The Zend Developer Zone has a review posted of a report that the O'Reilly Radar group put out concerning Open Source software and its place in the Enterprise business today.

It's not often that a report generates this much excitement but "Open Source in the Enterprise" says a lot of what needs to be said to C-Levels considering making the jump to Open Source.

Cal mentions one of the 6 factors that are driving more and more businesses to open source software (like PHP) - the community that surrounds them (how vibrant is it?). He also points out the concept of "vendor lock-in" and how open source can help companies accomplish it by ridding themselves of proprietary software. The report can be gotten from the O'Reilly Radar group for $399 for an individual copy or $995 for a sitewide license.

No Starch Press has officially released their PHP title "Wicked Cool PHP" (Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems).

Here's a bit from the press release:

Wicked Cool PHP [...] is a different breed of PHP book. It's made specifically for the developer who wants to know how to get things done without mucking around and wasting a lot of time. This is not a weighty PHP complete reference or bible that threatens to take down your bookshelf and the rest of the bookcase. This is a book for coders to pick up and use, not wade through.

It provides the reader with "76 immediately useful PHP scripts" that do a variety of things like send/receive email notifications, do some web scraping, track users with cookies and sessions and use web services like SOAP.

You can find out more about the book on this page on the O'Reilly website. The book will officially hit the stands February 15th.

In a new article on DevShed, the spotlight is on putting Apache "in jail" with chroot, but they also include a section on setting up PHP to work inside it.

In this conclusion to a six-part series on Apache configuration and installation, you will learn how to use chroot to put Apache in jail, how to prepare PHP to work in jail, and more.

The article is an excerpt from the O'Reilly book "Apache Security" and shows how to get PHP to cooperate by installing it normally and then setting up some shared libraries to be used in the jail. They note one common problem - an issue with PHP accessing sendmail - that can be solved easily with a change to php.ini for the setup.

The PHP Community is buzzing about a new article, posted on the O'Reilly Ruby blog, about how the author (Derek Silvers of cdbaby.com) made the decision that Ruby on Rails just wasn't right for the project he was working on.

Back in January 2005, I announced on the O'Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby (cdbaby.com) website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch. [...] The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.

But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails' preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It's do-able with a lot of glue. But it's damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you're really doing this.)

Recounting the rest of the story, Derek mentions the turning point ("Is there anything Rails can do that PHP CAN'T do?") and the speed at which they were able to make up for the two years of lost development time. To helps others make a decision for their project, he also includes seven reasons why he made the decision to switch back, including:

• Our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration
• Don't want what i don't need
• I love SQL
• Programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because *you* are better

There's also been several bloggers in the PHP community that have responded to the article:

• Elizabeth Naramore - "Derek Sivers' Article on RoR vs PHP"
• Paul Jones - "Is there anything Rails can do that PHP cannot do? *No.*"
• Terry Chay - "Why PHP triumphs over Ruby"
• Jeff Moore - "Ruby versus PHP or There and Back Again"

Continuing on from this previous post, DevShed has this new tutorial posted. Another excerpt from O'Reilly's "Programming PHP, Second Edition" (by Kevin Tatroe, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Peter MacIntyre), this section gets more into connecting to the database, making a query and returning some information.

They start off looking at the DSNs mentioned previously and include a bit of error checking around it to handle anything that might come up. The next step is, of course, to make a query against the information in your database. They also include an example of the fetchRow method to push the returned results into a variable.

The variable is built out as an array, so they show what that array looks like "on the inside" and how you can reference the different values that make it up.

DevShed has started a new series looking at working with PHP and databases with this new tutorial posted today, an excerpt from the O'Reilly book "Programming PHP, Second Edition".

We focus on the PEAR DB system, which lets you use the same functions to access any database, rather than on the myriad database-specific extensions. In this chapter, you'll learn how to fetch data from the database, how to store data in the database, and how to handle errors. We finish with a sample application that shows how to put various database techniques into action.

In this first part of the series, they look at what kinds of things are possible with the database connection, some of the basics of using the PEAR DB class and working with data source names to help with the connection.

DevShed has a new book excerpt from a good standby security resource from O'Reilly - Chris Shiflett's "Essential PHP Security". This time, they focus on the chapter talking about sessions and cookie security.

This chapter discusses sessions and the inherent risks associated with stateful web applications. You will first learn the fundamentals of state, cookies, and sessions; then I will discuss several concerns - cookie theft, exposed session data, session fixation, and session hijacking-along with practices that you can employ to help prevent them.

The chapter talks about how the statelessness of HTTP causes problems, how cookies can be stolen because of it and what kinds of things you can do to keep you and your users safe (like session fixation).

On CodeSnipers.com there's a new book review of one of O'Reilly's PHP-related offerings, "PHP Hacks" by "Jack D. Herrington".

I had borrowed a Perl Hacks book from and friend and really liked it, it was great! It had a lot of practical things as well as some fun things. I expected the same from PHP Hacks and I was not disappointed!

She links to both the table of contents and the sample chapter to give you an idea of the feel of the book. There's two main sections in the review covering both aspects of the book - the Practical Stuff and the Fun Stuff. Of course, no book is perfect, so there is one thing she mentions that wasn't really worked into the book, but you'll need to read the review to find out what.

On KillerSites.com, Stefan Mischook has a new book review of a new version of a good old PHP book standby - the 2nd Edition of the PHP Cookbook from O'Reilly.

The 'cookbook' series from O'Reilly press target a reader who understands (at least) the basics of a subject, these are not good books for beginners. This is the 2nd edition and covers PHP 5.

Stefan comments on the content of the book, noting that it covers "chunks" of functionality by task rather than teaching the language details behind it. He notes that this is just the book for someone needing to perform some kind of task, and just looking for the bit of code to get it done. The book also shares some helpful hints along the way, like "What is the difference between ereg and preg?"

Overall, he recommends the book, but only for those that already have a gasp on PHP and need those little code bits to make things work.

In his latest blog post, Tobias Schlitt shares a bit of a book review about one of the latest (German) PHP-related offerings from O'Reilly - PHP Design Patterns.

I seized the time on the tram yesterday night to take a look at it and I have to admit I'm quite impressed. Stephan managed to write down a lot of practical experience in respect to the implementation of OO patterns with PHP.

Tobias talks about the structure of the book (recommending it to anyone looking to learn OOP in PHP), and mentions some of the chapter topics including:

• New OOP features in PHP5
• Basic OOP concepts
• Generation Patterns (Singleton, Factory, etc)
• Behavior Patterns (Subject/Observer, Visitor, Iterator)

While some books only touch the theory of design patterns and avoid giving practical examples to the user, Stephan manages very good to combine both.