Shameer Chamal has a quick tutorial posted to his blog today showing how you can create a basic ajax validation feature for your Kohana-based web application.

If you are new to Kohana framework, implementing validation will be an adventure, especially if you are looking for ajax validation. In this article I will present a simple way to implement some necessary validations using ajax in a sign up form.

He starts with a simple view containing the login form and including a few extra files (like the Javascript helper for the validation). Next he creates the user model that will do the backend check to see if the user already exists. Finally the controller and Javascript are created to bring all the pieces together. The Javascript uses the jQuery framework to make things a bit more convenient and runs a check against the backend for the given username with the response returned as a JSON message.

On the ZendCasts.com site there's a new screencast continuing their look at the Zend_Tool component by combining it with Zend_Log to do some easy reporting.

This video uses a collection of powerful PHP libraries in order to illustrate how easy it really is to build a command-line tool for reporting against XML files. We start off by logging visitor statistics in the controller into a log file with Zend_Log. Once data has been collected, we’re then able to utilize SimpleXML, Zend_Date and the Zend_Tool component to build out a very simple reporting tool.

He suggests one possible use is to create a cron job that will regenerate the reports nightly. You can view the screencast in the post or download a copy of the project to get started right away.

DevShed has posted an excerpt from the book "Advanced PHP Programming" from George Schlossnagle as this new tutorial detailing the creation of standalone PHP scripts.

If you've ever been interested in making significant use of PHP outside of a web environment, this article will show you how. The first of three parts.

This chapter describes how to reuse existing code libraries to perform administrative tasks in PHP and how to write standalone and one-liner scripts. It gives a couple extremely paradigm-breaking projects that put PHP to use outside the Web environment.

In this first part, they groundwork is laid - they introduce the CLI interface PHP already has and show how to handle input/output and work with parsing the command line arguments passed in.

DevShed has posted an excerpt from the book "Advanced PHP Programming" from George Schlossnagle as this new tutorial detailing the creation of standalone PHP scripts.

If you've ever been interested in making significant use of PHP outside of a web environment, this article will show you how. The first of three parts.

This chapter describes how to reuse existing code libraries to perform administrative tasks in PHP and how to write standalone and one-liner scripts. It gives a couple extremely paradigm-breaking projects that put PHP to use outside the Web environment.

In this first part, they groundwork is laid - they introduce the CLI interface PHP already has and show how to handle input/output and work with parsing the command line arguments passed in.