Joe Ferguson has posted an interesting idea to help build more community around the various PHP user groups all around the world: a sticker exchange.

I started a thread on the PHP UG Admins email list of doing a User Group sticker exchange and the idea took off pretty quickly. The idea is that user groups that want to participate send stickers to a central location. Stickers are then broken up into packets where every group that sent stickers will receive a packet of stickers from all the other user groups. The goal would be for every user group to send ~50 stickers (Some are sending much more).

Different people in different regions are working on handling the distribution to other local user groups (like Michelangelo Van Dam and Francesco Fullone). If you're a user group, have some stickers and would like to participate, you can sign up using this form and one of the organizers of the exchange will be in touch with you shortly.

Brandon Savage has posted the second article in his RabbitMQ+PHP series today with a look at publishing messages to the queue. (Part one is here)

Now that we understand the basics behind RabbitMQ, it’s time for us to start working with it. The first step in working with RabbitMQ is to begin sending messages to the exchange so that they can be queued. In RabbitMQ parlance, the “producer” is responsible for “publishing” the messages to the exchange.

He includes the code you'll need to use the AMQP PHP extension to connect with the RabbitMQ server and select a channel. He also shows how to set up an "exchange" and "queue" and bind them to each other. Finally, there's the one line of code that uses the routing key value to push a message into the waiting service.

Harry Fuecks came across a need in his development work to bridge a gap between a PHP script and some Java work he'd done. He found the way that fit his situation the best - the encryption of the data on the PHP side via OpenSSL.

Needed a mechanism to be able to pass chunks of data securely from PHP to Java [...] One solution might be something "from scratch" involving mcrypt or PHP libraries like Crypt_RSA. [...] Another approach is GnuPG, either via the command line as discussed in this tutorial or via the GnuPG extension from PECL.

Option 3 is using OpenSSL and PHP's openssl_seal() function. SSL is normally used for encrypting networked communication between peers but that's not all it can do. [...] What's more - and perhaps the biggest win - it also allows us to re-use existing SSL certificates.

He uses the openssl_seal functionality on top of the EVP encrypted envelope on the certificate to handle the encrypt/decrypt of the data. Both the PHP code and Java code (and execution example) are included in the post.

Harry Fuecks came across a need in his development work to bridge a gap between a PHP script and some Java work he'd done. He found the way that fit his situation the best - the encryption of the data on the PHP side via OpenSSL.

Needed a mechanism to be able to pass chunks of data securely from PHP to Java [...] One solution might be something "from scratch" involving mcrypt or PHP libraries like Crypt_RSA. [...] Another approach is GnuPG, either via the command line as discussed in this tutorial or via the GnuPG extension from PECL.

Option 3 is using OpenSSL and PHP's openssl_seal() function. SSL is normally used for encrypting networked communication between peers but that's not all it can do. [...] What's more - and perhaps the biggest win - it also allows us to re-use existing SSL certificates.

He uses the openssl_seal functionality on top of the EVP encrypted envelope on the certificate to handle the encrypt/decrypt of the data. Both the PHP code and Java code (and execution example) are included in the post.

In this new blog entry, Marcus Whitney talks about the upcoming php|architect webcast he'll be hosting interviewing two people from Microsoft - Brian Goldfarb and Joe Stagner.

I'm pretty excited about this weeks webcast. I'll be speaking with Brian Goldfarb and Joe Stagner of Microsoft about how PHP can be used for enterprise development on the Windows platform.

I think that everyone should consider checking in and asking these guys some questions.

He also mentions that Microsoft, for a long time, only saw PHP in the context of the LAMP "package" and not as a stand-alone language. Seems their outlook has changed a bit - check out the webcast to see just how much...

In this new blog entry, Marcus Whitney talks about the upcoming php|architect webcast he'll be hosting interviewing two people from Microsoft - Brian Goldfarb and Joe Stagner.

I'm pretty excited about this weeks webcast. I'll be speaking with Brian Goldfarb and Joe Stagner of Microsoft about how PHP can be used for enterprise development on the Windows platform.

I think that everyone should consider checking in and asking these guys some questions.

He also mentions that Microsoft, for a long time, only saw PHP in the context of the LAMP "package" and not as a stand-alone language. Seems their outlook has changed a bit - check out the webcast to see just how much...

On Evolt.org, there's this new tutorial that steps you through the implementation of the TMX standard to create localization for your scripts.

One of the main concerns of internationalization consists of separating the main source code from the texts, the labels, the messages and all the other objects related to the specific language in use. This facilitates the translation process as such as all the resources related to the local language context are well identified and separated.

In a global market the costs to translate and update the texts (including labels, messages, menu elements and so on) can easily become quite high. This is the context where the TMX standard comes to help by applying to the translation and management process of these texts the concepts of reuse, increase of consistency, and the shortening of the production cycle. All this with the added bonus of cutting the development costs.

They give you the XML structure for the example they're working with and the code to get it all working. They also do a great job of explaining how the standards all work. The code is relatively undocumented, but is clear enough to be easily included and used on any site.

On Evolt.org, there's this new tutorial that steps you through the implementation of the TMX standard to create localization for your scripts.

One of the main concerns of internationalization consists of separating the main source code from the texts, the labels, the messages and all the other objects related to the specific language in use. This facilitates the translation process as such as all the resources related to the local language context are well identified and separated.

In a global market the costs to translate and update the texts (including labels, messages, menu elements and so on) can easily become quite high. This is the context where the TMX standard comes to help by applying to the translation and management process of these texts the concepts of reuse, increase of consistency, and the shortening of the production cycle. All this with the added bonus of cutting the development costs.

They give you the XML structure for the example they're working with and the code to get it all working. They also do a great job of explaining how the standards all work. The code is relatively undocumented, but is clear enough to be easily included and used on any site.