Daniel Cousineau posted copies of his submissions to the PHP Women group's Article Contest (Best Practices) that finishes up today.

I made a few posts to the PHPWomen.org Article Competition and felt I should share them here.

His three submissions are:

• Flash Your Errors: It's Illegal In 28 States! on combining flash messages and error reporting
• David Copperfield Wasn't This __magical: __autoload() is Awesome! on using the __autoload functions and PEAR style namespacing
• Path Secrets Of The Most Awesome on making your path operations indestructible across operating systems.

There's still (a little) time to get your own submission in to the contest to get over and submit your article for your chance to win a copy of Zend Studio and maybe get your article featured in Linux Pro Magazine.

In trying to get PHP, AMFPHP and Flash to cooperate together with ByteArray information, Alessandro Crugnola came across some issues:

Recently I made some test in AMFPHP sending an retrieving ByteArray to be stored in a mysql blob field. But suddenly I encounter a problem when I was trying to return an array of ByteArrays and I could not find out the reason flash continued to show me [an] error.

He includes the offending code on both the PHP and ActionScript side and his ultimate solution - a problem with AMFPHP's serializer. He's even made a patch file if you're seeing the same issue and want to bring your install up to date.

On the PHP in Action blog Dagfinn Reiersol shares a method to send messages across a POST request that's followed by a redirect (versus a simple GET where it can be in the URL).

When processing a GET request, you can display whatever messages you want. The most simplistic way is to echo them directly; or if just slightly more sophisticated, set it in the template that's about to become the web page. When processing a POST request that is to be followed by a redirect, you can't do that. The response (redirect) sent back to the browser does not have any text or HTML content.

He points out two different ways to handle the problem - either manually append the message to the URL you're redirecting to or (a bit better method) store it in a session variable and remove it once its done. Several frameworks call this a "flash message". He gives examples of how to set this in two popular frameworks - Zend Framework and CakePHP.

In this first article of a new series on the IBM developerWorks site introduces you to their method for creating your own "on-demand video website" with PHP:

In Part 1 of a three-part series on creating an on-demand video site with PHP, we begin by looking at the different flavors of digital video and their particular nuances. When creating video for the Web, the overarching issue you need to keep in mind is whether you want your video to be small and easy to download or whether you want it to be the best quality possible.

They'll also show you how to convert the video into the Flash Video format to make it easy to pull into an in-page Flash player. You'll need to register or log in to get to the article.

The DevX.com site has posted some code that gives you methods for passing information back and forth between PHP and a Flash application.

When you need to develop a web form with a special design and great effects, you will probably elect to use Flash. But building and programming Flash forms is considerably different from building standard HTML-based forms. [...] To do that though, you need to know how to access data in the Flash form and (sometimes) how to update the Flash form from PHP as well.

They help you build a sample Flash form as a base to work with in the transfer methods including the ActionScript to get the data out of each field. The tutorial shows the two way communication that's possible - pushing the Flash values out to the PHP script via a getURL() call and pulling the results back in with a call to loadVars() from the PHP script's output.

Richard Lord has a quick post about a handy library that can help with the creation of AVM2 swf files from inside of PHP.

It creates the number formats used in AVM2 swfs, as described here. I created these functions for the SWX project and am releasing the code under the MIT license so it can be used in other projects too.

You can download the file directly from his blog. You can find out more about the native data format (SWX) for Flash on the SWX Format website.

Kore Nordmann has written up some benchmarks of some of the more popular PHP image creation libraries testing their output times and results for generating the same image.

In my article series I showed several ways on how to create images with PHP, going into implementation details etc. Now I just want to provide a very rough overview on speed and quality of the extensions.

He ran them with some settings disabled to optimize things as they ran and came up with results pointing to Cairo being the fastest to generate and output the image. It also had the benefit of outputting an image with the highest quality of the five tested (Cairo, SVG, Flash and GD with and without supersampling). His benchmark code is also included.

The Bakery has a grouping of six new articles/tutorials/components posted covering things from SOAP to loading models on the fly to some of the latest CakePHP releases:

• A Component to help creating SOAP services
• Using requestAction & custom layouts to add XHR functionality
• Ticket Component - i.e. password reset
• Model loader (loading models on the fly)
• New CakePHP Releases
• Multiple flashes with different classes

Check out The Bakery for more great CakePHP related information and tools.

For those that weren't able to be in attendance for Zend's last Webinar webcast, "Zend Framework 1.0 - An Overview", they've now posted the presentation to their Webinar page:

In this webinar, Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Manager, will provide an overview of the design philosophy, the major components of the framework and its future directions. Topics will cover MVC, Search, Data Access, Web Services, Filter, Authentication, Cache and more. Tune in to learn more about the value Zend Framework can offer your web project.

You'll need Flash to check it out and it's a little over an hour long (1 hr 15 min), narrated by Bill Karwin.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a new interview that Cal Evans conducted with a few of the developers and managers from Active Media Architects, a design/programming/development company that's created many sites including the one Cal mentions - MyKleenexTissue.com.

Flash and PHP are becoming a popular pair of technologies. It seems that every time I turn around, I'm seeing new Flash front-ends that are talking to PHP back-ends and doing some very interesting things. One of the most interesting things I've seen though has to be MyKleenexTissue.com.

I was given the opportunity to sit down and talk with Andy Lintner, Director of Application Development, Jon Aniano, General Manager, and Jeff Kazmierski, President and Creative Director; all of Active Media Architects, the team behind MyKleenexTissue.com. Along the way we talked about the technology decisions they made, and the process they used for development.

They talk about how the project got started, what kind of development time was involved with creating a Flash site, some of the technology behind the scenes (including their framework) and a bit about the company itself.