Site News: Popular Posts for the Week of 07.08.2011

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

• Elated.com: Object-Oriented PHP: Autoloading, Serializing, and Querying Objects
  
• Casey's Blog: Make Your Life as a PHP Developer Twice as Easy With phpsh
  
• Mike Purcell's Blog: Symfony - PHP - Possibly Forking 1.x so Invested Companies don't Lose Millions
  
• Ibuildings techPortal: DPC11: Distributed Systems Tutorial
  
• Gonzalo Ayuso's Blog: New features in PHP5.4 alpha1
  
• Bradley Holt's Blog: Testing PHP 5.4
  
• Chris Shiflett's Blog: Sorting Multi-Dimensional Arrays in PHP
  
• Freek Lijten's Blog: Git commit hooks using PHP
  
• Site News: Popular Posts for the Week of 07.01.2011
  
• Community News: Latest PEAR Releases for 07.04.2011
  

SWAT Blog: Python VS PHP

On the SWAT blog there's a recent post comparing Python and PHP and some of the reasons the author prefers the former over the latter.

Even after just one week using Python, I remember why I'll always prefer it - it empowers me as a programmer. In the Python community, they refer to it as the "batteries included" philosophy - with the mere inclusion of a library, anything becomes possible. Combine that with clean and readable syntax, fluent interfaces, powerful list comprehensions, list slicing, an interactive console, and too many other features to mention, it's clear to see why.

He illustrates one of the differences between the two languages in the handling of things as objects versus strings. He recommends developers at least take a look at Python as an alternative to some of the usual PHP you might be used to.

Martin Sikora's Blog: Google Chrome Extension: PHP Ninja Manual

In a new post today Martin Sikora has points out a Google Chrome extension he's created that lets you view some of the basics of the PHP manual without leaving the browser.

Finally, I released my extension for Google Chrome called PHP Ninja Manual (Ninja - because I like Avinash Kaushik'sblog and he always call people who are very skilled in something as "Ninjas"). I was always lazy to open PHP documentation every time I had to look at some method definition and its parameters so I made this extension which is actually preparsed official PHP manual available instantly in a popup window.

You can see a screenshot of it in action here including the auto-complete searching and the example of the function's summary details. If you try it out and have feedback, go over to the forum for it and leave your comments.

Community News: Launch of CSI:PHP

Jeremy Kendall has started up a new blog that's a sort of "WTF in PHP" listing of some of the random (and bad) code that he comes across daily - CSI:PHP.

It all began with a new gig and an amazingly horrific codebase. I began tweeting the most unbelievable, most frustrating snippets I could find. After quite a few of those tweets, Chris Hartjes replied with, "Looking at your tweets I cannot even fathom what your job is. CSI:PHP ?" A concept was born.

Some of the posts so far include eval() hell, a bad use of preg_replace and a bad method for calling mail(). Currently there's not a way for others to contribute their own code WTFs, but from what I hear it's possible for the future.

Site News: Blast from the Past - One Year Ago in PHP

Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:

• php|architect: Never Use $_GET Again
  
• Kevin Schroder's Blog: PHP 5.3 Certification Beta Testers Needed
  
• Project: MakeGood - A test runner for doing Test Driven Development with Eclipse PDT
  
• Court Ewing's Blog: Zend Framework Modules: Autoloading & Namespaces
  
• Github.com: Lisphp - Lisp in PHP
  
• NETTUTS.com: Object-Oriented PHP for Beginners
  
• dynaTrace Blog: Top 10 Performance Problems taken from Zappos, Monster, Thomson and Co
  
• Project: MongoSession - A PHP MongoDB Session Handler
  
• FinalConcept.com.au: Symfony: Session Login Timeout
  
• Hasan Otuome's Blog: PHP Documentation Tips
  
• Symfony-Reloaded.org: Bundle Best Practices
  
• Brian Swan's Blog: Accessing Windows Azure Blob Storage from PHP
  
• PHPRiot.com: Zend Framework 101: Zend_Oauth
  
• 9Lessons Blog: Stored Procedure Lesson
  
• SymfonyLab: Play with me in symfony2 game
  

Voices of the ElePHPant: Interview with Michael Maclean

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has release their latest episode today - an interview with Michael Maclean, a developer on the Cairo PHP project.

Cal asks Michael his "three questions" about his

• Explain to us what Cairo PHP is and why PHP developers should be interested in it.
  
• What is your role in the project and how did you get involved in such a unique project?
  
• Give us some examples of some real-world projects that use Cairo PHP.
  

You can listen to this new episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

Kevin Schroeder's Blog: Authentication Using Zend_Amf

Kevin Schroeder has a new post to his blog today showing how you can use the Zend_Amf component in your Flex+PHP application to authenticate users with the same authentication structure the rest of the application uses.

I forget why, but a few days ago I started doing some digging around with authentication in Zend_Amf_Server. I had figured that I would add an adapter to the Zend_Amf_Server::setAuth() method and that would be it. But I was wrong.

Zend_Auth is used to validate the login information that's passed along and the Zend_Acl checks to see if they have access. To make this work for a connection from Flex, you need to make an authentication adapter and add it (as well as a basic ACL) into your Zend_Amf_Server call.