I recently wanted to perform a HEAD request to a file, after which I wanted to perform some more advanced HTTP interaction, so CURL was also the tool of choice here.

He started with the (slow?) command line to get the parameters right before moving into PHP. After picking out the right ones ("curl -I -X HEAD http://localhost/admin/") he transfers them into a series of curl_setopt calls that specifies a HEAD request type and no content to send (with CURLOPT_NOBODY).

This current tirade stems from implementing a file upload progress meter in PHP5. Yes, PHP5.2 has some hook, and there's a PECL extension. [...] I realize this is partially a PHP issue I'm ranting about, but it's ultimately a hacky workaround to a basic piece of functionality that browsers should support.

He mentions an example where he basically directly asked a member of the IE team about it. It wasn't greeted seriously and still hasn't managed to be included in most of the popular browsers of today.

Opcode caches save energy, expenses, improve overall user experience on web sites, and it's often one of the simplest optimizations to implement. This article will explain the basics of installing, configuring, and tuning an opcode cache for PHP, the Alternative PHP Cache (APC).

The article focuses on how the APC works and how to get it up and working on your installation (as pulled from the pecl repositories). They look at some of the functions the extension's API includes (like ap_cache_info or ap_store for manual caching) as well as some more advanced topics like locking performance, working with TTL, cache priming and filtering.

Since there are more and more people in the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) community that start asking for diversity in the development side, Nick Boldt has suggested to help out and contribute patches to the project "if there's Zend folks willing to coach me...". Actually, I am very excited from his (and others) proposal, since it's the first time a group of people have stated that they want to contribute to PDT.

The event will happen on May 30th, 2008 and an effort will be made to squash as many from this list as possible (as well as potential others that might be found along the way). You can get more information about how to participate and help out the PDT project on this page on the Eclipse site.

If you use YAML in PHP, then you had until recently the choice between the C based PECL extension syck or the horrible spyc PHP based implementation. With syck it has the issue that it only supports the core standard and not stuff like merge-key, which is a very very useful extension to the core YAML standard.

He also points out another implementation that the Symfony framework has created - one built around regular expressions (slower, but a "more correct" version).

The gallery and the user registration. The whole site tilllate.com is now running on Trevi, our extension of Zend Framework. With a reach of 2.5 million unique clients a month, tilllate.com is one of the world's biggest installation of Zend Framework.

They talk about the two upgraded parts of their older system - the move up to the Zend_Db database abstraction layer and a change to use memoization in the Zend_Date and Zend_Config components.

The Windows installers and archives were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

These updated packages can be downloaded from the Downloads page on PHP.net as usual (with each updated package having a note indicating the change).

When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There's just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here's how to get off to a flying start.

He points you first in the direction of the preg_* functions then towards a few examples (like with mod_rewrite) and tools to help you understand how things match, like the regex tested extension for firefox and the regular expression cheat sheet on ILoveJackDaniels.com.

I was trying to interact with my subversion repositories using PHP yesterday and I knew that PECL has a extension named "SVN" for PHP users. So I tried to install in in my machine by when I tried to install it with the [following] command it always failed.

The trick to his hint is to install the libsvn-dev package (found via a search with apt-get) and installed and compiled in to the PHP installation with the extension. Sample code is included.

This [validation from an external site like the W3C validator] approach is a good start, but it is far from ideal because it is based on an honor system of sorts. You often forget to validate each change you make and there is always some corner case that you forget. So, what can be done about it? Well, if you find yourself developing in PHP, you can employ the following solution.

The code he includes pulls in the XHTML content from your page (or the output of the framework's view layer) and pushes it into a DOMDocument that's build with the LIBXML_DTDLOAD and LIBXML_DTDATTR options.