A pretty cool project in PHP - Memproxy is a caching proxy "server" that uses memcached for storing the cache. This project uses PHP scripts to handle caching using memcache.

The server uses memcached to store the information and automatically manages things like TTL, custom headers and is "application agnostic" all wrapped up in a small codebase with minimal dependencies.

Matthew Turland has come across an "interesting bug" in PHP's stream wrappers functionality - some strange 404 or 500 HTTP errors in one of his scripts.

I wrote a small script a while back that's gained a surprising amount of popularity thanks to a plug from the site that it posts to. [...] I learned that this [connection from the script] could be done with streams, I attempted to implement it in that fashion, but ran into strange issues where I would get 404 or 500-level HTTP errors rather than the response I was expected.

He eventually found the bug related to his problem (in the 5.2.x branch) but happily notes that it has been corrected and will be patched in the upcoming 5.3 (and 6) branches.

Lukas Smith has posted the second and third parts of his talk with Rasmus Lerdorf - a look at MaxClients and HTTP headers.

As promised here are the two other logs from the recent chat I witnessed. [...] Again I left the logs in their raw original way. Hope they are useful for you all.

Lukas also links to two resources he mentions in the second (third?) log about performance as well as mentioning one of the most useful Firefox extensions for web developers - YSlow!.

The Developer Tutorials website has posted an article with a sort of beginner's guide to working with WordPress and its customization.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. [...] WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

They briefly mention how to use the administrative interface for the tool, but focus mainly on the templating system. They talk about the structure of the themes and how to create your own inside it. There's even parts detailing the specific sections (like the header, the posts section and the sidebars).

The DeveloperTutorials website has a new article that steps you through the creation of an autoresponder script for an email account (in qmail).

It's very convenient for users to be able to communicate with web applications (or businesses) via email, but it's not always easy for the employees of the company to respond. Some of the email requests could be complex, and others could be simple but occur very frequently. So it's a real advantage when we can write scripts to respond to user emails for us.

The tutorial sets up a basic structure for you to work from including places for the addresses and extra headers for the response. You can also download the code to have it to follow along with (or play around with yourself).

On his blog, Bill has posted about a patch for IIS7 running on a Windows Vista machine that corrects an issue with applications that send multiple response headers.

Today we released a patch for IIS7 in Windows Vista that addresses an issue we've seen with CGI applications (especially PHP applications that use the built-in CGI component). The typical symptom is an application that runs using CGI and is unable to support multiple "cookies" for authentication or personalization.

He also links to the Microsoft Knowledge Base article on the topic and to the download for the patch.

Paul Jones has posted a new tutorial about using the mail functionality of the Solar framework - the Solar_Mail and Solar_Stmp packages.

While each of these [PEAR Mail, PhpMailer, SwiftMailer, Zend_Mail] will work with Solar, the new Solar_Mail and Solar_Smtp packages work "natively", in that they support automatic configuration, locale and exception inheritance, and so on. Read on for some examples on how to use them.

In his example he sets up and sends a simple message, setting the contents of the email (sent as an HTML message). Since there's been much talk about the safety of a lot of the mailing systems in frameworks, Paul talks about how it's been secured from header injections, through safe attachments, and from a transport dependency-injection for SMTP.

There's even a method included that lets you take the SMTP information out of the script and put it into the Solar configuration file to use in the entire application.

This new post on the Sanisoft blog has some good news for CakePHP developers concerning the bundled email component - it now can be made header injection safe.

In Cheesecake 1.x we had used our home grown component for sending emails. Having learned our lessons from the headaches of Pixelpost team due to email header injection attacks in their comment mailing code we had taken precautions to make our code safe from such attacks.

They proposed an update to the CakePHP functionality to integrate this solution on a more permanent basis.

Today Rob Allen posts about a fellow developer's request to add a header and footer into all of the view templates on their Zend Framework site:

At the moment, the Zend Framework doesn't have an "officially blessed" solution, so there are multiple approaches being used.

Included in his list are things like the Zend_Layout proposal, the Zend_View_Enhanced proposal and the Front Controller plug-in.

If you've ever had the frustration of working with Ajax in Internet Explorer and have noticed it caching the requests/results, you might want to check out this new post on the JSLabs blog for a helpful hint.

While working on an AJAX project over the weekend, I ran into the following issue: (through a GET request), every time I tried to call a certain function, It was returning the same data (which was supposed to be different each time)

First, he tried just changing the headers (via PHP's header function) to see if IE would understand the new message, but to no avail. He finally figured out that, despite whatever headers were sent or how much the content changed, what he really needed to do was to provide the script some kind of unique identifier with each request (just appended to the url) so that IE knew the request was different. His weapon of choice was a date/time value.