Lorna Mitchell has posted the last article in her look at web services - a focus on status codes.

Unlike the other posts in this series, this one is quite specific to one type of service - REST - since it deals with status codes, specifically HTTP ones. The ideas are transferrable however and other types of service can return statuses in a similar way.

She mentions things to keep in mind in returning the codes, some of the more interesting codes as well as some typical situations where things like an error code 500 would be thrown.

Status codes are like a headline to the calling entity about what happened, and are a valuable tool in the web service toolkit.

John Lim has written up an article for the Oracle Technology Network about creating high performance systems with Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) and PHP.

Running a software application that is able to work reliably through hardware and software failures is incredibly hard. [...] In this article, I will cover the network, architecture and design of our RAC application. Then I will discuss the real-world experiences and problems we experienced.

He details their RAC setup - load balancers, application servers and their RAC servers - before working through the different technologies and how they're all installed and configured to work together most efficiently.

In the next to last article of their loader series, DevShed looks at replacing some of the file loading functionality in their examples with functions from the SPL.

As I mentioned before, the Standard PHP library comes bundled with some helpful functions, such as "spl_autoload()," "spl_register_extension()" and "spl_autoload_register()" that allow you to either use a default implementation of the "__autoload()" function, or create a custom one for it.

Their example defines the extensions to use for autoloading and the name of the file/class to pull in. The rest is done automagically.

New on WebReference.com is this look (part of a series) at working with XML in PHP, this time it's specifically covering the DOM functionality.

With this series of articles, I will try to simplify and demystify the use and application of XML and the DOM. First, we will look at what XML is and then move on to what functions are available for use to manipulate and use XML.

The tutorial introduces XML and gives a sample structure of a document and breaks it down to explain each of the parts. Following that they look at some of the XML-related functionality to create their sample XML file.

On the Content with Style blog Pascal Opitz looks at creating a custom Zend form element for uploading images.

It really is time to post something, isn't it? Here is a quick way to have an image preview inside of a form based on Zend Form. I am using the auto include mechanism for this one, utilizing the PEAR naming convention, and all my files will sit underneath a Shared folder within the library folder.

Their custom element is created in a two pieces - the form element itself and a custom view helper to define how the form element is displayed. An example of its use is also included.

On the "Make Me Pulse" blog today Ludovic Hindryckx has a bit of code he's shared to let you connect PHP to an Active Directory server (via an LDAP connection).

Today we are going to see how to make an authentication with PHP and an Active Directory LDAP (AD). [...] This code sample has been tested on a Windows 2k3 server.

The script calls the ldap_connect connect function with the user-submitted username and password and runs a bind (as the user) and searches for an account with the same name. If the information is found, it returns back to the $info variable to be checked.

This new screencast from NETTUTS.com introduces you to the CodeIgniter framework and helps you build a small sample application to see where all the pieces fit.

In this week's 30 minute screencast, I'm going to show you how easy it is to work with the MVC pattern and CodeIgniter. This video is aimed at beginners who have no experience with a PHP framework. For demonstration purposes, we'll be building a simple image upload utility. We'll then perform some validation, save the file to our uploads folder, and automatically create a respective thumbnail.

You can check out the screencast in-page or just download the source and get started.

New on DevShed there's the latest part of a series of tutorials they've written up (fifth of eight) about building automatic loading functionality into your applications. This time they change up their class to make the their loading function accessible outside of a class object.

To avoid an eventual (and unnecessary) instantiation of the loader class, it would be helpful to declare the mentioned "load()" method static. Thus, bearing in mind this important concept, in this fifth part of the series I'm going to enhance the signature of the "Loader" class created previously by turning its loading method into a static one.

They change the definition of the function to be "public static" making it callable both through the "self" keyword and outside the class with the "::" operator.

Federico Cargnelutti has posted a class (DateIntervalFormat) that gives you the difference between a date and "now" in words rather than an integer.

This class, a refactored version of Drupal's format_interval function, makes it relatively easy to format an interval value. The format will automatically format as compactly as possible. For example: if the difference between the two dates is only a few hours and both dates occur on the same day, the year, month, and day parts of the date will be omitted.

So, instead of getting a value of "86400 seconds" you'd get back something like "5 days 3 hours".

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new tutorial looking at combining the Zend Server (Community Edition) with the Java Print Service to make printing in your applications (something PHP's not very good at) simpler.

What if you still need to have printing support in your PHP application? With Zend Server, Zend's integrated PHP application stack, the answer might be not what you were expecting. Use the PHP Java Bridge, available in both the community and commercial editions of Zend Server.

Their method combines Java code with some native PHP code to create a "printer" and point your scripts to it. Various options and configuration file information are included as well as two scripts - one to make a simple "one image" document and another to make a more complex PDF containing an interactive form.