David Van Couvering has posted about some of his experience with the latest version of the NetBeans editor for some of his PHP and Javascript development work.

Yesterday I spent the whole day trying to help a friend in need who had waded in too deep with a contract he has. He has no database experience, and was trying to customize a Wordpress plugin that uses PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. So I downloaded the daily build of the PHP bundle of NetBeans for 6.5 and started working.

He happily notes that things like syntax highlighting, inline documentation and completion were still there in the PHP bundle as well. He also mentions a few other things that could come in handy for the IDE - ssh tunnel support (see here), an "Add Column Wizard" and a "Insert DLL Wizard".

The CodeIgniter blog has posted their latest "Community Voice" feature highlighting an article from Michael Wales:

This week, our Community Voice author is Michael Wales, a programmer, a father, an aspiring author, and an award winning Airman. For the past 3 years, he's been focusing the majority of his time on CodeIgniter. He is among the most consistent contributors to the community, has released numerous libraries and tutorials, and is one of the most highly sought after freelancers within the community.

Michael talks about some of his experiences in developing web applications - both CodeIgniter driven and not. He notes that the framework does allow him to look at things from "outside the box" a bit more since it takes the hard bits off his shoulders.

Lorna Mitchell has posted an update to the PHP Women website with a wrapup from the recent Dutch PHP Conference that happened in Amsterdam on June 14th as written up by one of their Dutch members Ghica van Emde Boas

Meet Ghica van Emde Boas. Ghica is one of our Dutch members, herself a published author. She attended the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam last weekend, and was generous enough to donate three signed copies of her own book which went to assist some of the local ladies in their learning. Here is Ghica's account of her day.

Ghica's day included Zeev Suraski's talk, Marco Tabini's presentation on mayo (oh, and application design) and well as talks from Derick Rethans, Lorna Mitchell and Stefan Priebsch (oh, and the infamous Terry Chay).

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new course that's offered by Zend to help experienced programmers further their PHP education - Zend Quick Start: PHP for Experienced Programmers.

This course covers many of the same topics as both the PHP I: Foundations and PHP II: Higher Structures classes but at an accelerated rate with special emphasis on the differences between PHP and other commonly used languages.

The next session of the course starts on April 29th and will last through May 16th. There will be nine sessions during that time for two hours at a time. You can get full details, including how to reserve your spot, on the course's page on the Zend website.

Akash Mehta mentions on the Developer Tutorials Blog about some of his experiences with interviews, specifically dealing with the certifications people list on their resumes.

As he sees it, there's three categories:

• The Good - things like the ZCE
• The Bad - proof of testing but no proof of experience
• The Ugly - failing to have anything to show your ability/knowledge

It's all about image, even when it comes to hiring a good programmer. Employers are looking first for someone who even vaguely looks like they know their stuff, then they dive deeper into the real skills and talents that potential employee might have.

As the Zend Developer Zone points out there's a new interview over on the PHPWomen.org website with Nancy Wichmann, one of the members of the PHP Women group, about some of her development experiences.

NancyW - a well known drupal developer, documentation contributor, module developer/maintainer apart from these a prestigious WOMEN in the world of opensource.

The interviewer asks a wide range of questions (with some interesting answers!) on topics ranging from her college major, how she got interested in Drupal out to things like her good/bad experiences in the open source world and some advice for those new to the community.

Following along with the official guide from Facebook about creating a simple application for the site, Dave Courtney ran into some issues. Specifically, a fatal error when he tried to run his three line script.

After setting up my application settings, which were all straight forward, I set about creating a simple 'Hello World' page. Following the step by step guide to creating an application provided by FaceBook I wrote a simple index.php page. [...] This is where I encountered probably the only major issue of the day.

In the end, his issue was caused by the SimpleXML he had installed locally. Once his application was uploaded, it worked just fine. With this problem down, he moved on to working with the Facebook Markup Language and how he integrated it with the database.

On the "Yet Another Web Development Blog", there's a new post about a PHP developer (the author of the post) taking some time and spending a week with the Python programing language in a real project to see what it's like.

Today I was the first time I've used my new found Python skills in a professional capacity. [...] Since I had already worked with the HTMLParser library, I figured this would be a perfect opportunity for Python.

He includes some sample code showing a basic use of Python and a brief comparison of using each of the languages in a web development environment.

In his new post on PHPEverywhere today, John Lim shares some of the experiences he's had so far in making the move up from PHP 4 to PHP 5 in his applications.

The transition was relatively painless. [...] What's nice about PHP5 is that it caught some errors that have been lingering in our code: PHP5 no longer allows a function to be defined twice, and some basic variable referencing errors that we missed previously.

They made the move to PHP5 for the latest versions of their applications, but have still stuck with the legacy, PHP4 versions for the time being to give customers a buffer period to make the move themselves. He also mentions changes to the way they make Ajax calls. John is a lead developer for both the ADOdb and PHPLens projects.