Five things you didn’t know you could do with PHP

Larry Ullman (writer of several PHP books and an instructor at UCB) wrote this article on interesting ways to use PHP. It covers unconventional ways to use conventional PHP features. I liked it.

[url=http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1778106,00.asp]http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1778106,00.asp[/url]

Posted in PHP

June 17th, 2006 :: AJAX Revisited, revisted

Well, it took a whole month, but I did slightly re-tool last month’s demo of SACK (the Simple Ajax Toolkit) to work on our test site. Now, it searches against the kcpug.org member’s list. I’ve also added the “setTimeOut()” functionality to make it feel a little more stable. Be sure to check it out in the index page.

Be sure to check out the [url=http://php5.kcpug.org/ajax-fun/memberlookup/]the ajax-driven member list[/url].

Get real about PHP4 vs. PHP5

I ran across this article on The PHP Grind website. It’s a little bit on the ranty side. The point of the article being that the current state of the PHP4 vs. PHP5 battle is reaching critical mass, with some major players in the software market blatantly ignoring PHP5 despite it’s proven stability and increased security features.

http://www.thephpgrind.net/2006/06/08/get-real-about-php4-vs-php5/

Now, some of us are at the mercy of our web hosts, and some of us need to test our code on PHP5 before cutting away from PHP4. [url=http://www.wampserver.com/en/]WAMP[/url]’s latest release uses PHP 5.1.4 (the latest release of PHP) for Windows, and several similar “packaged installs” of Apache/MySQL/PHP exist for other platforms. These are especially useful if you want to get a miniature install going on your desktop to help you make the change to PHP5.

I thought it was an interesting article. I wasn’t aware that so many big names in the web app industry were actually telling customers to hold off on using PHP5.

May 20, 2006 :: AJAX Revisited

With all of the changes in the realm of Asynchronous JavaScript driven development, we took this month to introduce some of the updates and simplifications that have occurred. The presentation is available in a variety of forms:

[url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_may/Ajax-revisited.pdf]AJAX Revisited (pdf)[/url]
[url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_may/Ajax-revisited.swf]AJAX Revisited (swf)[/url]
[url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_may/Ajax-revisited.odp]AJAX Revisited (ODF – Impress)[/url]

As I mentioned this week, I’ve added some new folders to the links area of our site. As you explore and use this technology, please add the links that you find the most useful or interesting.

Read more for other random links I saved while researching this presentation.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/11/09/fixing-ajax-xmlhttprequest-considered-harmful.html

http://www.json.org/
http://www.json.org/xml.html
http://www.json.org/json.js

http://developer.yahoo.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/common/json.htm

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/examples/kitchensink/

http://www.symfony-project.com/
http://framework.zend.com/

Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL

Just noticed a good summary of MySQL performance tuning tips on google video. Not necessarily PHP, but since many of us use MySQL in one way or another, I thought the group might be interested.

[i]Read on for links and more info[/i]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2524524540025172110&q=type%3Agoogle+engEDU&pl=true

“Jay Pipes is a co-author of the recently published Pro MySQL (Apress, … all ยป 2005), which covers all of the newest MySQL 5 features, as well as in-depth discussion and analysis of the MySQL server architecture, storage engines, transaction procesing, benchmarking, and advanced SQL scenarios. You can also see his name on articles appearing in Linux Magazine and can read more articles about MySQL at his website. ”

For those who find this interesting, much of the same information is contained in:

High Performance MySQL
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hpmysql/index.html

March 18, 2006 :: The Eclipse IDE and PHP

Eric gave us a great introduction to the Eclipse IDE. For those of you looking for a new IDE, certainly give this a spin. Eric was able to even setup the XDebug extension shortly after the presentation.

For more info, be sure to check out [url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_mar/eclipse.swf]his presentation[/url].

Available in [url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_mar/eclipse.swf]Shockwave Flash[/url] and [url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_mar/eclipse.odp]Open Office.org[/url] formats.

Thanks again Eric!!!

Zend Framework available for download!

Zend Framework is a high quality and open source framework for developing Web Applications and Web Services.

Built in the true PHP spirit, the Zend Framework delivers ease-of-use and powerful functionality. It provides solutions for building modern, robust, and secure websites.

http://framework.zend.com/

Posted in PHP

My-BIC – A PHP AJAX “State of Mind”

“State of Mind” as opposed to a “framework”

Jim Plush, the guy behind My-BIC, has come up with some intuitive sample code and tutorials for harnessing the power of AJAX with PHP.

From the Readme:
My-Bic is a very simple concept, we keep javascript and PHP seperate instead of trying to mash them together. This concept allows you to use the client side framework with whatever backend language you choose.

See the My-BIC page for more info:
http://www.litfuel.net/mybic/

Posted in PHP

Yahoo Developer Network – PHP Development Center

http://developer.yahoo.net/php/

Yahoo put together a nice site chock full of helpful code samples and applications to help PHP developers understand and use the Yahoo! ™ API.

Yahoo’s API provides developers with access to quite a bit of useful information. This site makes it pretty simple to understand how to unlock the potential.

Posted in PHP