In this post to his site Marc Morera talks about traits, namespaces and how they fit together (or don't).

Some projects using PHP 5.4 are actually using Traits. If you don’t know yet what a trait is, there are some interesting links for you. [...] This post is about the usage of "use statements" in Traits.

He starts with an overall picture of what he's trying to accomplish in a contribution to an open source project (with a word of caution). He talks about how you can make traits and classes more "friendly" with a refactoring example of his initial code snippet. In the end, though, he recommends basically avoiding namespaces if possible in traits, reducing headaches that could be caused either by conflicts or missing dependencies.

For those that weren't able to attend this year's PHP South Coast conference (in Portsmouth, UK) Matthew Setter has posted a wrap up of some of his experiences there and what the conference was like.

I’m on the train heading to Stansted airport, after what I can only describe as a brilliant weekend in Portsmouth, attending the inaugural PHP South Coast, conference. I’ve not been to Portsmouth for 10 years, but the wait was well worth it.

He talks about the venue where the conference was held and some of the talks that were given during the day long event. There were two tracks so, unfortunately, he wasn't able to attend all of the talks but he does provide summaries for those he was able to attend. He also spotlights the opening keynote from Cal Evans about the importance of community and how it relates to your career. He ends the post talking about something he found quite valuable: meeting people, both those he knew from online and others just attending the event.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new tutorial showing you some of the PHP functions that you can use to interact with the network surrounding (and even vaguely related to) your application.

PHP has a great many tools for interacting with a network and also with the Internet. In this article, I examine some of those tools and functions to show how exactly you can use them to make your scripts more useful in a network environment. Click here to download the accompanying source code.

They show how to use fopen to access remote sites, gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr for DNS resolution, getprotobynumber to check the port number for a TCP/IP type and quite a few more. This also includes a brief look at the PEAR Net_Whois package. You can download the examples if you'd like to just jump into the code.

Christoph Dorn has a new post about using his recently released FirePHP Companion to get a better perspective on how your application works with its cache (information like the location of the cache file).

I thought I would rework the example I included in my php|architect article. You will see how much easier it now is to accomplish the same, and with much less code, using FirePHP Companion instead of the existing FirePHP extension.

In his example he has a site with an RSS feed that's cached and compares the old way of doing things to the simpler, easier way to use the features the Companion offers to record the process the script takes to build the feed and pushes the results back out at the end of the script.

A screencast is included in the post to show you how his example PHP code and the plugin all fit together.

In a new article to the PHP Zone (part of the DZone.com site) today Mihai Corlan has written up an introduction to the architecture of the interactions that happen between PHP and Flex applications.

When I did my first web project using Flex, boy oh boy, it was quite a switch! The clean separation between the client and the server, (the business logic on the client side in addition to business logic on the server side), client-side technology that is compiled instead of interpreted, two languages on the client, all these required a different mind-set from traditional web development. [...] I want to share with you some of the things that are specific to Flex in relation to PHP. And I want to show you how common tasks for building HTML/PHP applications are done with Flex and PHP.

He talks about the SOA architecture model that the Flex/PHP interaction follows (connecting to services) and illustrates a basic Flex client to PHP server request/response pattern for a simple application. He even includes a sample illustration of an AIR application's interaction with a backend PHP server.

On the Quality Assurance in PHP Projects site, Mike Lively has written up a few thoughts on how developers and development environments should work with testing databases as resources (case study).

Proper interaction with relational databases is incredibly important in most pieces of software. The importance of this interaction is underscored by the fact that many software architectures have at least one entire layer or system devoted to data persistence and data loading. When dealing with critical data in enterprise level applications it becomes even more important to make sure your data is being stored and retrieved correctly.

He talks about a case study on the topic (still in development) that will talk about testing techniques, functionality and how to create the tests needed to ensure your development environment can correctly use the database resource via unit tests and functional tests.

DevShed wraps up yet another in their design pattern series of articles today with this new tutorial - the final part in their look at using Mediator classes in PHP5.

At this stage I believe that implementing the mediator pattern with PHP 5 should be a pretty painless process to you, but if the examples that I showed you in the first article weren't enough to help you completely grasp this pattern, over the course of this last tutorial I'm going to expand the original mediator class that you learned previously. The expansion will make it capable of maintaining three classes in perfect synchronization.

They start off with the base Mediator class they developed in previous parts of the series and expand it out some more with the functionality needed to keep three (not just two) objects synchronized. To help out, they build some more file handling classes, ones that work with the three different types - numeric, alpha, and alphanumeric content.

DevShed wraps up yet another in their design pattern series of articles today with this new tutorial - the final part in their look at using Mediator classes in PHP5.

At this stage I believe that implementing the mediator pattern with PHP 5 should be a pretty painless process to you, but if the examples that I showed you in the first article weren't enough to help you completely grasp this pattern, over the course of this last tutorial I'm going to expand the original mediator class that you learned previously. The expansion will make it capable of maintaining three classes in perfect synchronization.

They start off with the base Mediator class they developed in previous parts of the series and expand it out some more with the functionality needed to keep three (not just two) objects synchronized. To help out, they build some more file handling classes, ones that work with the three different types - numeric, alpha, and alphanumeric content.

On CodeSnipers today, there's a new post looking at two aspects of getting Ruby on Rails to cooperate nicely with PHP, specifically in dealing with sessions and the structure/layout of the files that make up the site.

Each of the topics is covered in a paragraph detailing what things look like for either side and a possible solution for cross-communication.

On CodeSnipers today, there's a new post looking at two aspects of getting Ruby on Rails to cooperate nicely with PHP, specifically in dealing with sessions and the structure/layout of the files that make up the site.

Each of the topics is covered in a paragraph detailing what things look like for either side and a possible solution for cross-communication.