On the PHP/Cloudcast site today they've released another screencast showing you how to integrate your application with Stripe, the popular (and programmer friendly) payment gateway for your applications. This is the third part of their series.

In this, the third episode of PHP Cloud Development Casts, we go through how to integrate Stripe Webhooks in to our PHP applications. We extend the PHP Kohana application we created in episode 2 and show how simple it is to create a webhook and to receive the information and store it in a MySQL database.

Through the use of Stripe's webhooks, you can have a transaction call back to your application on a specified URL and perform further actions. In his example, he shows how to make the request, handling the "payment success" event. He includes all of the code (controller, view, etc) that you'll need to plug into Kohana to make it all work.

On MaltBlue.com today Matt has a new article posted describing why he thinks Kohana is a good alternative to the Zend Framework in some projects.

recently I’ve been doing a lot of research in to some of the best PHP frameworks and codebases, including Symfony 1 & Symfony 2, Drupal, CakePHP and Kohana for a technical documentation project that I’ve been working on. [...] Well, to say the least, I was really surprised at just how simple, lightweight and easy Kohana is to use. Wow, what a true breath of fresh air it is after using Zend Framework for so long now.

He talks some about the things he likes about the framework (including a well-structured configuration file and its overall speed) and includes a simple "getting started" tutorial. He shows you how to make a simple application that includes database support, caching and the MVC stack to display a list of users.

In the Kohana framework, you can get an inside look at the discussion inside a framework community regarding their adherence to the PSR-1 & PSR-2 standards (hint: they're not in favor).

A commentor asks the question "Will Kohana eventually follow the following guidelines?" and is immediately given the simple response of "no". Other comments reinforce this by pointing out some of the differences in the standards that the framwork follows and what the PSR standards outline.

Other posters make comments about the PHP-FIG group themselves, some of the things outlined in the standards and some of their own personal preferences when it comes to the the standards of their own code. You can find more information on the standards here: PSR-1 and PSR-2.

Juan Treminio has started up series of posts over on his blog looking at the Kohana framework and guiding you through the creation of a sample application with it (in-depth).

The Kohana Framework started off as a fork of the very popular CodeIgniter Framework. During the KO 2.x versions, it stayed fairly similar to how CodeIgniter functioned, and a developer could easily jump from one to the other and feel very familiar. With the introduction of the Kohana 3.x version, this all changed, as Kohana was completely rewritten from the ground up. Now, unless you’re a seasoned PHP developer, you may have difficulty making the jump from other frameworks in Kohana. I have written this tutorial to be your step-by-step guide into the world of Kohana

So far, he's posted three parts of the series:

• Initial setup and configuration
• Bootstrapping the application
• Controller/MVVM/KOstache

Keep an eye on his blog for more posts in this great series!

On the AjaxRay site today there's a new review of an introductory book from Packt Publishing about unofficial wiki is a BIG try to help in this issue. Besides, recently Packt has published the first book on Kohana “Kohana 3.0 Beginner’s Guide“. Jason D. Straughan wrote this book for Kohana version 3.x.

The review includes an overall assessment of the book, a detailed description of how the chapters are laid out and some of the complaints he had about the book's contents - a lack of code examples in some places, demos/screenshots pointing out what the framework can really do and the inclusion of some deprecated methods.

Overall, the book is well organized, focused and will be helpful on it’s purpose. I felt it’s capable to teach Kohana to a new guy, in a smooth way. Yes, there have some printing mistakes, old (because they are changed in new version) function use and some other minor issues, but seems ignorable to me. I’d recommend it for Kohana beginners.

On his blog today Kowser introduces you to Kohana, an easy to use, lightweight PHP HMVC framework that can help you get applications up and running quickly. In his tutorial he walks you through the creation of a simple application - a typical blog.

Kohana is the framework I liked best among other PHP framework. Its an easy one also . To me it is organized, highly object oriented, having clear separation of model, view & controller. Autoloading of classes is nice feature here also. Here is the tutorial I prepared. [...] Probably you have downloaded the zip file from here.

He walks you through the initial setup and configuration first then jumps right into the code with an "Article" controller, a view to match and a simple model to hook into a "kohana_blog" table (creation SQL provided). Using this setup, he shows how to get a list of the current articles and update current ones/add new ones via a basic form.

Matthew Wells has a new post that looks at combining Kohana and Gearman to create a system to handle large data processing without slowing down the rest of the application.

A commonly identified bottleneck arises when dealing with large, 'expensive' data. This is commonly seen when an application posts a large volume of well structured data to the API (that some process must be carried out upon), before some form of structured receipt is then returned as a request response. [...] Analysing such a request tends to show high PHP CPU usage with lower database consumption. [...] The structured nature of data exchanged via an API means that we can, relatively simply and reliably, divide the submitted data and process it simultaneously with the help of a great tool called Gearman.

He walks you through the entire process including his initial thoughts on what the system should be and how it should behave when the requests are made. He shares the code he used to implement the system - a simple worker that processes part of the request and returns the results. The command-line calls to run the worker manually for testing are also included.

Shameer Chamal has a quick tutorial posted to his blog today showing how you can create a basic ajax validation feature for your Kohana-based web application.

If you are new to Kohana framework, implementing validation will be an adventure, especially if you are looking for ajax validation. In this article I will present a simple way to implement some necessary validations using ajax in a sign up form.

He starts with a simple view containing the login form and including a few extra files (like the Javascript helper for the validation). Next he creates the user model that will do the backend check to see if the user already exists. Finally the controller and Javascript are created to bring all the pieces together. The Javascript uses the jQuery framework to make things a bit more convenient and runs a check against the backend for the given username with the response returned as a JSON message.

On the Query7.com blog today Logan shows you how to create a simple wiki with the help of the Kohana framework, a HMVC PHP5 framework that includes several tools (including UTF-8 suport and a cascading filesystem) to make a developer's life easier.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a simple wiki using the PHP framework Kohana version 3.1. Several years ago Siddharta Govindaraj created a screencast demonstrating how to create a wiki using Django, this is essentially the Kohana version of that. It covers using Kohana’s Routing, ORM and MVC systems. Full source code of the application is available on github.

You'll need to be at least a bit familiar with the framework to follow along, but he takes it step-by-step to be sure things are easy to follow. He shows the configuration changes you'll need to make to the boostrap and the database configuration. He shows you the creation of a model and the SQL to match as well as the routing change for the new addition. Views are next on the list, then the controller - all with full code included.

On StackOverflow a question was asked about how to tweak and tune the performance of a Kohana-powered website. The result was a detailed answer from Pascal Martin that can be applied to just about any kind of web application out there, not just ones written in PHP.

Here are some points that come to my mind when talking about performances, scalability, PHP, ...First of all, there are many aspects/questions that are to consider : configuration of the server (both PHP, MySQL, and system) ; you might get more help about that on serverfault, I suppose, PHP code, database queries, using or not your webserver? Can you use any kind of caching mechanism ? Or do you need always more that up to date data on the website ?

He goes on to give tips about using a reverse proxy (like Varnish), using an opcode cache, caching data as well, profiling and optimizing SQL queries. He finishes it off with a more specific look at Kohana and how you can use some of its built in tools to accomplish these same goals.