Matthias Noback has a series of posts on his site sharing some of his thoughts around layers, ports and adapters in application architecture:

Looking back at my old blog posts, I think it's good to write down a more balanced view on application architecture than the one that speaks from some of the older posts from 2013 and 2014. Before I do, I allow myself a quick self-centered trip down memory lane.

He's posted all three parts of the series, each providing either some background on him and his previous work or principles and architecture suggestions:

• Layers, ports & adapters - Part 1, Foreword
• Layers, ports & adapters - Part 2, Layers
• Layers, ports & adapters - Part 3, Ports & Adapters

Each part includes code and/or structure suggestions to help clarify points made along the way.

The Laravel News site has a quick post sharing an interesting Javascript library that brings the functionality of Laravel's collections over from PHP to the world of Javascript.

Collect.js is a port of Laravel Collections to JavaScript. It’s dependency free and makes working with arrays and objects easy. [...] It’s almost a one to one map with the Laravel version and it even includes the fairly new Collection Tap method.

There are some differences, however, including the requirement that all comparisons use strict equality versus the looser version PHP allows. The post includes the npm install command to get the library installed, gives a simple example of it in use and links to both the GutHub repo and the NPM page for more details.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new article posted showing you how to get started with Underscore, a PHP library ported over from Javascript's popular Underscore.js library with many of the same methods intact.

If you’ve ever used the Backbone framework for JavaScript, you’ll already be familiar with Underscore. Indeed, it’s become incredibly useful for JavaScript developers in general. But did you know that it’s been ported to PHP? [...] Underscore describes itself as a “utility belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. It’s the tie to go along with jQuery’s tux, and Backbone.js’s suspenders.”

He starts by showing you how to get it installed and some of the basic syntax of the methods it defines (basically replace the period with the double-colon) for both the procedural and OOP handling. He shows examples of a few of the more handy methods it provides including:

• Each
• Pluck
• Minimum and Maximum
• Filter and Reject
• sortBy
• groupBy

...and many more. There's also a bit of talk about templating and extending the library via "mixins".

Lorna Mitchell has shared some advice about correcting an issue with PHP and Gearman after she did an upgrade via PECL.

I upgraded PHP and related pecl modules on my development machine today, and ran into a problem with Gearman. Actually I ran into more than one! Firstly the challenge of getting the newest pecl version working with a gearman version. Then an error where my existing PHP application couldn't connect to gearman after upgrade.

Running on Ubuntu, she found this tutorial helpful in getting Gearman back into a working state and installed (version 1.1.1). The "unable to connect" error turned out to be a change in how the Gearman connection needed to be made - the addition of a port to the connection string made things work again.

On the Liip blog there's a recent post talking about a tool Google offers to help you authenticate your users, a one-time passcode generator called Google Authenticator. The post talks about a PHP port of the same idea.

The main point about 2-step verification is that something else than your computer provides that token. If it's on your computer and that one gets stolen (or hacked into), it won't help much for the additional security. That's why you need a second device for those tokens. Some banks do that with SMS/Text Messages (Facebook, too), other give you special devices for that (eg. RSA keys) and the last group does it with your smartphone.

At the request of a client, they created a tool that did just this, but for PHP. As a result, they created the GoogleAuthenticator library that makes it easy to implement in your application. There's even an example of it in use. For more information about the Google Authenticator tool, see this page on Google Code.

Gareth Heyes has a recent post pointing out the port of a project of his, CSSReg (a filtering tool for user-provided stylesheets) over to PHP.

Just a quick post to mention the excellent work by Norman Hippert aka @thewildcat, he successfully converted my Javascript based CSSReg into PHP. I was meaning to do this but never found the time so it’s pretty awesome that not only did thewildcat convert the code but found some nice bugs in my code and fixed them. Great work Norman thanks very much!

You can see a demo of it here and grab the source as a download here. You can find out more about the origins of CSSReg (and some of its siblings) in this other post from Gareth.

Maarten Balliauw has announced the release of a PHP port of a powerful tool for server-side introspection of your applications - Glimpse for PHP.

A few months ago, the .NET world was surprised with a magnificent tool called "Glimpse". Today I'm pleased to release a first draft of a PHP version for Glimpse! Now what is this Glimpse thing… Well: "what Firebug is for the client, Glimpse does for the server... in other words, a client side Glimpse into whats going on in your server."

He includes a of how the introspection works and some sample code using a phar to add it to your PHP application. You can see it in action in this screencast based on the PHP Azure Contest website. He also shows one very cool feature that allows for cross-device tracking of requests. You can find this PHP port of Glimpse on github.

In a new post to his blog Jeff Moser takes you through some of his experiences in port code from C# to PHP as a first-time PHPer and learning right from a book.

After years of hearing negative things about PHP, I had been led to believe that touching it would rot my brain. Ok, maybe that's a bit much, but its reputation had me believe it was full of bad problems. Even the cool kids had issues with PHP. But I thought that it couldn’t be too bad because there was that one website that gets a few hits using a dialect of it. When Kaggle offered to sponsor a port of my TrueSkill C# code to PHP, I thought I'd finally have my first real encounter with PHP.

He starts with a few disclaimers, noting that the structure of the application was kept largely the same and that he didn't go much into the web or database functionality that PHP's well known for. He talks about the book he chose to learn from (Beginning PHP 5.3) and includes some excerpts from the author talking about the PHP language. He splits up the rest of the post into several different sections covering his thoughts on the whole process:

• The Good Parts
• The "When in Rome..." Parts
• The "Ok, I guess" Parts
• The Frustrating Parts

Unfortunately, the "Good" parts section is one of the smallest.

On the DeveloperTutorials.com site today there's a new tutorial showing the creation of a port scanner with PHP - a tool that, given some of the familiar ports that services (like web or email servers) run on, can check to see if they're responding.

While building web applications, it's often important to keep an eye on the other services running on your server. Having access to the current status of public servers can empower your applications to make decisions and respond to problems automatically. Acknowledging a service is offline can also save endless support emails. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to keep track of your server status by scanning ports on your server with PHP.

Their example makes a socket connection to the remote port to see if there's a valid hookup. The wrap this inside a loop for ports 1 through 1000 to see what ports are open and responding on your local machine (doing this on a remote machine is just asking for trouble).

Their full example defines some of the common ports in an array and loops to check on their status. It sets out a base you can build on top of with things like their suggestions - logging scan results, repoting downtime and running a service-specific task.

In a recent post to his blog Ant Phillips looks at how you can integrate the SAP Netweaver softare into Zero PHP (a Java PHP clone).

I thought it would be interesting to hook up a Zero PHP application with a SAP NetWeaver system. So last weekend I summoned up the courage and, armed with a bottle of red wine, set about the task. Surprisingly enough it wasn't too difficult (setting aside finding 20GB of disk space needed by the installer).

He talks about making the connection via SAP's JCo middleware component and the PHP/Java bridge that comes with the standard Zero installation. Code is included showing how to make the connection and grab information from the SAP data store.