Hello again from sunny Watford.
We have some great articles for you this week, including an interesting insight into the theory that it was actually Wordpress that made PHP popular, and not PHP frameworks.
Also, with the Web and PHP Conference coming up next month, you can have your say in the program by voting for your favourite speaker.
Love to hear your thoughts and opinions on all we do here at PHPWeekly.
Enjoy the sunshine, see you next week!
Katie |
Articles
PHP Development and Cloud Computing
An interview with Cloud Computing champion Vito Chin.
Facebook Invents a PHP Virtual Machine
Social networking giant Facebook has taken another step at making the PHP Web programming language run more quickly. The company has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems.
7 Reasons Why Wordpress Made PHP Popular, not PHP Frameworks
Recently the Tiobe Index published an update of their programming language index on which they claim PHP has been raising in popularity due to Zend Framework 2, but they do not justify why. Read this article to learn about the opinion why this claim is unfounded and PHP popularity has more to do with Wordpress than with PHP, as one language may be more popular than PHP Frameworks.
PHP Phragmentation - Get Off My Lawn!
Daily grumblings of MrSmileyFace
The Seven Stages of Drupal Development
Read this recent presentation by Fredric Mitchell, from the Twin Cities Drupal Camp last week.
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Tutorials and Talks
Turning PHP On and Off in Unexpected Places
PHP allows us to shift in and out of "PHP gear" any time we want... even right in the middle of an if statement.
Using PHP and Oracle Database 12c Implicit Result Sets
The new Oracle Database 12c "Implicit Result Sets" (IRS) feature allows query results to be returned from a stored PL/SQL procedure (or a PL/SQL anonymous block) without requiring special PHP code. Support for IRS is available in PHP OCI8 2.0.0-devel extension when it is compiled and used with Oracle Database 12c. (OCI8 2.0 can be compiled and used with other versions of Oracle Database but the available feature set is reduced).
Retrofitted Login Throttling
Last month, Nintendo announced that one of its sites (Nintendo Club of Japan) had been compromised by a brute force login attack. The attackers made 15,000,000 authentication attempts, and successfully took control of 24,000 accounts. The attack would have failed if Nintendo had implemented login throttling.
How To Parse An Array in PHP
3 methods of parsing an array really quickly in PHP. The logic is similar in any programming language, be it php, perl, python, c, c++ etc., the logic is the same, but the syntax may be slightly different.
Using PHP's NumberFormatter to Format Currencies
Rob Allen has been using number_format() for a very long time, but recently discovered that within the intl extension there's a NumberFormatter class available too. This is quite a clever class as it is Locale aware and handles formatting currency, including the correct symbol.
Scraping Google Maps Search Results With JavaScript and PHP
Google Maps provides several useful APIs for accessing data: a geocoding API to convert addresses to latitude and longitude, a search API to provide locations matching a term, and a details API for retrieving location metadata.
An Introduction to HHVM
HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) converts PHP code into a high-level bytecode (commonly known as an intermediate language). This bytecode is then translated into x64 machine code dynamically at runtime by a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. In these respects, HHVM has similarities to virtual machines for other languages including C#/CLR and Java/JVM.
Simple Chat Using WebSocket and PHP Socket
The WebSocket is a feature of HTML5 for establishing a socket connection between a web browser and a server. Once the connection has been established with the server, all WebSocket data (frames) are sent directly over a socket rather than usual HTTP response and requests, giving us much faster and persistent communication between a web browser and a server. Let’s create a simple chat system using this cool technology (HTML5 WebSocket and PHP).
Revisiting Benchmarking Dependency Injection Containers
Phil Bennett has returned to a topic he covered earlier to refresh some of the statistics and add a few newer technologies to the mix. In this new post he benchmarks some of the more popular PHP-based dependency injection containers.
Data Structures for PHP Devs: Graphs
In one of my previous articles I introduced you to the tree data structure. Now I’d like to explore a related structure – the graph. Graphs have a number of real-world applications, such as network optimisation, traffic routing and social network analysis. Google’s PageRank, Facebook’s Graph Search, and Amazon’s and NetFlix’s recommendations are some examples of graph-driven applications.
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News and Announcements
PHP OCI8 2.0.0-devel for Oracle Database is on PECL
PHP OCI8 2.0.0-devel is now available on PECL (and in the PHP 'master' branch). This is a development release, so changes may occur.
Web & PHP Conference Sep 16-18th - Timetable Preview
Web & PHP Conference has previewed the timetable for their FREE conference. The conference welcomes the PHP community to an event that boasts some of the greatest speakers - from the already renowned in the PHP industry to the rising stars; to great content and sessions. All this can be accessed completely free! Head to the website for more information. Make sure to register for your place at the event!
Web & PHP Conference - Session Vote
For this year’s FREE Web & PHP Conference in San Jose, Sep 16-18, we want YOU to get involved and have YOUR say in the program. We have reserved a number of places in the schedule to be picked by the community, decided by an online vote. Each week, we’ll be putting up a group of four abstracts and asking you to vote on your favourite. This week in Round 4, battling it out for your vote, we have: Evan Coury v Mike Stowe v Joshua Thijssen v Matt Simonsen. Who is your favourite? Who do you want to see speaking at the Conference? Make your choice and you can see them give their session... and it won't even cost you a penny or a cent! Have your say and vote now!
Ski PHP Conference - Call For Speakers
The Utah PHP Users Group is organising the Ski PHP Conference 2014, in Salt Lake City on January 17th and 18th 2014. They have started a call for speakers. Learn here about their generous speaker package, in order to get the best speakers possible. If you are interested in speaking submit your proposal by August 31st.
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Reading and Viewing
The Power of PHP - Meet Michelangelo van Dam
In our first "video podcast", I recently spoke with prominent PHP developer Michelangelo van Dam (aka @DragonBe) about PHP, its history, current trends toward convergence and compatibility, use in the enterprise, and where Drupal fits in the picture. This conversation is a follow-up to Michelangelo's guest blogpost on Acquia.com: "The power of PHP: The Swiss Army Knife of Digital".
Instant PHP Web Scraping (by Jacob Ward, published 26th July 2013)
Get up and running with the basic techniques of web scraping using PHP.
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Jobs
If you have a position that needs filling, let us know and we will include it.
Performance Telecom (UK) seek freelancer (Remote worker) - Python and PHP Developer
This position is primarily Python, but PHP skills are also required.
Senior PHP Developer in Bucharest, Romania
We are searching for a passionate PHP developer who will be part of a team of senior programmers and experienced testing engineers, directly involved in technical development projects, using Agile Scrum as methodology. |
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
Rockmongo for PHP-Powered MongoDB Administration
By default, MongoDB provides the interactive JavaScript-based mongo shell which can be used for performing database operations. Although this shell may be the best approach to start with MongoDB queries, a GUI tool to administer the service is always useful.
Phalcon PHP - Higher Performance Web Framework
Phalcon PHP is a web framework delivered as a C extension providing high performance and lower resource consumption. Phalcon PHP is written in C with platform independence in mind. As a result, Phalcon PHP is available on Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, You can either download a binary package for the system of your choice or build it from sources.
Stringy
A PHP library with a variety of string manipulation functions with multibyte support. Offers both OO method chaining and a procedural-style static wrapper. Compatible with PHP 5.3+. Inspired by underscore.string.js.
eloquent/pathogen
Pathogen is a general purpose library for path manipulation. Pathogen supports file system paths including Unix and Windows style paths, but is truly a general-purpose path implementation, capable of representing URI paths and other path-like structures while providing a comprehensive API.
Fetch
Fetch is a library for reading email and attachments, primarily using the POP and IMAP protocols. Fetch was part of a large project, Mortar, which is hosted on Google Code. It is currently being migrated over to Github, as well as being updated to support modern php features. While the project is in flux I encourage you to try it out, but be careful about using it in a production environment without proper testing.
PHPUnit -Coverage-Listener
PHPUnit Coverage Listener is a utility library that allows you to process the PHPUnit code-coverage information and send it into some remote location via cURL. The main goal of the PHPunit Coverage Listener package is to provide a mechanism that generates a payload data (from PHPUnit code-coverage information) named coverage.json and send it to remote location.
Introducing Nanimator Library - for Nano Animations
It’s primary purpose is to animate a set of DOM elements inside a container, mainly translate, translateX, translateY and opacity. It also reduces your code by writing almost nothing at all, except initialising the library.
eloquent/schemer
Generic schema validation library for PHP, based on JSON Schema.
LitleCo/little-sdk-for-PHP
Litle & Co. powers the payment processing engines for leading companies that sell directly to consumers through internet retail, direct response marketing (TV, radio and telephone), and online services. Litle & Co. is the leading, independent authority in card-not-present (CNP) commerce, transaction processing and merchant services.
saasu
This is a PHP Client library for Saasu, the online accounting software. This library is designed to make it easy to work with the Saasu API for general purpose.
ramsey/uuid
A PHP 5.3+ library for generating and working with RFC 4122 version 1, 3, 4, and 5 universally unique identifiers (UUID). Much inspiration for this library came from the Java and Python UUID libraries.
SocalNick/ScnSocialAuth
Uses the HybridAuth PHP library to Enable authentication via Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, etc for the ZfcUser ZF2 module.
PHP Mongo Query
PHPMongoQuery implements MongoDB queries in PHP, allowing developers to query a 'document' (an array containing data) against a Mongo query object, returning a boolean value for pass or fail. Additionally a set of documents can be queried to filter them, as queries are used in MongoDB. |
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