Chris Roane has a new post to his blog asking an interesting question - should PHP programmers/developers spend the time to go to college?

A common debate in our field is whether or not a college education is worth it when becoming a PHP programmer. People will throw statistics in how much more money you can make with a college degree. But is the cost of college (time + tuition) for a four year degree better than the benefits of having four years of experience in the web programming field?

He qualifies it with the fact that not all college educations are created equal and that it depends on the student as to what they get out of it. He breaks it up into a few different sections with reasoning in each:

• The Benefits of Going to College
• The Cost of Going to College
• The Benefits of a PHP Programmer Not Going to College
• The Negative Aspects of a PHP Programmer Skipping College

Chris Jones has a new post to his Oracle blog today about a situation he found himself in with his recent Zend Framework application. The issue popped up when he tried to use more than just the basic controller.

I've been using NetBeans with Frameworks recently. I had no problem when doing a single controller example in Zend Framework, so I knew everything was installed OK and mod_rewrite was "working" fine. But I would click a URL that should be routed to a second controller and see an error [about the requested URL not being found].

His solution was to add a new line to his .htaccess file so Apache knew where to start the rewrite from (instead of it being relative) - a RewriteBase path.

Rob Allen has a new post for all of the unit test fans out there wanting to test their Zend Framework controllers. He show how to make it worlds easier with the help of Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase.

Testing controllers has traditionally been a hassle due to the requirements of setting up the bootstrap, the front controller and initiating the dispatch cycle. In June, Matthew addressed this with the release of Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase way back in 2008. Later, Matthew helpfully wrote an article on how to use it and I have used that as a starting point for the information here.

He illustrates with the TodoIt application and shows how to correctly set up PHPUnit including a TestHelper file that acts as a bootstrap when running the tests. Rob gives the code for a sample controller and a basic tests to run against it - checking for an "h1" element containing "Login".

In a new post to his blog Kevin Schroeder shows how to use the Zend_Server component of the Zend Framework to make a script that automatically makes the server you need based off of the request type.

I've been doing some work with Adobe on some articles and one of them was on working with mobile clients with Flash. Well, me being the masochist I did more. What I did was write an example that worked as a full website, an Ajax website, a Flash service and an XML-RPC service. [...] In a plugin, which I will show you in a bit, I attached an instance of Zend_Server_Interface. Then in the controller I simple told it to do its thing, with the exception of handing the Service Mapping Description for JSON-RPC ($smd). That's it.

Because of how the XML-RPC, JSON and AMF servers are handled, they extend the main Zend_Server_Interface, making it easy to create them on the fly. He includes the code for both the sample controller and the plugin mentioned above. It checks for Ajax, AMF, XML and JSON request types and sets the service handler correctly. If there's not one, it falls back on the mapping.

In his continuing look at using CouchDb as a file system, Gonzalo Ayuso has posted this third part in the group of articles about using streams to connect your scripts to the database instance.

I'm still working in my filesystem with CouchDb. After creating a library to enable working with PHP and CouchDB (see the post here), and after using Monkey Patching to override standard PHP's filesystem functions. I've created another solution now. Thanks to a comment in my last post (many thanks Benjamin) I've discovered that it's possible to create a stream wrapper in PHP (I thought it was only available with a C extension).

He includes the code for the stream connection wrapper, a pretty simple script that parses the string it's given and opens a read/write stream to the source. There's also a "url_stat" method that will return to you the size of the stream in bytes. Then you just register the wrapper and go about your normal file system calls to use the CouchDb directly.

• Mail_mimeDecode 1.5.2
• PHP_CodeSniffer 1.3.0RC1
• Mail_mimeDecode 1.5.3

Chris Tankersley has a new post to how blog looking at a powerful but sometimes seldom used feature of PHP - Reflection. His post introduces you to some of the basics you can use to have your code find out more about itself.

Reflection is a metaprogramming construct that allows a program to look into itself and do a multitude of different things - gain meaning, watch execution, call code, or even provide feedback. [...] With PHP 5, PHP gained a robust reflection class that allows a developer to gain access to just about every aspect of an object and interact with it. The key is figuring out what is available, and then exploiting it to gain additional benefits.

He gives examples from his project where it uses the ReflectionClass feature to pull in the values of a class including properties and methods in a class (a set of ReflectionMethods). Some code is provided to make the examples a bit more clear.

Brian Swan has a new post to his blog today about consuming protected feeds of OData coming from SQL Azure in a PHP application.

I did write a post a few weeks ago that described how to enable anonymous access to SQL Azure OData feeds (Consuming SQL Azure Data with the OData SDK for PHP), but I had a few things to learn about AppFabric access control before I felt comfortable writing about authenticated access to these feeds.

He starts from the Azure side, creating a sample OData feed and adding permissions to only allow access to a specific (database) user for the feed. You'll use a set of data to connect to the feed - a username, a secret key, an issuer name and the OData endpoint address. Then, using the OData SDK he shows how to generate the needed classes with the automatic tool and use them to connect to the endpoint and retrieve data from the feed. He also includes a little snippet for those that might not want to use the SDK - an example using curl to connect and authorize the session.

Lorna Mitchell has posted her second part of her "tips for [tech] event hosting" series (first part here) with some suggestions for the day of the event - those last minute things that might get forgotten.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. [...] As an organiser you see all the small behind-the-scenes crises, but if they are invisible to the average attendee, then you're doing really well.

She makes suggestions about the little things - ensuring name badges are ready, a posted schedule of the happenings at the event (not every event will have programs), check in on all of the tech like projectors, wifi and the like as well as keeping track of things like hashtags on twitter to see what people like and don't like more immediately.

Kevin Schroeder has the latest excerpt from his book posted ("You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?") with a focus on the SPL - Standard PHP Library. He specifically takes a quick look at Iterators.

If you are doing any data processing whatsoever you are using arrays. And most likely you are doing database queries, iterating over the results and doing your algorithm-ing. But what if you have additional functionality that you need to have integrated with your data. You could go the traditional route and copy and paste half your application around or you could build, what we like to call structured applications. SPL allows you to do that.

In the excerpt he mentions the methods that come built in to Iterators like rewind, current and valid. There's also some sample code showing a custom iterator that works with some user data to output the information set in the constructor. You can find out more about this chapter and the rest in Kevin's book.