Chris Jones has a new post today showing you how to use Oracle and PHP together to process data offline via the Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing feature.

Offloading slow batch tasks to an external process is a common method of improving website responsiveness. One great way to initiate such background tasks in PHP is to use Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing in a producer-consumer message passing fashion. [...] The following example simulates an application user registration system where the PHP application queues each new user's street address. An external system monitoring the queue can then fetch and process that address. In real life the external system might initiate a snail-mail welcome letter, or do further, slower automated validation on the address.

He includes the SQL needed to create the database and configure the queue system as well as start it up and get it ready for requests. He shows how to push an address into the queue for processing and how to get the results once it has completed in both the SQL and from the oci_* functions in PHP.

NetTuts.com has a new tutorial posted suggesting a few ways you can make testable and maintainable code in PHP applications.

Frameworks provide a tool for rapid application development, but often accrue technical debt as rapidly as they allow you to create functionality. Technical debt is created when maintainability isn't a purposeful focus of the developer. Future changes and debugging become costly, due to a lack of unit testing and structure. Here's how to begin structuring your code to achieve testability and maintainability - and save you time.

There's a few concepts they cover in the tutorial including DRY (don't repeat yourself), working with dependency injection and actually writing the tests with PHPUnit. They start with a bit of code that needs some work and use the tests to help refactor it into something that can be easily mocked (using Mockery).

Matthew Setter has written up a post to his site that continues his look at the features of Zend Framework 2. This time he's looking specifically at hydrators, models and the table gateways and their use in connecting your application with a database.

One set of features has really been helping me of late ones that really have me smiling; these are: Hydrators, Models and Table Gateways. If you're new to ZF2 or database interaction with frameworks, then you're in a perfect position as today's post will be giving you a good introduction to the basics of using both together.

He starts with a look back at how it all was done in ZF1 and shows how using these three components makes for an even better system, allowing the model to be completely data-source agnostic. His examples start with the table gateway class, showing how to connect it with a "users" table. From there he adds in the model (with an "exchangeArray" method) and a hydrator that maps the table columns to the properties on the entity. He shows how to add this setup to the service configuration and its use in a controller, returning a full list of the records in the "user" table.

In his latest post to his site Chris Jones shows you how to update the Zend Framework 2 tutorial app (quickstart) to make it work with an Oracle database instead.

This post shows the changes to the ZF2 tutorial application to allow it to run with Oracle Database 11gR2. [...] The instructions for creating the sample ZF2 application are here. Follow those steps as written, making the substitutions shown [in the rest of the post].

The full schema definition is included in the post, complete with the same sample data as the tutorial. He includes the updates you'll need to make to the database configuration for the OCI8 connection and changes to the code to accommodate the Oracle data format (mostly uppercasing everything).

Brandon Savage has a new post to his site today showing you how to compile and install PHP 5.5, the next major upcoming release for the language (in RC status as of the time of this post though).

There's always a lag behind new releases of PHP and releases of packages for operating systems such as Ubuntu. This lag time means that you could be kept from upgrading to the latest and greatest PHP for a year or more, unless you use an outside repository like Dotdeb. [...] Instead, I roll my own version of PHP. It's simple and easy to do, and something that any developer can do. Here's my instructions for doing so on a fresh Ubuntu installation.

He gives a reason or two why you might want to "roll your own" installation and helps you get the environment prepared via some "aptitude" install commands for supporting software. Commands are included for installing needed dependencies, configuring/building PHP and updating Apache to use this new install. He finishes it up with a few smaller things to do like making the php.ini and enabling the Zend opcode caching extension.

Simon Holywell has a new post talking about cookie security in PHP, focusing on some of the PHP configuration settings that can help.

The security of session handling in PHP can easily be enhanced through the use of a few configuration settings and the addition of an SSL certificate. Whilst this topic has been covered numerous times before it still bears mentioning with a large number of PHP sites and servers having not implemented these features.

He talks about the httponly flag when setting the cookie/in the configuration, the "use only cookies" for sessions and forcing them to be "secure only".

On PHPMaster.com today there's an article with some good suggestions about ways to deprecate parts of an API safely.

Deprecation can happen for various reasons - perhaps an API is no longer useful and has reached its end-of-life, or the refactoring of code to improve its reusability and testability obsoletes particular methods. In this article I'll share with you some key points that you should follow when deprecating APIs so you can continue to grow your code and provide fair warning to those who depend on it.

They break it up into a few different steps:

• Prepare for Refactoring
• Employ the Single Responsibility Principle
• Communicate with your Users
• Remove the Old Code

PHPMaster.com has posted part two of their series looking at indexing in MongoDB databases (part one here) with some more advanced concepts Mongo makes available.

In part 1 of this series we had an introduction to indexing in MongoDB. we saw how to create, use, and analyze queries with indexes giving us a good foundation to build on. In this part, we'll take a look at a few more small but important concepts, like indexing on sub-documents and embedded fields, covered queries, and index direction.

They use the same "posts" collection from the previous article, showing you how to index it based on a "location" sub document and "embedded fields" inside of it. They also touch on complex sorting with a multi-field index and the idea of "covered queries." These are queries that all fields queried are part of an index as well as all returned. They finish up the article by showing you how to remove indexes too.

PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted that introduces you to a build tool that's more common in the Java world but can easily support PHP projects, Apache's Maven.

Apache Maven is a build automation tool with the purpose of building, reporting, and creating documentation of projects. It builds projects using a Project Object Model (POM) and a set of plugins shared by all projects using Maven, thus providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds, you automatically know how all Maven projects build. [...] Through this article you will gain familiarity with Maven for PHP, and how to install and use the PHP-Maven plugin from the command line and in Eclipse.

The tutorial walks you first through the basic install of Maven and get you started with an example "settings.xml" file helping to set up the PHP-Maven plugin. They help you create your first project using the Archetype plugin and its related "pom.xml" file. The project already has a defined structure (similar to what you might see in a Composer-loadable PHP repo on Github) for the source of your app and the tests. They show you how to hook in PHPUnit and phpDocumentor for testing/dcumentation builds and, finally, how to integrate it all into Eclipse to allow for easier, in-IDE interactions.

On the Script-Tutorial.com site today there's a new post looking at functional programming in PHP - some of the concepts involved and example code showing how to make it work.

Functional programming can be defined in simple terms as a programming paradigm that do not change the state of a program instead it uses pure functions. A pure function is a function that has the ability to accept a value and return another value without changing the input supplied to it. It is characterized by its ability to support functions that are of high order. [...] A programming paradigm that is functional has the following attributes: do not alter the states which make parallelism easier, deals mostly with a function which is the smallest unit hence enhances readability of code, has deterministic functions that enable stability of a program.

He talks some about anonymous/lambda functions (closures) and their role in PHP's implementation of functional programming. He also talks some about partial functions, currying, higher order functions and recursion. He finishes off the article with a look at some of the advantages this method of development can bring as well as some of the disadvantages that come with things like recursion and the learning curve of the method.