On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a recent post showing you how to combine PHP and the Coinbase API to add the ability to accept bitcoins as payment in your application. This is part one in a series of posts about making the connection and integrating it into the application.

Have you ever thought about selling your services in exchange for Bitcoins? It’s not so strange – today, many big players are actually doing it. From OkCupid to KhanAcademy, even WordPress is accepting Bitcoin. Also, some countries are thinking about it as a currency. Today, we will see how to accept Bitcoin payments on your website/application in an easy way, with the Coinbase API (and its SDK).

He briefly explains what kind of services the Coinbase API provides and talks about some of the different integration methods they offer. While they do offer a "button" you can add to the site, this tutorial focuses on the PHP integration using their SDK. They help you get it installed and show how to use the Coinbase site to set up authentication and authorization handling. He helps you get an instance of the Coinbase object ready for use and shows how to use it to interact with your account. The SDK also allows you to create the same button as the Coinbase site does, just in a more programatic way.

On DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi has a quick tutorial showing you how to set up and use the PHPUnit_Selenium component in the latest releases of the popular testing software.

With the 1.2 release, PHPUnit_Selenium supports (basically) for the first time the Selenium 2 WebDriver API. While PHPUnit_Selenium already worked with Selenium 2, it did so only by using the Selenium 1 emulation included in the jar; now it provides an object-oriented API right natively supported in a base PHPUnit test case, shipped in PHPUnit's PEAR channel.

He includes the steps you'll need to pull it from the PEAR channel and how to set up a test case based on the PHPUnit_Extensions_Selenium2TestCase object. He gives a few examples of how to select various components on the page (via CSS selectors and XPath), assert that the right information is there and interact with forms.

This new tutorial from the Zend Developer Zone (by Vikram Vaswani) looks at getting data objects set up between PHP and the DB_OO2 package.

Data objects, which provide an API for accessing and manipulating database tables, are one such tool. There are a number of implementations for data objects in PHP, most notably the popular PEAR DB_DataObject package. This tutorial focuses on one such implementation, the DB_OO2 package, showing you how it can significantly reduce your coding time when working with database tables.

The DB_OO2 package (PEAR) lets you set up references to your database tables as objects and interface with them by setting properties and calling standardized functions. Many of the PHP frameworks out there let you do this same sort of thing, but those are built in - this method lets you use the package wherever.

On his blog today, Vinu Thomas points out a faster way to run PHP natively on a pure Java server - Quercus. As a side benefit, it can also interact with the Java code already in the application/on the server.

Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor.

Quercus focuses on the integration of PHP and Java and allows PHP to access things like Java's JMS, EJB and SOA Frameworks. It works by compiling the PHP scripts into Java and run on top of the Quercus software as a native application.

On his blog today, Vinu Thomas points out a faster way to run PHP natively on a pure Java server - Quercus. As a side benefit, it can also interact with the Java code already in the application/on the server.

Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor.

Quercus focuses on the integration of PHP and Java and allows PHP to access things like Java's JMS, EJB and SOA Frameworks. It works by compiling the PHP scripts into Java and run on top of the Quercus software as a native application.

Justin Laing from the MerchantOS group submitted a link to a Facebook tutorial that shows hos to get connected to one of the most popular social networking applications via PHP.

I will cover the basics of using the Facebook PHP library and how to get your application started, including: installing the Facebook Developer application, downloading The Facebook PHP client library, creating your application, Hello Facebook! Example, FBML - Facebook Markup Language and using the Facebook API.

He starts with his download of the API, including the creation of the application profile and of an API key you'll use to interact with Facebook's API. The simple "Hello" script is next - one that echos out a "Hello [username]! Welcome to my first application!" message to the page's viewers. To help customize the page, he also shows how to make the page "addable" for other users versus just there on login.

Justin Laing from the MerchantOS group submitted a link to a Facebook tutorial that shows hos to get connected to one of the most popular social networking applications via PHP.

I will cover the basics of using the Facebook PHP library and how to get your application started, including: installing the Facebook Developer application, downloading The Facebook PHP client library, creating your application, Hello Facebook! Example, FBML - Facebook Markup Language and using the Facebook API.

He starts with his download of the API, including the creation of the application profile and of an API key you'll use to interact with Facebook's API. The simple "Hello" script is next - one that echos out a "Hello [username]! Welcome to my first application!" message to the page's viewers. To help customize the page, he also shows how to make the page "addable" for other users versus just there on login.

With a continuation of their previous article, WebReference has posted part two of their "How to Interact with Web Forms" series - an excerpt from the PHP Phrasebook (Sams).

They build on the previous code, showing how to:

• preselect items from a multiple select list,
• process image submit buttons
• checking the mandatory fields
• checking the values of select lists

They wrap it all up with two handy concepts - how to write out your data to a form and send it off in email form to the location of your choosing and working with the files uploaded via a form.

With a continuation of their previous article, WebReference has posted part two of their "How to Interact with Web Forms" series - an excerpt from the PHP Phrasebook (Sams).

They build on the previous code, showing how to:

• preselect items from a multiple select list,
• process image submit buttons
• checking the mandatory fields
• checking the values of select lists

They wrap it all up with two handy concepts - how to write out your data to a form and send it off in email form to the location of your choosing and working with the files uploaded via a form.

On WebReference.com today, there's this new tutorial with an introduction to getting PHP to interact with web forms.

HTML forms are one of the key ingredients of any dynamic website because they can enable the users of a site to interact with it. Otherwise, websites are more or less static:They may be driven by a database and, therefore, regularly changing, but they look the same for each and every visitor. HTML forms can change that; therefore, using data from forms from within PHP is very important.

They give examples of how to send data back to a script from a form, reading that data (using superglobals), and what data will be returned from each form element type. From there, they get into specifics like dealing with magic quotes and saving the form data into a cookie...