PHP has a great many tools for interacting with a network and also with the Internet. In this article we will look at some of those tools and functions to see how we can use them to make our scripts more useful in a network environment.

They look at the fopen, gethostbyname, gethostbynamel, getservbyport and the Net_Whois PEAR package (among others).

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here's fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

Some of the packages they link to include Ajaxd WordPress, Profiles, Quick SMS, Invite Friends and SezWho.

PHP Groups, a worldwide network for PHP user groups, launched today with the intent to foster an open community for PHP user groups to share and exchange ideas and information. Membership is open to anyone working with a PHP user group or interested in starting one.

At present, PHP Groups provides a mailing list where user group leaders and those interested may subscribe and take part in a dialog with other user groups. "I hope that part of our accomplishments will involve uniting and bringing together for an open dialog all of the PHP user groups across the world," said Ramsey. "I hope this mailing list can get that conversation going."

If you're interested in the project and want to get involved, check out their mailing list and website to get complete details.

caching services such as coral content distribution network provide an alternative for when your site goes down, but why wait until it gets to that stage? why not just send all your hits from high-end websites to the coral cache version? well, there isn't a good reason not to, so i'll show you how to do it automatically.

He provides the simple script that looks for certain sites in the "HTTP_REFERER" value of incoming calls and pushes them off to the cached location with a header() redirect. The whole thing is only 12 lines, not counting the $sites array.

We now have an IRC channel for the PHP Appalachia conference - Freenode - #phpappalachia. Come join us!

You can access the Freenode network with any IRC client and can join in on the channel at any time. Come find out others who are coming and get the latest on the conference.

He starts with a brief look back to see how far the script's come before charging ahead into even more expansion. He fleshes out the getMXRecords and checkDNSRecords methods before adding in come TCP service functions - scanPort and getWhois. Finally, he wraps it all back into the class and takes one last look at the entire creation (and a simple example that checks the DNS and scans ports for the host "google.com".

If you didn't get a change to check out part one, it's definitely suggested that you do so before you start on this section. As mentioned, they're going to show you how to add other functionality to the class, including the ability to ping another server, check the current machine's network settings, perform a "netstat" command, and get the MX records for a hostname. At the end, they stick it all together in the complete (so far) class for easy cut and paste.

The goal of the channel is to foster talks about topics such as design patterns, emerging PHP concepts, working on the bleeding edge, and new ways of doing old things. The channel is already set up and running smooth with users constantly around (though they might be just lurking), so come on over and join in.

The two major features added are JSON client side encoding and network down handling. Client side JSON encoding will allow you to send more complex structures to your PHP script and they can get converted to normal PHP objects. The other major feature is handling network down issues.

For example if your client script cannot get a response back from the server My-Bic will now allow you to define your own network down function or you can use the default method which creates a div on the screen alerting the user of network issues. If there are 3 requests that fail in a row My-Bic disables itself until the page is reloaded. All of those settings are configurable so you can change or override them.

The addition of these two features is definitely a plus for the framework - they provide two more advanced features that any developer can use thanks to the simplicity of the My-Bic framework. Some of the other features of the framework include easy forms, a built-in submission queue, and a bit to help you in debugging your scripts.]]> Fri, 31 Mar 2006 20:08:08 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4857 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4857 this new tutorial that covers the rapid creation of PHP applications with the help of the Achievo ATK PHP application framework.

In this article, you will learn the power of this combination by using the open source Achievo ATK PHP application framework to build a Web application on top of an existing Oracle database. Using the venerable scott schema as an example, you will see how to build a Web application with full CRUD (create, read, update, delete) support for managing employees and departments in just a few steps and in fewer than 100 lines of code.

The tutorial introduces the framework and leads you through how to get it all installed on your (Linux/Unix or Windows) system. From there, it's all code - creating the initial module, adding nodes to perform actions, and linking them together with relations in the data.]]> Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:54:43 -0600