Joakim Nygard has come up with a debug bar similar to ones found in other frameworks for the Zend Framework - the Scienta ZF debug bar.

The Scienta ZF Debug Bar is a plugin for the Zend Framework for PHP5. It provides useful debug information displayed in a small bar at the bottom of every page. Time spent, memory usage and number of database queries are presented at a glance. Additionally, included files, a listing of available view variables and the complete SQL command of all queries are shown in separate panels (shown configured with 2 database adapters):

You can check out an example setup here [png] and get the full installation instructions and latest downloads from the project's page.

Andi Gutmans has posted some of his own thoughts about the recent Zend Server beta release over on his Blogspot blog:

As I alluded in my New Year's post we've been very busy working on a new product line which today we are unveiling as Zend Server. Zend Server is not a Zend Core or Zend Platform derivative (although it uses a small amount of those components, mostly enhanced) rather it's a new approach on how we want to develop, distribute, and service our production products.

He talks about some of Zend's reasoning behind the project such as the need they saw in the community for a good, easy to install full web stack that can be relied on to provide solid, dependable performance. The entire setup is free of dependencies making it idea for a "drop in" kind of package for those needing an environment on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

You can find out more information about this new Zend offering on this page on the Zend website.

In this new post to his blog Juozas Kaziukenas takes a look at one method for getting the information out of a remote page - parsing it with PHP and XPath (assuming the page is correctly formatted).

When I was writing about how I use web scraping, I was still hadn't tried using Xpath (shame on me). [...] It turned out, that using Xpath is extremely easy, really. When you master it, you can do everything in seconds. Yes, you need to know how XML works and how to write correct Xpath queries (brief explanation of Xpath syntax is available at W3Schools), but hey - these topics are in 1st year of university.

He includes both some sample code (to fetch a titles and prices for cameras from bhphotovideo.com) and a link to a XPath checker you can use to ensure that your query is correctly formatted. It's good that he also includes a quick reminder about the ethical issue with web scraping - it could be considered stealing depending on where the information comes from and who is providing it.

For those that might have missed it, the phpBB.com server was hacked via an unpatched version of another piece of PHP software running on the same machine. Stefan Koopmanschap has posted a bit about it and talks about what happened and what can be learned from it.

Yesterday the phpBB.com server got hacked. People who, like me, were there back in the days of phpBB2 will be reminded of the security flaws found in the software back then. However, this was not the cause of this hack. It was an unpatched version of another PHP package that caused the hack, which exposed amongst other things the full user database and several server passwords.

The problem was with an unpatched version of phpList, a mailing list manager, that allowed the hacker to get in and get out with a complete dump of the users table (including passwords and other private information).

I think the whole world can learn something from this: Your server is only as secure as your weakest link. So if you use any third party open source software, make sure that you always use the latest version, and that you subscribe to notification mailinglists of new releases. This will ensure that you get notified when new versions are released, so that you can patch your installation to the latest version and fix any vulnerabilities in the software.

In a recent post to his blog Eric Reis talks about "why PHP won" in his web application development over other (web scripting) languages:

Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - let's face it - PHP can be pretty painful. As a language, it's inelegant. Its object-orientation support is "much improved" - which is another way of saying it's been horrendous for a long time. Writing unit tests or mock objects in PHP is an exercise in constant frustration. And yet I keep returning to PHP as a development platform, as have most of my fellow startup CTOs. This post is about why.

He includes four things (that would be needed to counter the information cascade that PHP has) a "new challenger" language might need to burst PHP's bubble.

• Speed of iteration (a good write/test/debug cycle)
• Better mapping of outputs to inputs
• A similar standard library
• A better OOP implementation

He gets a bit confusing in there, moving back and forth between "PHP is good" and "PHP is bad" comments but he does come back to the one thing that everyone can agree on - regardless of your personal bias, you should always consider this: "it's all about picking the right tool for the job".

This new article from PHPBuilder.com talks about getting started with one of the newly introduced components of the Zend Framework (in collaboration with Adobe) - the Zend_Amf interface.

To introduce this new Zend Framework extension and give you a look inside its functionality, I show you how to build a Flex application that pulls data from a MySQL database using PHP. First, you set up the application to use XML, the conventional cross-platform data-exchange method. Then, you change the code to use AMF and custom classes.

They give you the tools you'll need to set up the right environment (including version 1.7 or later of the Zend Framework and Adobe Flex Builder) and the steps to create the simple application. It uses a MySQL backend to store contact information ad a basic Flex interface to pull that information back out for display.

Jonathan Snook hands off a handy tip for the CakePHP developers out there concerning the debugging information that can be displayed at the bottom of your application's pages.

I just wanted to document this somewhere but whenever I work on a CakePHP project, there's always the debug info that sits at the bottom of the page. It's big and bulky and once I'm off the default CakePHP styles, it's usually pretty ugly. I've done various stylings but I finally took a moment to implement a really simple idea: Fixed position the table and then use hover styles to toggle the visibility.

He includes the simple four style entries that can be used to tame this debugging information down into something a bit more useful (and less intrusive).

In response to another blogger's review of the php|architect "Guide to Programming with Magento", Michael Kimsal has posted some clarifications.

Starting off with "However, I'm not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book" I wasn't particularly surprised that there was more of a focus on negatives rather than positives.

Michael mentions three topics - the "first to market" point the reviewer makes about different versions of Magento between the book being authored and the release, some of the missing information the reviewer would've liked to see and the complexity of the example module that the reviewer complains is too hard to follow.

DevShed has continued their series (here's part one) looking at the use of file uploading in your PHP scripts. They build on that foundation and add in some more useful features this time:

The initial script in the first tutorial of this series lacked some important features, such as the implementation of an effective error handling module and the ability to check the MIME type and size of the file being uploaded. In this second installment of the series, I'm going to improve the logic of the script from the first tutorial to provide it with the capacity to retrieve useful information concerning the entire file uploading process.

They look back at the previous tutorial to remind you of some of the concepts and then move on to show you how to get information about the file (like the MIME type, name and size of the uploaded file). The last page is just the full source code for the cut and pasters out there.

DevShed has started up yet another PHP-related series today with this new tutorial covering part of PHP5's object functionality - destructors.

This article, the first part of a five-part series, introduces you to destructors and their use with PHP 5 programs. [...] The word "destructor" relates to certain methods or functions of a determined programming language that are responsible for destroying data that, in the context of that particular language, shouldn't exist any longer.

They create a sample class (for storing user information) and show how to integrate a destructor to remove all traces of the user's information from the properties of the class.