In a new post to the CatsWhoCode.com blog Jean-Babtiste Jung walks you through the creation of a simple monitoring script written using just PHP that can tell you if your web site is up and responsive.

In order to make sure that your website is always available to the public, you have to monitor it. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can easily create a monitoring script that will check your website availability and send an email or sms alert to you if it isn't.

They have a snippet of code (about 15 lines long) with a function you can call to check a remote host's connection and check the returned data for a certain string. This can not only ensure that your site is responsive but also that it's not responding incorrectly. You could even use this to hit a certain monitoring page of your site to check for certain things (like database connection problems).

In a new post to his blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney takes a look at a pretty cool feature of the Zend Server tool - the ability to directly monitor your Zend Framework applications.

When keeping tabs on your ZF applications, it's often difficult to separate application errors from general PHP errors, and if you aggregate them in the same location as your web server errors, this can become more difficult still. [...] Zend Server's Monitor extension has some capabilities for providing more context, and does much of this by default: request and environment settings available when the error was logged, the function name and arguments provided, and a full backtrace are available for you to inspect.

You can also trigger custom events via the extension's API and, to make it even easier, they've created a new writer for Zend_Log - Zend_Log_Writer_ZendMonitor. He includes a bit of sample code showing you how to create an instance of the component and log a sample citical message.

Lars Strojny has posted a leaflet to his blog looking at some of the PHP development practices that should be encouraged in 2009. The list includes:

• Developments to object-oriented code practices
• Using a VCS
• Continuous deployment
• More code testing
• More use of rapid application development tools
• Monitoring of production systems
• Bytecode caching
• and more...

These are just some suggestions of things to look towards including the best if them all - "love your code".

Johannes Schluter has posted about an interesting little project he's worked up to find his own path to usefulness in Twitter - a PHP extension that tweets bugs to his account.

The other thing I see there are people telling me what errors in their applications they are currently fixing. I can't see why that's interesting. But as people seem to be interested I found out that I have stuff to say, too, or better my PHP has, since sometimes I have errors there, too. But well, I'm lazy so I don't want to "twitter" them myself.

His "little PHP extension" that automatically sends the reported error out to the designated account. Of course, it tends to slow things down (connection to a remote machine and all) but it could be useful for sending an SMS is something pops up.

On the PHPRiot.com site today there's a new tutorial posted covering an alternate method for uploading files - using Ajax to help monitor the progress of the file upload.

In this article we will develop a solution that will allow users to upload a file from their computer using HTML forms. We will then determine the progress of the upload while it is in progress using Ajax, and display the status to the user.

They chose the prototype library and the APC extension for PHP to make their code work. The basic idea is, through a feature of APC, the script can receive a progress measurement back from the server. This is handed off to the Javascript (Ajax) functionality that then updates the progress meter to reflect the change.

On the IBM developerWorks website there's a new tutorial (part 2 of the series, here's part 1) about creating the DB2 Health Monitor sample app:

DB2 9 pureXML technology allows businesses to improve data integrity and avoid legacy data lock-in. It enables application developers to utilize the best storage medium for the task and eliminate the middle-tier application logic previously required to take advantage of Web services.

PHP's role in the creation is to generate the XML that the system needs to communicate between the application and the database.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Bjorn Schotte points out a PHP extension that has the potential to be very useful for developers wanting to monitor the current usage of the parts of their scripts - mod_top.

mod_top is a PHP extension that is able to monitor PHP 4.4.x and PHP 5.x based applications. Sounds cool. Unfortunately it seems there's no source available, but the FAQ says that mod_top is free.

Check out some of the screenshots to get an idea of what the output looks like. There's three simple steps to getting it up and running - installing the Lamp1701 libraries, installing the PHP Probe extension and, of course, running the software. Check out the project's page for more information including the downloads.

As mentioned on dzone.com, there's an extension for Firefox, FirePHP, that allows you to get a bit more info on what your PHP scripts are up to.

FirePHP allows you to take a deeper look at all the work your PHP code does to generate that page you are currently looking at in your Firefox browser.

Just install the FirePHP Firefox extension, PHP PEAR package and add a few lines of code to your PHP application to get started. You will see a "FirePHP" tab in your Firebug extension to bring your PHP backend logic to your fingertips!

You can check out screenshots of it in action, a demo of its use, and of course, download the latest version all from their site. It works either as a separate window or attached in your browser and, based on an XML capabilities file, works with your application to provide details about your scripts.

Since the recent release of a new tool from Yahoo! - Yahoo! Pipes - developers have been working with it and creating their own "pipes" of functionality, already exploring the boundaries of the application. Clay Loveless is one PHP developer that has already created his own pipe to monitor feeds from several PHP extensions.

The first pipe I've created and published is the PHP Extension Monitor. It's an aggregated feed that pulls in release information on several cool extensions that aren't announced in the PECL feed, such as Suhosin, XCache and DBXML.

Check out his pipe here or you can go create your own by logging in with a Yahoo! ID here.

Aide (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) is described as "a free replacement for Tripwire. It does the same things as the semi-free Tripwire and more." So, of course, one of the useful things that it does is output logs to help you keep track of what's happening on your system. In this new post on the PHP-Tools blog, they talk about the parsing of these same logs - with a little help from PHP.

Since we started hosting our sites on our own server we had some nasty cracker-attacks. To at least have a chance recognizing whether the system had been compromised we started to use aide some time ago. Aide keeps track of changes in the filesystem and provides us with a human-readable report once a day.

They note, though, that sometimes it's a valid change and not a security issue, so they employed the Util_AideAnalyzer package to help parse the logs into something useful. They give an example of what this looks like, including variations getting more specific data on certain aspects. They also point you in the right direction to get the Util_AideAnalyzer package installed on your system.