Hasin Hayder has a quick post about taking a URL in the opposite direction than most seem to go these days - from shortened to the long, full URL.

Now when you get the short url shortened by using any of these services, you dont know where your browser is taking you! so if you are interested to figure out the original url hiding behind these short url, you need to have a little knowledge on how these services actually work.

Then the short URL is hit, the HTTP response is in the 300 family and the browser is redirected to the correct location. He uses cURL in PHP to grab this header information and parse out the full-length URL to return both the URL requested (the shortened one) and the full-length it was generated to point to.

Fabien Potencier has posted another article about dependency injection and the Symfony service container. In this part of the series he looks at the "need for speed" - reducing the need for the XML/YAML parsing of the same information on every request via a new tool, the PHP dumper.

With the introduction of the XML and YAML configuration files, you might have became a bit sceptic about the performance of the container itself. Even if services are lazy loading, reading a bunch of XML or YAML files on each request and creating objects by using introspection is probably not very efficient in PHP. [...] How can you have the best of both world? That's quite simply. The Symfony Dependency Injection component provides yet another built-in dumper: a PHP dumper.

The dumper lets you convert the service container into regular PHP code (expanding the container's functionality out into a Container class based on the XML/YAML configuration.

According to a new press release from Zend, they've expanded their training course line to include a few more topics - migration from PHP4 to PHP5 and an in-depth look at their Zend Studio for Eclipse IDE.

These courses further expand the portfolio of Zend training courses, which include PHP from introduction to advanced levels, as well as courses about PHP Security, creation of Rich Internet Applications, and the use of major Zend products.

Here's the details:

• Migrating Your Web Applications from PHP v4 to v5 - This webinar guides you through the basics of planning a migration, as well as discussing some of the tools to make the process easier, such as unit testing and PHPDoc. The current class will be held September 9th and 11th and will cost about $300 USD.
• Zend Studio for Eclipse - The Zend Studio for Eclipse Course is designed to provide PHP programmers with a practical, in-depth knowledge of the next generation tool in the Zend Studio IDE family. The current class will start August 25th and will run through September 5th. Cost for the class is about $800 USD.

Finishing off their look at the "chain of responsibility", DevShed has posted part three of the series - expanding on the code that they produced in the past, they add more functionality to their error logger.

Now, paying attention to the topics that will be covered in this tutorial, what you'll learn here will consist essentially of applying the chain of responsibility schema to expand the capacity of the error logging system that was developed previously.

They take a look back at what they produced in the previous tutorial (the simple error logger) and show how to expand on it by adding functionality to log errors to a file. The finish it off by showing how to implement it all in a simple script.

Finishing off their look at the "chain of responsibility", DevShed has posted part three of the series - expanding on the code that they produced in the past, they add more functionality to their error logger.

Now, paying attention to the topics that will be covered in this tutorial, what you'll learn here will consist essentially of applying the chain of responsibility schema to expand the capacity of the error logging system that was developed previously.

They take a look back at what they produced in the previous tutorial (the simple error logger) and show how to expand on it by adding functionality to log errors to a file. The finish it off by showing how to implement it all in a simple script.

PHPBuilder.com has another excerpt from the book PHP 5 in Practice showing quickly this time how to create a dyanmic progress bar for your application.

In some situations you might need to display a progress bar—for example, when you are performing many tasks on the back end and they take a while to complete. In these cases it is a good idea to give some indication to the user that you are in fact still performing tasks and that their browser hasn't simply locked up.

They demonstrate a few different ways to accomplih this task including a simple "Please wait" kind of message and a more PHP-based example that changes the width of a DIV based on the amount of time it's taken to perform the task.

PHPBuilder.com has another excerpt from the book PHP 5 in Practice showing quickly this time how to create a dyanmic progress bar for your application.

In some situations you might need to display a progress bar—for example, when you are performing many tasks on the back end and they take a while to complete. In these cases it is a good idea to give some indication to the user that you are in fact still performing tasks and that their browser hasn't simply locked up.

They demonstrate a few different ways to accomplih this task including a simple "Please wait" kind of message and a more PHP-based example that changes the width of a DIV based on the amount of time it's taken to perform the task.

As all good sites must do, the ThinkingPHP blog is moving onward and upward in its focus, and according to this new post, that only means good things for PHPers.

You might have noticed that I changed the title of this blog to "ThinkingPHP and beyond" a couple days ago. I did that because currently I'm thinking a lot about where go with it. I definetly want to stay focused on PHP in general, but I feel like I (and a lot of other php developers) actually work with a lot more technologies then "just" php. So I'd like to talk about that as well.

Some of the other topics Felix is considering talking about include PHP coding practices, web standards/usability/accessibility, web services, and agile development topics. Keep an eye out here for more to come from this great blog - we'll always post the latest.

As all good sites must do, the ThinkingPHP blog is moving onward and upward in its focus, and according to this new post, that only means good things for PHPers.

You might have noticed that I changed the title of this blog to "ThinkingPHP and beyond" a couple days ago. I did that because currently I'm thinking a lot about where go with it. I definetly want to stay focused on PHP in general, but I feel like I (and a lot of other php developers) actually work with a lot more technologies then "just" php. So I'd like to talk about that as well.

Some of the other topics Felix is considering talking about include PHP coding practices, web standards/usability/accessibility, web services, and agile development topics. Keep an eye out here for more to come from this great blog - we'll always post the latest.