable, ISP, shared hosters or domain parkings were not considered.

Highlights for the month:

• 5.2 is about to be the 3rd most popular version
• PHP 5 is more often chosen on larger domains
• In April, web sites are bracing for the next versions
• Doesn't seem to be much impact from MOPB : have to wait for this month's to see it.

Stats cover a wide range of topics including:

• PHP on the Internet
• PHP Versions with dropping usage
• PHP5 adoption by country
• PHP versions by IP

Also, be sure to check out the evolution stats for the past month, showing some of the trends for the past months as compared to April.

Nexen.net has posted the latest PHP statistics for the month of March 2007 today including the PHP version distribution, the usage of different versions of PHP, PHP 5 adoption by country, and much more.

Here are the PHP stats for March 2007. To learn about methodology, read la section phpversion. 10.1 millions servers hosted on 2.3 millions IP were surveyed during December, and 22.8 were used for stats : domaines without web sites, those unreachable, ISP, shared hosters or domain parkings were not considered.

Also included are the evolution statistics comparing PHP to two other languages - ASP amd Masque. Interestingly enough, the growth pattern almost directly matches the inverse of the ASP results.

DynamicWebPages.de has posted their new statistics for PHP usage in the community for this past month:

After the small decrease in the last month, PHP made it back up easily. For the first time since April 2006, the 20 million mark on the number of domains has been passed. In contrast to the previous month that means a jump of nearly 800,000 domains. The number of IP addresses, on which PHP is installed, also has numbers worth checking out. With 1,332,514 IP addresses on record, this month's numbers are the highest conditions since September 2004.

You can check out the graph and the statistics for the last year in their statistics page of their site.

As mentioned by DynamicWebPages.de, the latest PHP usage statistics have been released for November 2006.

Overall, the spread of PHP seems to have settled down this month to a more stable value. For this month, the number of domain using PHP came in at 19 million (19,404,533) and the number of IPs using PHP is at 1.3 million (1,319,743). This drop can be somewhat attributed to several hosts being made aware of the "expose_php" setting in their installations and turning it off for security reasons.

You can check out this month's numbers as well as how it relates to previous months (and years) in this graph.