The code in the example reduces the image colors to 10, then discards all but one pixel of every color and then creates the palettes out of those colors. This might not be the most accurate way to do this, but at least it's fast.

His code makes three different "palettes" from the image - average, dark and light - and outputs them as a range of colored boxes for each all of the three palettes. Examples of the output are also included in the post.

I made a very light DBAL that uses PHP5.2.x only (Since many people seem to want that) and it has the exact same DSN syntax as MDB2 for now and the query method are also called the same (No API Changes). [...] The main goal of the DBAL is to have a very effective and light way of switching RDBMS but also the possibility to change your DBAL to something more "0feature complete" as such as MDB2.

He includes the list of query method names and the types of databases that he wants it to support (as well as mentioning the fact that it would be unit tested for reliability).

If you keep an eye on the timeline, you probably saw that the symfony unit tests have been completely reworked lately. This is because we switched from simpletest, which was fine but had side effects when functional tests were executed all at once, to our own testing framework, lime.

Lime is more lighweight than PHPUnit or simpletest and has several advantages. First, it launches test files in a sandbox to avoid strange effects between each test file run (one of the reasons we were unable to fix the old symfony core tests). It also introduces a new sfBrowser, sfTestBrowser and more importantly sfDomCssSelectorBrowser that allow you to write functionnal tests with ease. It is not backward compatible but is a lot more powerful than the old system. Oh, and it holds in a single file, lime.php, without any dependence.

They show some examples of its usage (and a note on which tests will need to be updated) as well as the output that would come of it. They've also included some sample tests (in the "test/" folder of the release) if you'd like to check it out more throughly.

Matthew also mentions a real truth behind programming, no matter who you are - that it takes practice, lots and lots of practice. That's what it is - constant practice so you know better how to combat the troubles you might find the next time they rear their ugly head.

The concept's pretty simple - the form they build submits back to the page and writes the input out to a file. This file is then read by the controller for the LED they have connected and, with the proper input, will turn it on and off. The code for the PHP/web side of things is included, but it might take a little work to get the rest of the hardware interfaced (as the author saw as well).

Chris also points out some of the interesting comments made in the entry, including mentions of Digg's stats and some great comments testifying to the light, powerful nature of PHP.

The most popular open-source software is also the most free of bugs, according to the first results of a U.S. government-sponsored effort to help make such software as secure as possible.

The so-called LAMP stack of open-source software has a lower bug density--the number of bugs per thousand lines of code--than a baseline of 32 open-source projects analysed, Coverity, a maker of code analysis tools, announced Monday.

The results are a product of a Homeland Security effort (performed by Stanford University) for three years. They found that the LAMP combination contained about 0.434 bugs per 1,000 lines of code. Unfortunately, their results also showed, of those problems, PHP had the higest bug count of the four.]]> Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:25:42 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4927 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4927 CodeIgniter, an "Open Source Web Application Framework that makes writing kick-ass PHP programs simple as apple pie".

Designed to enable, not overwhelm, Code Igniter is a powerful PHP/MySQL framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.

If you're a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you're tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks that require rocket science to understand, Code Igniter might just be the right tool for you.

They've released a beta (version 1.0) for public consumption, and it looks like it has promise. It has simplicity at its core, and makes it simple to build up useful apps quickly. Be sure to check out the videos of it in action...]]> Fri, 03 Mar 2006 06:56:13 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4864 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4864 his latest post, Jim Plush looks at an Ajax/PHP framework that he has created that's lightweight and supports just the bare-bones of things - My-BIC.

I'm looking for some volunteers to try it out and voice their opinions. The basic concept is: one xmlhttp class that takes care of sending and receiving data and a php script on the server that acts as a front controller that all ajax requests go through.

2 lines of javascript and one php class are all you need to get an ajax setup going! So far it's for PHP5 however if there is interest in PHP4 I will create a quick version for that as well.

He gives a code example in the post, and includes a graphic detailing how it all ties together. For more information on this simple framework, check out its current site.]]> Mon, 20 Feb 2006 07:06:36 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4757 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4757 Pierre has posted his second look at working with the imagepng function today over on his blog.

Bernhard Seefeld was testing the new compression option for imagepng and was wondering why there is still a relative big difference in image sizes.

In my first attempt to create smaller images, I only allowed to change the compression, it was not sufficient to get really lite pictures.

After a short look to the libpng codebase (and the horrible imagick doc), I added a last argument to imagepng, the filtering mode.

He includes code later in the post, showing how to use this filtering option to make even smaller images (an option included from PHP 5.1.3 and up).]]> Mon, 30 Jan 2006 07:37:31 -0600