The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their latest episode - an interview with Kevin Schroeder of Zend Technologies.

Cal's "three questions" center less around his work at Zend and more about his work with the language:

• How did you come into programming in PHP?
• Which part of PHP programming surprised you the most (as a programmer who didn't start with PHP)?
• What one aspect of PHP programming do you enjoy the most?

As always you can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribe to the feed.

On the Zend Developer Zone today Cal Evans has posted his review of a book by Kevin Schroeder called "You Want to Do What with PHP?", a look at some of the less commonly used PHP functionality in action.

You Want to Do What with PHP?" isn't your usual PHP book. I am guessing that even advanced PHP developers don't have a book like this on their shelves as I've never read one that covers quite this variety of material. Kevin talks about a lot of topics that we politely call "Edge Cases" for PHP developers. [...] This book guides you through building things like your own stream handler, asynchronous operations and my personal favorite, writing Daemons in PHP.

Cal covers both the good and the bad about the book. Among the things lacking are no real "ease into it" introduction and a debugging chapter that feels like an ad for Zend Studio. On the good side, the book provides a enterprise-level developer with a whole new toolset they might not have tried out before.

On his blog today Kevin Schroeder has the latest in a series of excerpts from his book "You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?" - a section of the chapter on daemons.

PHP is a language generally not suited for running daemons. That said, PHP can do it, and in certain circumstances does it sufficiently for the job. In this chapter we look at some of the things you need to know about to build a PHP-based daemon. This excerpt doesn't feature any code, but it does set the foundation for why I think PHP is fine for daemons in some circumstances.

The excerpt is mainly the first part of the chapter that just introduces the idea of daemons including some of the right and wrong uses, using the right tool for the job and how using PHP for a daemon can help with needs in a place where PHP might already be a norm.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new post from Cal Evans about an article from the minds of Ryan Stewart (Adobe) and Kevin Schroeder (Zend) about the powerful combination of Flex and PHP.

These two have gotten together again to show how you can use Flex (Flash, ActionScript, AIR, you know the drill) and Zend Framework (Winner of a BOSSie) Their new article "Flex and PHP" from the most recent issue of Flash & Flex magazine, talks about using the same controllers and actions for returning both HTML and JSON. This concept of programming for multiple destinations is important in a web where your API may be more important than your HTML.

You can get the full article as a PDF from the DevZone site. It's an extended tutorial on getting Flex and PHP to work together via multiple formats (similar to what Kevin presented on his blog recently.

Kevin Schroeder has the latest excerpt from his book posted ("You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?") with a focus on the SPL - Standard PHP Library. He specifically takes a quick look at Iterators.

If you are doing any data processing whatsoever you are using arrays. And most likely you are doing database queries, iterating over the results and doing your algorithm-ing. But what if you have additional functionality that you need to have integrated with your data. You could go the traditional route and copy and paste half your application around or you could build, what we like to call structured applications. SPL allows you to do that.

In the excerpt he mentions the methods that come built in to Iterators like rewind, current and valid. There's also some sample code showing a custom iterator that works with some user data to output the information set in the constructor. You can find out more about this chapter and the rest in Kevin's book.

Kevin Schroeder has another new post to his blog today with an excerpt from his "You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?" book. This new post is a section from the fourth chapter looking at stream handling.

Communication is key to building applications now and for the future. While it is not something that I think that everyone should do, I have not seem many applications that make good use of streams in PHP. Streams can be immensely useful in the right situations, but a lot of developers are not really aware of how streams can be used. [...] While I don't think you will end up basing your application around streams it is a really good idea to know how streams work.

The sample code (and description) talk about changing the properties of a stream on the fly. He shows how, with a fgets loop checking the input, he can catch a command from the already running script and change the compression setting on the currently open stream. The compression changes the stream's data from plain text to a binary format as handled by the streams functionality.

In a new post to his blog Kevin Schroeder talks about a book he's written about some of the stranger things you can do with PHP - You want to do WHAT with PHP?.

You will not find another book on the market like it. Mostly because other PHP authors are not as crazy as I am. [...] In short, if you want a book that goes beyond the practical for the purpose of expanding your mind, this is the book for you. It is not meant to be a "cookbook", pre se. It is meant to, as Einstein put it, stretch your mind so that it does not return to its original shape.

You can see the table of contents [pdf] and a sample chapter [pdf] about working with daemons. Other topics covered include networking/sockets, streams, character encoding, debugging, profiling and good development practices. You can pick up your copy on the MC Press site and have it shipped in early September 2010.