A new post on the Zend Developer Zone talks about the Zend Certified Engineer oDesk site that has been set up. oDesk is a marketplace for "providers" (programmers/development shops) to interact with "buyers" (companies looking for their services).

Recently oDesk set up a group called Zend Certified Engineers and they require verification of eligibility via the providers certified ZCE ID #s in order to join this group. Why is oDesk interested in providing a ZCE group to their users? Primarily this came about because buyers of software services who are part of the oDesk ecosystem requested from oDesk better ways of distinguishing experienced, trained programmers from those who are not as knowledgeable.

You can check out a few different pages for more information - the oDesk trends page for PHP, the main page for the ZCE group and a link back to Zend's site for more information on becoming a Zend Certified Engineer.

On the O'Reilly OnLamp.com website today, there's a new article that compares searching methods on a site - a "search engine showdown".

It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on to another site. At last you find one with an internal search engine. You enter your search term, and voilá!--the information you need pops up in less than a second.

They compare these two types - hosted versus local - and show how to get started on integrating one, the local option, into your site. They start with a few things consider before getting into the choices - the physical issues involved, the page information itself, and how the engine will index.

The rest of the article is devoted to the different options they'd recommend along with ratings, what technology they use, if they're PHP5 compatible, difficulty of installation, and many more criteria. Their list of leading local search engines for your site are:

• Sphider
• MnogoSearch
• TSEP
• PHPDig
• iSearch
• RiSearch

On the O'Reilly OnLamp.com website today, there's a new article that compares searching methods on a site - a "search engine showdown".

It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on to another site. At last you find one with an internal search engine. You enter your search term, and voilá!--the information you need pops up in less than a second.

They compare these two types - hosted versus local - and show how to get started on integrating one, the local option, into your site. They start with a few things consider before getting into the choices - the physical issues involved, the page information itself, and how the engine will index.

The rest of the article is devoted to the different options they'd recommend along with ratings, what technology they use, if they're PHP5 compatible, difficulty of installation, and many more criteria. Their list of leading local search engines for your site are:

• Sphider
• MnogoSearch
• TSEP
• PHPDig
• iSearch
• RiSearch

PHP as been bumped down a spot in the popularity ranking provided by Tiobe Software for this month. It was pushed down to fifth place by Visual Basic moving up the ranks. The others in the top five are (in order) Java, C, C++, and Visual Basic.

The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

According to their long term trends graph, PHP has still been gaining popularity overall, with only a bit of a dip lately. Other languages in the top five are also currently seeing similar dips in popularity too. Check out the full report for all of this month's details.

PHP as been bumped down a spot in the popularity ranking provided by Tiobe Software for this month. It was pushed down to fifth place by Visual Basic moving up the ranks. The others in the top five are (in order) Java, C, C++, and Visual Basic.

The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

According to their long term trends graph, PHP has still been gaining popularity overall, with only a bit of a dip lately. Other languages in the top five are also currently seeing similar dips in popularity too. Check out the full report for all of this month's details.

Jim Plush has two big announcements on his blog today - both dealing with his MyBic Ajax and PHP framework. One deals with a new version and the other with a benchmark the library has reached.

The first announcement is about the package's latest release - version 0.7.0. This is the last release before heading straight up to a 1.0 stable release for the utility. This current version contains no bugs/memory leaks that he's found. This release was made to fix the last of them.

Right on the heels of this announcement, there's another concerning the MyBic library's placement on the SourceForge ranking list. It's been officially bumped up to number 145 out of the 100,000+ projects the site manages.

You can get the latest on this great package and all of the information and downloads of the new releases from the project's official site.

Jim Plush has two big announcements on his blog today - both dealing with his MyBic Ajax and PHP framework. One deals with a new version and the other with a benchmark the library has reached.

The first announcement is about the package's latest release - version 0.7.0. This is the last release before heading straight up to a 1.0 stable release for the utility. This current version contains no bugs/memory leaks that he's found. This release was made to fix the last of them.

Right on the heels of this announcement, there's another concerning the MyBic library's placement on the SourceForge ranking list. It's been officially bumped up to number 145 out of the 100,000+ projects the site manages.

You can get the latest on this great package and all of the information and downloads of the new releases from the project's official site.

As PHP Magazine notes today, PHP has come in fifth (again) on the TIOBE Programming Community index.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

Those higher on the list are Java, C, Visual Basic, and C++, though C++ seems to be fading and Visual Basic growing by leaps and bounds. In the long term trends they record, PHP is showing a rising trend, quite a bit up from even just February of this year.

As PHP Magazine notes today, PHP has come in fifth (again) on the TIOBE Programming Community index.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

Those higher on the list are Java, C, Visual Basic, and C++, though C++ seems to be fading and Visual Basic growing by leaps and bounds. In the long term trends they record, PHP is showing a rising trend, quite a bit up from even just February of this year.

On the SearchOpenSource.com site today, there's this new article combining two popular things together to make one powerful and productive tool using the Amazon web services and the Zend Framework.

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.