On the Android Hive there's a recent tutorial posted showing you how to use Google Cloud Messaging and PHP+MySQL to do push notifications on an Android phone.

As per google's documentation "Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM) is a service that helps developers send data from servers to their Android applications on Android devices". Using this service you can send data to your application whenever new data is available instead of making requests to server in timely fashion. Integrating GCM in your android application enhances user experience and saves lot of battery power.

You can either follow along with the tutorial via the screencast (and download the code) or you can read through the text version, complete with code snippets, SQL and screenshots to help you along the way. The code for the Android side is included as well.

In a recent post from the AppBackr blog they share a solution they've found for running unit tests automatically for lazy coders using a combination of PHPUnit, Watchr and Growl notifications (OS X-only, obviously).

Now you could run [your] tests manually after each change by typing 'phpunit ', but we were looking for something a little more comfortable. We want to decrease the transactional cost of running the tests as much as possible to make the lives of our engineers more pleasant. Making testing easy is the only way the engineers will run the tests frequently.

Instead they opted for Watchr, a tool that keeps an eye on a list of files looking for a change. When one happens, a process is fired off - in this case a PHPUnit run. To make it even easier to see feedback, they integrated it with Growl to show pass or fail results. He includes the source for his Watchr script to help you get started.

In a new post Gonzalo Ayuso about a system he's developed to create real-time notifications for PHP applications using a mix of PHP and javascript (jQuery).

Real time communications are cool, isn't it? Something impossible to do five years ago now (or almost impossible) is already available. Nowadays we have two possible solutions. WebSockets and Comet. [...] I prefer to use comet (at least now). It's not as good as websockets but pretty straightforward ant it works (even on IE). Now I'm going to explain a little script that I've got to perform a comet communications, made with PHP.

His little sample application detects when a user has clicked on a link by subscribing to an event and using the javascript callback to send the message of a click event and wait for a response. You can find the complete code for the example over on github.

In a new post to his blog Giulio Pons talks about how to send push notifications to an iPhone using the pushme.to application installed on the user's phone.

Push service is a technology that allows you to send alerts/notifications to a mobile device. Blackberry has its own push service, iPhone has its own, and also Android devices has their own push services. [...] I want to send push to my iPhone, but I'm not able to develop an iPhone application that receive push alerts, and I don't want to send only email alerts.

You set up the application on your phone and make a widget on their site for your application to use. Included in the post is also the PHP you can use to connect to the pushme.to service (using a curl POST request to send form encoded info to their servers).

Phil Sturgeon has posted a fun little script CodeIgniter users can use to connect their application with Prowl.

Most web-applications currently use automated e-mail's to let an administrator know someting is going on and some applications use Twitter. Why not use iPhone Push Notifications to get an alert to you immediately without having to check a thing?

He threw together a quick library that only requires a username, password and application name to set the messages. You can download the sample library directly from Github

On NETTUTS.com a recent tutorial has been posted about the integration of your PHP application with PayPal's Instant Payment Notification system.

Today we are going to combine Paypal with PHP to allow for the easy processing of payments on your website.

You'll need a Premier PayPal Account to get it all working as well as already have a server with a working PHP installation (there's no setup and install for that in this tutorial). There's ten different steps in the process and screenshots and code are provided the whole way:

• Creating a PayPal Account
• Enable IPN
• Building a Simple HTML Page
• Building a PayPal Button
• Writing ipn.php
• Creating the Database
• Account Creation
• Emailing the Login Credentials
• Invalid Payment Email
• User Login

Daniel Cousineau has a new post today that looks at his process for getting a Growl-like messaging system up and running in Ubuntu by combining Mumbles and PHP (via a DBus API).

I decided the best easiest route is to access the internal DBus API, however the forums and other resources on the Mumbles site'¦ well... just plain suck. And by suck I mean tell you that something exists and'¦ thaaats about it.

What he did find, thanks to Google, was a tool called D-Feet to help with debugging and a DBus extension for PHP that could add the needed support into his PHP installation. Following a bit of hacking and lots of testing, he was mostly successful. The only side effect is an Exception where the extension cannot correctly catch the Notify signal.

Raphael Stolt, with some time on his hands, set up a local copy of Xinc, the "shiny new Continuous Integration(CI) server" as hosted on the Google code site and spent some time working with it:

Since then the idea of building a Growl publisher plugin for Xinc was traveling my mind repeatedly, so the following post will break this circle and show a possible approach to build such a plugin, which can be used to notify the build result for continuously integrated projects and thereby provide an on-point/immediate feedback.

He includes the plugin class (ready for cut&paste) as well as the task definition and how to hook it all in to the Xinc build system. There's also a little example of it in action - a happy/sad indicator showing if the build failed or was a success, right there on the desktop.

Christopher Jones has posted an announcement about the latest release of the PECL OCI8 package (version 1.3.2 Beta) hitting the streets:

I've released PECL OCI8 1.3.2 Beta - the latest release of PHP's OCI8 extension with support for Connection Pooling and Fast Application Notification. The release is based on the current PHP 5.3 development branch.

He notes another change in this release - a "session release" bit of functionality persistent connections will do when nothing is referencing them anymore, mking them work a bit more like normal connections. Issues that could be caused by this can be corrected with a new setting (oci8.old_oci_close_semantics) in your php.ini.

According to this forum post on the NeoSmart message boards, there's a new "0-day vulnerability" that they've discovered in the phpBB message board system.

Since this bug has just broken today, there's no response from phpBB as of yet with a patch, but expect it soon if this issue is as important as the post mentions.