Offloading slow batch tasks to an external process is a common method of improving website responsiveness. One great way to initiate such background tasks in PHP is to use Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing in a producer-consumer message passing fashion. [...] The following example simulates an application user registration system where the PHP application queues each new user's street address. An external system monitoring the queue can then fetch and process that address. In real life the external system might initiate a snail-mail welcome letter, or do further, slower automated validation on the address.

He includes the SQL needed to create the database and configure the queue system as well as start it up and get it ready for requests. He shows how to push an address into the queue for processing and how to get the results once it has completed in both the SQL and from the oci_* functions in PHP.

For months now I have been telling myself I would create an in-depth, multi-part series of articles that would take a developer from being a complete newbie at testing to have them mocking classes left and right and asserting until the break of dawn. This series will introduce you to the core concepts of testing. It will tell you why statics are bad, why dependency injection is king, what the difference between a mock and a stub is and how to love the red and green bar.

The four parts of the series he's posted are:

• Unit Testing Tutorial Part I: Introduction to PHPUnit
• Unit Testing Tutorial Part II: Assertions, Writing a Useful Test and @dataProvider
• Unit Testing Tutorial Part III: Testing Protected/Private Methods, Coverage Reports and CRAP
• Unit Testing Tutorial Part IV: Mock Objects, Stub Methods and Dependency Injection

I'm going to throw out here some potential advanced skills from off the top of my head - not at all a complete list.... PHP objects? PHP regular expressions? Frameworks? Security measures? Ability to use PHP to do cool things like recursive node walking of XML files? Use of third party libraries? Or would you add something else entirely? Just curious, because I'm looking for work and want to know if I can reasonably bill myself as having advanced PHP skills. Thanks for the input!

Responses cover a wide range of topics including:

• the Zend Certification(s)
• Clean, easy to understand coding practices
• How to effectively test your applications
• Addressing security concerns

CodeIgniter is a widely used PHP framework that aims to help developers write better structured code and remove boilerplate tasks from the workflow. In this article, I'm going to explain some incredibly useful techniques to use when developing applications using CodeIgniter.

They cover things like setting up easier configuration parameters, optional config settings, creating HTML emails, application versions and separate response formats.

We felt that the other handful of PHP Meetup groups in the area cater to those just starting out more often than not. The engineers who are serious about building professional, enterprise-level applications don't really have a group where they can consistently expect presentations on those topics.

The focus of the group is less on the basic "hows" and "whys" of PHP and more on things like performance/scaling, optimization, testing and application architecture. If you're interested in joining the group, check out < href="http://www.meetup.com/pro-php/">their Meetup page. There's no word (as of the time of this post) on when their first meeting will be, but it sounds like an interesting group.

You already know Singleton, Signal/Observer, Factory and friends. But, which object oriented patterns are en vogue in the PHP world and how can you seize their power? This talk gives you an overview on Dependency Injection, Data Mapper and more OO patterns the PHP world talks about right know, using practical code examples.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can follow along with the talk in his slides over on the qafoo.com site.

Sporting more than 70 native array-related functions, PHP's array manipulation capabilities have long been one of the language's most attractive features. [...] There are however many array-related tasks which ask a bit more of the developer than merely knowing what part of the manual one needs to consult. Many such tasks require a somewhat more in-depth understanding of the native features, or are possible only when a bit of imagination is applied to the problem.

In his examples he shows how to do things like sorting a multi-dimensional array, iterating recursively (with the help of a RecursiveArrayIterator), converting an object to an array and doing "natural" sorting on an array's contents.

As Codeigniter builds on its (already considerable) popularity, now might be a good time to think about using the massively community-supported PHP framework to its maximum potential, if you aren't already. Here are two tutorials to check out, depending on your level of familiarity with object-oriented PHP and frameworks.

Here's the two he mentions:

• Codeigniter for the absolute beginner
• Developing dynamic Web sites with CodeIgniter

The second tutorial is a little older, but the functionality of the framework hasn't changed dramatically since then so most of it should still apply.

On a previous post I had someone comment that they did not agree that the code implementation that was presented in the article was advanced (which was described in the title). They also claimed that I was not an advanced PHP programmer. This made me think. Not because my programming skill or knowledge was challenged. But because I'm not sure what makes code or a programmer "advanced".

He asks a few questions about the criteria for considering someone an "advanced programmer" including things like how fast or efficient they are, how much they make or the conference(s) they've been to. He points out that, because "advanced" is such a relative term, it's hard to put a finger on it. Being this hard to define (and mostly worthless even if it is) he suggests an alternative to trying to figure it out:

Instead of throwing around general terms in labeling code or other programmers, let's come together and figure out ways in improving code together. Practical applications.

Last year I wrote an article in how to implement basic validation for a form with PHP. I decided to re-look at this and improve what I did in that article. This time we are going to make a more advanced PHP form that is more responsive and effective. This PHP sample code has many advantages over the previous article. Not only that, but for the most part it is easier to implement with more complexed forms where you need more than basic validation.

He uses PHP5, jQuery and a helpful validation plugin than handles a lot of the heavy lifting for you in defining a validate() method with the field names and checks to perform on them. You just apply this to the form and it works like magic. Don't forget the backend though - he includes code to check for things like values being set and specific checks on a few fields.