I just released the initial version of PuPHPet, my GUI-based gnerator for Vagrant/Puppet environments! [...] Enter PuPHPet, my GUI configurator. I have created a simple, easy to use web app that targets PHP developers and the classic LAMP stack. You will not need to learn the ins and outs of Vagrant or Puppet to build your own working VM to your specific needs. As of now you can define things like custom virtual hosts, what version of PHP to install, set up some MySQL databases, etc, all without having to touch a manifest file.

His tool (hosted version is here) lets you define things like machine name, IP address, memory and target folder. You can pick from various server, PHP, MySQL and Apache packages you want installed as well. A custom archive (zip) file will be created that can be dropped into your system ready for use.

I merged my Highcharts branch into master today, including a bunch of improvements to the GUI for XHProf including: using Highcharts for graphing URLs over time, which allows for multiple axis per graph, adding a pie chart to the individual run page to show where time was spent on page load, ability to merge various calls for display within the pie chart (e.g. mysql_* into mysql), switched to the javascript tablesorter for the single run results, filter to allow you to view results only from a specific server or domain

You can see two screenshots of this new feature in action here and here. If you'd like to give the tool a try, you can grab the latest version from github.

Facebook was kind enough to open source the XHProf extension last year, but it flew under my radar until I saw a presentation including it earlier this year when they showed off HipHop. XHProf provides profiling information about your application, while being lightweight enough to run on a production server (against a percentage of requests). Once we got it installed we ran into a few limitations with the existing GUI.

His deadlines were tight, so he admits the code isn't as robust as it could be, but he does offer a tool that uses MySQL for data storage, keeps stats on things like peak memory usage and wall time and uses the Google Data Visualization API to run graphs of the data over time. You can see a few screenshots of the tool in action in the post including this sample graph and this comparison of two different runs against the same resources.

The project is available for download/contribution on github.

If you are familiar with the basics of PHP, then you're probably wondering how you can use it to make your website more appealing. The possibilities are endless, and you can write your own PHP scripts or implement widely available scripts from around the web. Let's get started with 15 creative uses for PHP for your website!

Some of the uses mentioned include:

• E-Commerce
• Graphical User Interface
• Building an Online Community
• Parsing XML Files
• Image Processing and Generation
• Create a PHP Photo Gallery

Others include templating, working with Flash and with one of the more popular PHP blogging tools - WordPress.

Your PC can be turned into a fully capable Web development environment, by installing those three technologies, and configuring them so they communicate with one another. Admittedly, you can simply install and use PHP for its command-line processing. But for creating and testing dynamically generated Web pages on your local machine, then Apache needs to be already installed and working.

If you're wanting to set that part up before you get started and aren't sure how, check out the other tutorial to get started. He works through the process with you, including screenshots of the installer and how to toss MySQL in to the mix.

Our client is looking for a consultant to start asap for a 3-6 month contract opening starting asap for a GUI developer:

Description:

Senior Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience in web application development, specifically on the client GUI side. A good candidate would have strong technical and communication skills with the ability to work independently and in a team environment. Must be able to translate requirements into detailed design specifications and drive the development to completion - including implementation, unit testing, integration, testing, and so on.

Responsibilities:

You will be responsible for the client side of theclient's monitoring and management software. This entails new designs and making enhancements to existing software.

Technical Requirements:

• Must be strong in UI (look-and-feel) design
• 3+ years using PHP, HTML, CSS, Java Script
• Web Services
• Strong SQL with Oracle

Desirable are MySQL, Perl, UNIX scripting, Java Having System administration experience is a plus.

There's no need to install a server and PHP and then try to coordinate them in order to get them to work together. Script GUI comes in one compact package. It includes a server, which is only available to the built-in browser and is a nice security feature. In addition, it supports CGI, virtual hosts, directory aliases, custom error documents and understands most commands in .htaccess files.

He tell how it works (pretty much just install and go) and how it can be configured to work with virtual hosts. Best of all, it already comes with the latest version of PHP for Windows and can interface with several of the popular databases out there.

The list is made up of:

• Crimson Editor
• VS.php
• ez_sql/ez_results - mysql wrapper library
• Smarty Template Engine mysql gui bundle 5.0

There's also a link to a post on the Zend Developer Zone on the topic from a comment. Apparently, it's related to the idea of rapid application development, and this presentation is linked to in a comment on the Zend site. It shows an editor that allows the user to work within a GUI component model based development environment to create a simple dynamic page that loads database data into an HTML table, complete with "back" and "forward" links.

PHP-Qt is an extension for PHP5 that aims to write software with the Qt Toolkit. It provides an object-oriented interface to the Qt4 Framework and allowes to write Qt applications in the PHP language.

Qt by Trolltech is a C++ toolkit for cross-platform GUI application development. Qt provides single-source portability across Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, all major commercial Unix variants, and embedded Linux.

Their first (and latest) release, version 0.0.1, has been posted and is ready for some testing. You need to have PHP 5.1RC1 or later to get it working (as well as the Qt4 development files, of course), but it looks like it has some good potential...]]> Fri, 02 Dec 2005 07:18:44 -0600