Andy Frey dropped us a line to tell us about a method he's come up with to make a remoting interface between Javascript and PHP5.

This is a demonstration of a very fast and easy way to build AJAX-type applications where communications between JavaScript on the client side and PHP5 on the server side is ideal. This library makes development of such systems fast and very simple.

In his example he shows how to create the PHP and Javascript functions that let the service talk back and forth. He defines a simple "Hello World" style application to show how it would be structured. He also includes a bit of more complex that has other functionality - getting a value out of an array and returning a property/private variable from the backend class.

Via Terry Chay's blog:

Joakim has let us know about the recent updates that have been made to the WebGrind web-based frontend for XDebug.

Webgrind, the web frontend to Xdebug has been updated to version 0.7 with a few new features like: Support for directly loading a report through hash in url, Visual breakdowns of internal, class and procedural functions and calls to include/require and Version checking.

This new version (0.7) can be downloaded directly from its Google Code page.

In an effort to breathe as much life into an old bit of software he was having to update, Harry Roberts worked up a list of things that he sees can make things a bit more "programmer friendly" when it comes to using classes, methods and interfaces in your code.

His list of four is:

• Doc Comments
• Flexible Parameters
• Use method Entry contracts
• Be Stateful and Refactor

The "Doc Comments" is pretty obvious, but some of the others need a bit more explaining. Being flexible with your parameters is more about requiring the least from a developer, "entry contracts" being the restrictions to let the developer know what you're expecting and refactoring commonly used functionality into a easy, single point of contact.

In this new post to the PHP 10.0 blog today, Stas talks about duck typing, a method that lets the code decide the functionality to use rather than a direct relation to a parent.

Well, if you are into duck typing style of programming, it may be interesting for you to have an object that implements certain set of functions, but not necessary declares it at class definition. Languages like Smalltalk do it all day along, so why PHP couldn't?

His example defines an interface Cow and a class MooingGrassEater and a function, CowConsumer, that does the work. A classname is passed in and an instance of that class is checked with "implements" rather than "instanceof" to see if it uses the Cow interface. He points out a place where PHP itself uses something similar in user defined streams.

On the Microsoft adCenter website, Walter Poupore has made a few posts to his blog about integrating PHP with various parts of the adCenter technology. Topics include:

• How to Check the Status of an Ad Group in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Keywords in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ads in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ad Groups in PHP (V5)

Check out his blog listing for more.

On his blog, Andreas Gohr has posted about various charting applications on the web (in his search for a way to show off the stats for DokuWiki) and looking specifically at the Google Charts.

Because such [popularity] data is much better to comprehend when accompanied by some nice graphs, I had a look at the Google Chart API today.

He also mentions three wrapper libraries that help your apps interface with the Charts API. Of course, he also includes some graphs of the popularity stats showing things like web server usage and PHP versions.

The PHPBuilder.com site has a new tutorial showing you how to interface PHP with Adobe's Flex functionality and to use remoting to let them "talk".

They dive right in, throwing download links at you and working through setup steps to get your environment up and running. With that out of the way, they show how to get the demo set up that uses their weborb framework.

The end result of the article is a simple Flex/PHP application that pulls information from the database and pushes it into a datagraid for display.

Lukas Smith is "pre-announcing" the effort he and several other core PHP developers have put together to try and help the PHP language become that much more solid - TestFest.

I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

They're also looking for developers to help with the web interface they'll need (the "simple back-end" that the moderators can use to handle the incoming test submissions). Complete information about the event can be found on its wiki page.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Andreas Uhsemann has posted about a project that he and fellow Mayflower Barcampers came up with that they thought could be useful (and interesting) to work on - a PHP extension to interface with the Skype communication tool.

At the Mayflower Barcamp a few weeks ago we had a very interesting and promising project: Develop a PHP extension for communication with Skype. Actually this project was a merge between two projects: One was to "develop a PHP extension" - five out of six project members never had written any PHP extension or did any PHP core development before. The other project was the Skype extension, with the goal to have a new PHP function that could send a chat message to a given Skype profile.

As they worked on it, they realized that it was really D-Bus (the message bus system) they needed to interface with, not Skype directly. They include some of the code they used to make the connection - creating the message, setting a few parameters and "send and block" the message out to the D-Bus connection waiting. They've even put the code up on a public CVS repository (on thinkforge.org) if you'd like to download and play with it yourself.