As is mentioned in this new post on the Symfony Finland site, the functionality allowing the Twig templating engine to perform Angular 2 Universal Rendering.

Angular is a household name when it comes to JavaScript frameworks. They've been going through a major transition since the announcement of Angular 2. In the latest development Angular 2 will be getting PHP / Twig support for isomorphic rendering.

[...] So the Angular and the Drupal development teams have started working together to bring Universal Rendering to PHP and Twig. The details remain murky on how exactly this will be implemented (using a Node.js server or a PHP library), but a PHP library (not an extension written in C) would be the easiest option for developers.

He points out that there's also a chance that the result could be coupled to Drupal (at least at first) but hopes are that it will end up as a generic component usable in any system using Twig. The post also includes links where you can find out more information about the topic of "Isomorphic Rendering" too.

In a new post to his blog Paul Jones talks about spotting something "in the wild" that he's a proponent of - a "universal constructor".

For those of you who don’t know, "universal constructor" is the name I give to PHP constructors that always and only take a single parameter. The parameter is an array of key-value pairs, which is then merged with a set of default keys and values. Finally, the array is unmarshalled, usually into object properties.

He talks about the benefits of using a constructor like this in your applications and how he's implemented it as a standard part of the Solar framework. Oh, and the sighting in the wild? It was in this MongoDB session handler.

Be sure to check out the comments for some other great opinions on this "universal constructor" idea, both for and against.

Derick Rethans one of the go-to guys for working with time in PHP has made this new post about something 2008 picked up along the way to 2009 - a leap second.

The start of this new year started with some buzz about a leap second being introduced between Dec 31st 2008, 23:59:59 and Jan 1st 2009, 00:00:00. I've had people ask where this leap second actually comes from, and whether you need to worry about it in your applications. To understand leap seconds means, unfortunately, understanding how time is actually kept.

He ponints out one of the major problems - how time is kept. With variants of Universal Time, it makes it hard to track down what's "right". He breaks out the difference between other time storage methods and the unix time that PHP can use (that counts the number of seconds since Jan 1st 1970) and how the leap second was handled for each.

Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.

The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.

You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.

Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.

The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.

You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.

According to this new post on Davey Shafik's blog, there's now a Universal Binary of the latest beta version of Zend Studio available.

I just wanted to make a quick note, to say that Zend Studio 5.5 Beta, though the installer is PPC, the actual ZDE application is an OS X Universal Binary. The speed difference is more than noticable!

You can find out more about Zend Studio from this page on the Zend website and sign up to become a beta tester to gain access to this just off the line Universal Binary release.

According to this new post on Davey Shafik's blog, there's now a Universal Binary of the latest beta version of Zend Studio available.

I just wanted to make a quick note, to say that Zend Studio 5.5 Beta, though the installer is PPC, the actual ZDE application is an OS X Universal Binary. The speed difference is more than noticable!

You can find out more about Zend Studio from this page on the Zend website and sign up to become a beta tester to gain access to this just off the line Universal Binary release.

Developer.com has posted a new article today looking at some of the features that tie PHP and the DB2 Universal Database together and make application development possible.

In a previous series of articles, I covered the IBM DB2 Universal DatabaseTM (DB2 UDB) plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET that lets Microsoft-trained application developers quickly develop .NET applications that run against DB2 UDB databases, whether they reside on the z/OS, i5/OSTM, AIX, Windows, Linux, HP-UX, or Solaris operating systems.

In this article, I explore the features that make programming PHP-based DB2 UDB applications as seamless as possible and ultimately shorten the development cycle for these types of applications.

They start off introducing PHP and how it's used, but quickly move into describing the APIs that allows PHP to talk to DB2 UDB. They list out a few - the IBM extension for PHP, the PDO ODBC connection utility, and a fading option, the unified ODBC driver. They also spend some time looking at the Zend Core for IBM, including a small tour of the integration of it with the ZDE that's offered.

Developer.com has posted a new article today looking at some of the features that tie PHP and the DB2 Universal Database together and make application development possible.

In a previous series of articles, I covered the IBM DB2 Universal DatabaseTM (DB2 UDB) plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET that lets Microsoft-trained application developers quickly develop .NET applications that run against DB2 UDB databases, whether they reside on the z/OS, i5/OSTM, AIX, Windows, Linux, HP-UX, or Solaris operating systems.

In this article, I explore the features that make programming PHP-based DB2 UDB applications as seamless as possible and ultimately shorten the development cycle for these types of applications.

They start off introducing PHP and how it's used, but quickly move into describing the APIs that allows PHP to talk to DB2 UDB. They list out a few - the IBM extension for PHP, the PDO ODBC connection utility, and a fading option, the unified ODBC driver. They also spend some time looking at the Zend Core for IBM, including a small tour of the integration of it with the ZDE that's offered.