Over on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans shares part of a mini-interview (one question, really) where Cal asked Tim about Solaris as a hosting and development platform for PHP.
Tim will be at ZendCon this year participating in a panel discussion titled "How Do The Stacks Stack Up?" I talked with Tim by phone because I was curious why PHP developers should consider Solaris as a development and deployment environment. Here's what Tim had to say.
His answer was based around three main points - observability, virtualization "stuff", and the ZFS filesystem all Solaris systems come installed with. And, of course, he explains the thought process behind each (briefly).
Sometimes, just the idea of starting off a new project makes developers shy away from an idea. They think about everything they have to set up even before they get to the real work. Thankfully, there are solutions out there to help you get down to the real work real fast. For example, the ATK Code Generator, an application designed to simplify creation of an application to a few clicks. This new tutorial from Jorge Garifuna shows you how.
Developers can spend their time creating robust database schema and feed it to the ATK Code Generator to see instant web applications customized for the schema. Something that used to take months to create, has been cut to minutes and instant results.
He mentions specifically a three-step method to create an "application" around a database table. The user views the tables in the software, customizes the options for it, and clicks to have the ATK Code Generator build it out for them.
Also included in the post are links to the project's homepage, some documentation, and screenshots of the application at work.
Jan Schneider has a new blog post today concerning the acceptance of three projects (based on the Horde Project) into the Google "Summer of Code" program for this year.
3 student applications for projects in the Horde Project have been accepted by Google's Summer of Code 2006 program: an LDAP browser/manager, a Live CD, and "Wandering Books".
Here's some of the details:
Jonathan Burchfield's LDAP module for the Horde Application Framework to include full read/write functionality when completed
Soumyadip Modak's development of a Horde bootable Live CD with a complete install of all Groupware modules Horde.
Luciano Ramalho's "Wandering Books" application to allow anyone to turn their own library into a lending library quickly and easily.
He recounts the talks he attended, including Hartmuts talk on Clustering MySQL, the Keynote from another of the php|architect staff, and a vote that was taken on the suggested location for next year's php|architect spring conference.
Davey has also posted quite a few pictures over on the php|tek photostream on Flickr for a bit of the experience for those not able to attend.
For those of you that have been following along, PHPBuilder.com has posted the third and final part of their "Using XML: A PHP Developer's Primer" series. Even if you haven't been keeping up, it's worth a look.
In this edition, they look at more advanced topics - a deeper look at Ajax and how to style the data you get back with XSL, both on the client and sever.
To start, they look at XSL - what it is, how it's used, and some code examples of both the XML and XSL structures to style XML data into a valid HTML page. Of course, you'll need the PHP extension to get this all working, so they step you through the installation/enabling of that as well.
They touch on other topics (like passing variables to a stylehseet and XSLT in Javascript) before getting to a simple XSLT and Ajax example - pulling book data and formating it with examples of both the PHP and Javascript sides.
On his blog today, Sebastian Bergmann has posted this quick entry about a cool feature of the upcoming version of PHPUnit - a graphical representation of the test execution.
Another new feature of the next version of PHPUnit is the ability to generate a graphical visualization of the test execution using GraphViz.
This graph (SVG version), for example, shows the graphical visualization for the execution of the tests declared in the MoneyTest sample that comes with PHPUnit.
The MoneyTest sample mentioned comes with the PHPUnit download, but the code was altered to cause it to fail. You can see the result in this graphic...
In this new article from InternetNews.com, there's a look back at where PHP has come from as well as a look forward to the new year and what we can expect.
PHP has long been a favorite dynamic programming language for Web developers. After 10 years of growth, 2006 looks to be a banner year for the open source language as its collaboration framework, partner ecosystem and the language itself are expected to grow and gain new users.
Look for a confluence of three distinct branches of the PHP language, with versions 4, 5 and 6 all likely to be out in the market in 2006. It will also be a year in which PHP will continue to challenge .NET and Java as the online language of choice for developers.
They also look at a brief history of PHP, what PHP6 has in store for the community, the confusion that the "three versions" (PHP 4.x, 5, and the upcoming 6) can cause. They wrap it all up with a positive note about PHP and its future from Andi Gutmans of Zend.
In his latest post today, Sebastian Bergmann announces the upcoming release of the latest version of the widely popular PHP unit testing suite - PHPUnit 3.0.
These past few days I have been busy hacking on what will become PHPUnit 3.0, hopefully already in January 2006.
The hallmark feature of PHPUnit 3.0 will be its support for Mock Objects. PHPUnit's Mock Object implementation has been initially developed by Jan Borsodi of eZ systems AS and is inspired by jMock.
While working with the Unit Tests for the Zend Framework I noticed that PHPUnit previously had no support for skipping the execution of a test, for instance when a required PHP extension is not available. PHPUnit 3.0 introduces the PHPUnit2_Framework_Assert::markTestSkipped() to mark a test as being skipped.
PHPUnit has become the de-facto standard for unit testing with PHP, and it's great to see so many more improvements coming from it. It's also good to see that, through it's efforts with the Zend Framework, it's also found some places it was lacking and fixed them right up.
PHPit.net has posted the third part in their "Building an advertising system with PHP" series today.
Welcome to part 3 of the "Building an advertising system with PHP" series. In the previous parts (part 1 and part 2) I have shown you how to build your own advertising system using PHP and JavaScript. We've also added two extra features to our ad system and in part 2 we built a page to manage the ads as well. If you haven't read either part yet, I highly recommend doing so before reading this part.
In this part, the final part of the series, I will show you how to first track all kinds of statistics on each ad, and after that display neat graphs using PHP/SWF Charts. Let's get started.
