Today I discovered a very powerful addition to the PHP world. Phar is an archive extension for PHP that allows an entire PHP application to be packaged into a single file. It's basically PHP's answer to Java's .jar archive format. Don't get excited yet, it gets better...

He mentions the reasons that make it "particularly handy" such as it being integrated into the next major PHP release (5.3) and that it makes deployment quick and easy. He includes a brief code snippet to show how a sample Phar archive could be created (via streams).

A common way to automate development and deployment tasks is by writing shell scripts, however, Phing provides some advantages over shell scripts for task automation. [...] But, having a large collection of shell scripts can lead to a maintenance nightmare, reason why I decided to port some of them to PHP as Phing tasks. I chose Phing because it's simple, powerful and very easy to extend.

He talks about DbDeployTask (an optional task for database revisions) and how to use the system for Agile development practices.

PHP Vikinger is over again. With about 35 attendees, I would think it was a great success. After opening the event, we figured out which topics people were interested in. After voting for the topics, we came up with a nice couple of topics.

Topics included QA/Testing, web application deployment a look at PHP's document object model functionality and some presentations on Project Zero, the new PHP lexer, eZ Components and database abstraction.

While I really prefer to use tools like this for deployment, I understand that not everyone wants to mess with standalone programs and configuration files. I've been asked before about Cake-specific deployment techniques, so I figure the easiest way is to see about adding a task to the Cake console.

His idea consists of two new commands - "cake deploy config" and "cake deploy" to make it simple to set up and directly deploy applications without having to go to outside software.

With the recent talk on the blogosphere about deployment (and for Django, and lots of other posts too), people are thinking about PHP a bit more analytically. I think people mostly get it wrong.

He points out that PHP, in essence, is a CGI-style execution and, in being so, makes it more flexible. Both sides, web and command line, can work with the language equally well. He also mentions the developer/administrator split he sees in PHP's structure and how the language facilitates it.

Speakers for this year's event include:

• Sebastian Bergmann - PHP Testing with PHPUnit
• Jan Lehnardt - Next generation data storage with CouchDb
• Derick Rethans - PHP's Dirty Secrets
• Kore Nordmann - Tagging

Topics of other talks to be presented include things like XUL theory, application deployment, personal information management and web services. Check out the full schedule and get ready to head over to Sankt Augustin August 25th and 26th for the fun.

Posting in the full realization of the futility of doing so, there's some PHP bashing (as usual) happening on reddit at the moment: PHP vs Python - the real difference, brought on by this mildly amusing image. While I can accept the points - technically it's actually much harder in handle errors uniformly in PHP and the community is less rich in computer scientists than Python - the corresponding flame war on reddit manages to miss a different point, which is easiest expressed in code.

He gives two sample scripts and asks what the real differences are. He answers his own question by way of saying that what matters between the two is how they're deployed (when it comes to error reporting):

Because PHP "resets" after each request ( see here or for much more detail here ) it's actually not always necessary to handle errors explicitly'"assuming there's not something fundamentally "broke" about your code and it's some kind of runtime error (e.g. db is down), it's often enough to just ignore the problem and wait for the system to "right itself" - nothing is going to leave PHP in a state it can't recover from.

PHP has been incredibly successful as a deployment platform for web applications. However, PHP as a platform is far from homogenous. With many different versions installed and the vast configurability of php.ini, there can be a great deal of variation from PHP installation to PHP installation. PHP developers often ask what should I target?

In his opinion, the statistics about usage need to be taken with a grain of salt and, with a bit of digging, some of the differences between them (expose_php anyone?) can be found. He rounds out the post with a recommendation to all developers out there - since the barrier for moving to PHP 5 is so low these days, what's stopping you?

NuSphere has released PhpDock 1.5! In a nutshell, NuSphere PhpDock is an innovative new PHP deployment solution that includes a Web server and browser, all combined in a single, small executable which runs your PHP scripts and renders it into HTML inside of a desktop application window. With PhpDock, you can deploy the same PHP or HTML application as a Web application, or as a stand-alone desktop application. See for yourself just how easy it is to build and run a PHP application as a Windows application by checking out the sample application that is supplied with PhpDock.

You can check out a trial of the software before buying by downloading it from their site or just buy it online for about $150 USD.

In "The J2EE guy still doesn't get PHP", Harry Fuecks suggests that PHP really needs [someone] to get together and write a detailed paper on how it works and why PHP scales so we can all live happily ever after.

I could not agree more.

Sebastian even notes that just recently, such a document would have come in very handy in a discussion. Unfortunately, he hasn't had the experience needed to make such a paper himself, so he's asking the community to help on the project and give suggestions/comments/offers of help in the comments of this blog posting.