Lorna Mitchell has posted the second part of her series detailing her REST server development project (part one is here).

This is part 2 of my rest service writing article. In part 1 we saw the library which holds the functionality we will be using, and we also handled the incoming request and captured all the data we'll be using.

In this second part she gets into the details behind the handle() method of the class. It splits the URL into its parts and, based on the action requested, hands it off to the right method and calls the output() method to return to the user. Some error handling is also included (with custom exceptions).

Stuart Herbert has announced the release of a new site that takes the place of providing SMS messages to UK users from twitter, twittex.com - a site created with the symfony framework.

Last Thursday, twitter was forced to withdraw its free SMS alerts service to UK users. [...] Six days later, thanks to the power of symfony, PHP, mysql and q4m, we've built and launched a replacement service called twittex.com.

The site lets you prepay for the messages you want to use. Using the symfony framework made it easy to get a system up and running quickly and easily (in six days!) to fill the gap suddenly left by twitter's decision.

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a new tutorial covering how to scan ports and checking a remote service's status with PHP.

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.

They show how to check a remote instance (a socket open with a timeout) and how to run through a list of ports, looping from one to one-thousand and running an fsockopen on each. They make a sample script to show these two combined - a simple page that loops through the common protocols (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc) and checks to see if the remote machine is running something on that port.

Hasin Hayder has posted part two of his series on making a FriendFeed clone in PHP (here's part one).

Following the first installment in this series, here is the second part. In this part I will focus mainly on Bookmarking and News services supported by FriendFeed .

He points out some of the major bookmarking sites and the URLs for their interfaces for their users (like del.icio.us, furl, stumbleupon and news services like digg and reddit).

Christopher Kunz has shared about a resource he came across that offers complete PHP encoding for a much lower price than some of the other services - phpshield.com. It seems a little too good to be true, though:

However, the phpShield.com home page did not offer the slightest clue who actually is behind that product. [...] It's common practice to whitelabel your solutions and sell them under different brands with different feature sets to different target audiences. However, we always clearly state who is behind the whitelabelled solution.

A little more digging shows an interesting relationship between the company that sells SourceGuardian and the company behind this PHPShield (Inovica). He sees the deception counting against the company and has just "struck one off the list" from his search for encoding methods.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series - an introduction to Service Component Architecture.

Today's special guest is Graham Charters. Graham works at IBM's development lab in Hursley, England. His past roles have included WebSphere Application Server development, and architecture responsibilities in WebSphere Business Integration, and Adapters. [...] Today Graham is going to talk to us today about the Service Component Architecture, or SCA.

Graham talks about what SCA is and includes a mention of the PECL package that enables PHP applications to work with multiple data sources seamlessly.

Download the show directly or subscribe to the feed to get this and other great PHP Abstract shows.

Chad has passed along a note today about a new release from the ITema group - the first Enterprise service bus for PHP developers, Blackbird.

ITema, Inc. today released Blackbird, its PHP enterprise service bus (ESB), to the Open Source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Blackbird allows PHP developers to rapidly develop loosely-coupled software applications, allowing them to leverage PHP's development speed and ease of use for application integration tasks.

It works well with Apache ServiceMix (via a common message queue) and has an "extensive collection of APIs, protocol handlers and XML/string parsing routines". The software is available for download and is released under the GNU General Public License as free for both personal and business use. There is also commercial support available as well as a forum to help you get the answers you need.

See also this post from PHPGeek.com

According to this new post on the PHPClasses.org blog today, they're launching some premium services for the users of the site:

It is with great pleasure that I announce that the PHP Classes site finally launched the premium services for PHP developers that use the site. [...] The premium subscriptions are the alternative that I found to make this site provide a pleasant user experience and hopefully provide useful features that can help making the life of PHP developers better.

He goes into detail on what all is involved in the premium subscriptions including:

• No advertising
• Own site search
• Recorded searches
• Notable packages
• PHP Specialist forums

There's also several other services that are listed as "coming soon" to further enhance the site - customizable site design templates, new class wish lists, personalized bookmarks, etc. The cost for all of the premium services comes to $5 USD/month (with $15 USD due at a time because of restrictions on the payment gateway).

Another pair of interesting notes about the future of the site are mentions of revenue sharing for best contributors and the opportunity for free subscriptions.

You can get complete information about these premium services from its page on the PHPClasses.org website.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Rob Richards and covering service oriented architectures in PHP.

Our special guest today is Rob Richards. Rob is an author and maintainer of many of the XML-based extensions of PHP 5, as well as one of the maintainers of libxml2. He is also the author of Pro PHP and Web Services, published by Apress. Rob is going to give us an overview of Service Oriented Architecture and what it means to us as PHP developers.

The direct link to grab the show is here, but you'd be doing yourself a favor to subscribe to the podcast feed and get all of the great content on a wide variety of topics presented by the experts.

On the JSLabs website, Justin Silverton has posted five cool things that you can do with PHP in a Windows environment:

Many PHP examples out there are designed for a linux/unix operating system. I am going to give some examples of some interesting functionality that only works with php running in a windows environment (IIS or apache).

Here's the list:

• Eject the CD-ROM
• Read and write from/to the registry
• Register and un-register phpscripts as a windows service
• Print pages/data
• List the current system processes

Each item has sample code and a simple explanation to get you started using it.