In a new post to his blog today, Paul Jones mentions his podcast for the Zend Developer Zone (a Solar Overview) and provides the script that he worked from to record the show.

In this episode, I'm going to give a brief overview of Solar project and how it helps with the mundane aspects of building applications. Solar is an open-source library and framework for PHP 5; you can read more about it at solarphp.com...

The rest of the show notes includes links to things like Yawp, Solar's built-in localization and it's exception handling code.

Check out more about Solar at Solarphp.com and check out the PHP Abstract podcast episode Paul recorded on the Zend Developer Zone site.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest podcast in its PHP Abstract series. This time it's hosted by Paul Jones, developer of the Solar framework project, who talks gives an overview of the project and its place in the PHP community.

Today's special guest is Paul M. Jones. Paul is an internationally-recognized expert PHP developer and technical consultant living in Memphis, TN. On his blog, he writes mostly about his software projects, but also touches on management, business, politics, and culture.

You can grab the show directly or subscribe to the feed to get this and more great shows from the podcast (with topics covered like PHP & Java, CodeIgniter, Security and much more)

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new article from editor of the dZone, Cal Evans, looking at using fluent interfaces in PHP.

Fluent Interfaces are not a new programming construct. However, PHP developers have not been able to use them until PHP 5. Now with PHP 5 and the ability to directly dereference an object, PHP developers can build objects using fluent interfaces.

He starts off with a look at what they are and how (and why) they can be used in an application. He includes code example to help show how you would create an interface (makeNormal).

The code and other information are pulled from a few sources:

• this article by Mike Naberezny
• a post from Paul Jones
• a blog post from Martin Fowler

Cal also mentions what he got into the fluent interfaces game for - creating a tag cloud with a fluent interface over the normal arguments/properties method.