The CodeIgniter blog has posted another community spotlight by one of its members - this time it's Mathew Davies (author of the Redux Auth library) talking about hashing.

He talks about how several topics are used in his Redux library including hashing, salts, a method for getting/resetting a forgotten password and how to use database sessions to manage users logged in.

The Redux Authentication System is a "great CodeIgniter Auth library. It's light, easy to use and fully featured. It's a great choice for your new or existing project due to the power it gives to the developer".

Matthew Weier O'Phinney recently posted about a method he's come up with for migrating your object-oriented libraries (including frameworks) over to the upcoming PHP 5.3 version of the language.

With PHP 5.3 coming up on the horizon, I'm of course looking forward to using namespaces.

He gives an example of how useful these namespaces can be for you and your code, but points out one failing point - trying to define classes in a namespace that are named the same as a built-in keyword for PHP. There's already been a suggestion to add a captial "I" in front of the class name to prevent this collision.

There's also the problem of throwing custom exceptions - unless you use the namespace properly your script will just throw a default exception.

Padraic Brady has posted about a new inclusion that Google has announced will be included in the authentication methods for their APIs - OAuth.

The Google Data API support comes with a few gotchas. Its documentation show a clear preference for using GET instead of POST, though the Google OAuth server does appear to natively support POST requests for everything with the exception that it has a small bug which interprets an empty POST request body as a sort of phantom empty parameter.

He notes that the library he's been working on (and submitted to both the Zend Framework and PEAR) it up to the 0.0.3 release including functionality marked as beta for the Consumer portion.

Padraic Brady has posted about another OAuth library that he's started up, one that's ready to be integrated with the Zend Framework reborn as a Zend_OAuth component (see his proposal code).

I've spent some time over the last week, and I have completed an initial pass at writing an OAuth Consumer in PHP5. I'm biased, but it's a nice chunk of code capable of fairly routine POST based OAuth requests using either an Authorized header, or a raw url encoded POST request body. My main remaining task is final cleanup, included refactoring, rolling my final set of acceptance tests into PHPUnit from SimpleTest, and adding support for HTTP GET, RSA, and a storage API so tokens can be saved in the background rather than outside the API.

Example code is included showing how to connect to the ma.gnolia bookmarking service and grabbing the response body from the request. He has a few more things to finish up before it's ready to go (backend storage, reworking the handling of web service API interaction, etc).

The ThinkPHP blog points out a milestone for one of the libraries that help set PHP on its current course - PHPLIB (from Kris Koehntopp).

This great collection of classes was in my eyes the first real useful library which delivered the solution to most of the basic / standard problems in PHP based software projects. [...] The easy implementation of DB-abstraction, template engine, authentication, permissions, session management and others made it easy to handle these problems in a standardized way. The strict object oriented code gave the developer the necessary flexibility to customize and extend the code where he/she needs it.

This year is (about) the ten year mark for the existence of the language and several commentors on the post remember the "good ole days" of PHP3 sessions, permissions and even the first version of Zend's website.

If you're using the subversion checkouts of the Zend Framework, Matthew Weier O'Phinney recommends you update your checked out copy to bring it up to sync with the reorganization they've just finished.

We just completed a reorganization of our subversion repository. The reorganization was necessary due to changes we are introducting both in our proposal system as well as project architecture. Specifically, we are introducing a new library, our 'Extras' library, which will contain contributions that are not officially supported by Zend but which still require successful completion of our proposal process. Additionally, we are merging our Laboratory repository.

This page on the Zend Framework website gives the new structure along with a list of key changes and an example of how to switch our your current checkout with this new version.

Harry Roberts has a quick post to his blog today showing a method he's come up with to handle PHP arrays from inside of SQL statements (a port of the JsonSQL library to PHP).

Trent Richardson created a very small and simple JsonSQL library for JavaScript which allows you to run an extremely limited subset of SQL against a Json array/object. I quickly ported it over to PHP 5 and it works like a charm, although the syntax for the WHERE clause isn't exactly the same but the rest ported across properly.

He's included some sample source code of it in action - selecting information out of an array of user information, once changing their order and the other grabbing a username. Complete source for the library is included too.

In his keynote this morning Andi Gutmans announced some other big news (see here for the other announcement) at the php|tek conference currently being held in Chicago - that Zend and the Dojo framework were teaming up to provide an "out-of-the-box" Ajax solution included with the Zend Framework.

Several members of the community have already blogged about it including:

• Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Andi himself
• Wolfram Kriesing
• this FAQ from the Zend Developer Zone detailing the partnership

So far, all of the comments have been good and the partnership has been well received. Matthew included in hist post a few of the places they're already planning on "ajaxing" in the Zend Framework (including the forms and the JSON-RPC server).

Tony Freixas continues his introductory look at "booting" a PHP script with part two of his series (here's part one) looking at using libraries.

In the good old days, if you wanted to create re-usable code, you would create a library of related functions or objects. Now, the excitement is all around frameworks. Everyone has one. What is the difference between the two?

He compares a library and a framework, pointing out key differences like how they fit with the application (controlled by or controlling) and dependencies they require. He rounds out his boot sequence, adding a few new parts to the structure of his example application.

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.