PHPDeveloper.org

International PHP Magazine: Poll Question: You Did Not Know That

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:16:19 -0500

The International PHP Magazine has conducted a poll on its website over the past week, this time asking "You Did Not Know That...", asking developers which of the true statements about PHP they didn't know about.

The options this time were:

The trailing '?>' in PHP is Optional
You can embed other programming languages in PHP
Objects can be made to look like arrays by using Standard PHP Library
require is faster than require_once
Anything Less than 5.1.0 is Silly
All

There wasn't a whole lot of difference in the results of this poll, but the most all-inclusive of the list was the one selected the most - "All". Following that, was that the trailing closing PHP tag is optional, then a tie for third between the "embed other languages" and "Less than PHP 5.1.0" options.

Be sure to cast your vote in their latest poll that asks readers that they're really looking for in their frameworks.

Adam Trachtenberg's Blog: PHP 5 + COM + Skype Help Wanted

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 07:15:49 -0500

Adam Trachtenberg is looking for some help in the COM department, specficially in using it with PHP5.

I'm trying to use PHP 5.2 to talk to Skype via the COM extension and Skype4COM interface.

I'm using this example from the Skype Forum, but I get a COM exception of "Skype client is not installed."

He also points to someone else with the problem, but still hasn't quite found a solution. Anyone want to help?

Justin Silverton's Blog: PHP vs Perl

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 18:24:04 -0500

Justin Silverton has posted a comparison between PHP and Perl, with the first part coming more from the PHP side comparing it to Perl and the second the opposite.

He starts off with some of the differences between the two langauges, including that PHP was made for the web, Perl was not and that PHP scripts take less overhead for the web server to run that Perl scripts as CGIs. There are also four larger topics that he looks at:

PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations
PHP has inconsistent function naming
PHP has no lexical scope
PHP has too many functions in the main namespace

All but the top item (that one could be argued either way) are reasons that a Perl user might cite against using PHP. For each of the items, there's a bit of description following to give you a better idea where they're coming from.

Wolfgang Drews' Blog: PHP Frameworks - to use or not to use?

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 08:25:22 -0600

It seems like all of the buzz in the PHP community lately is about the proliferation of several PHP frameworks including the Zend Framework, Symfony, and eZ Components. In response to this surge, several developers are offering their opinions on the matter, including Wolfgang Drews, maintainer of DynamicWebPages.de.

There are now so many Frameworks out there for php (just have a short look at dmoz, there are 46 listed, missing some wellknown ones like ezComponents, ZendFramework, Solar, Symfony, Code Igniter, ..., and what about PEAR??) - but which one are you going to use? Well, i guess it is a challenging question, especially if it is now up to you to decide this for a new starting project. Probably all frameworks have some strengths and weaknesses, but how long does it take you to evaluate them? You need some faster criteria to decide, and maybe these one will help you.

The "must have" questions he shares include:

Is the framework well documented?
Is the framework backed by a well known company?
Does the framework fit into your IT-landscape?

Each is as important as the next and together they, and their answers, make for a well-rounded look at each framework.

Justin Siltervon's Blog: 5 Reasons not to use OSCommerce

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:09:38 -0600

Justin Silverton/i> has written up in this blog post the five reasons he sees not to use the popular OSCommerce E-Commerce software.
He quotes from their site where it mentions that their goal is to "continually evolve by attracting a community [...] to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set."
Of the five raeasons he gives, here are a few:

difficult to integrate into an existing design
admin navigation issues
security

While some of the issues her points out here are a matter of personal preference, the "security" aspect caught my eye. These days, especially with all of the talk about security in the PHP community, that should be one of the first things groups look at in their software. From his comments, OSCommerce doesn't make it very easy to implement a patch either.

Greg Beaver's Blog: If you run your own PEAR channel, please watch pear-qa

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:11:40 -0600
Greg Beaver has a quick reminder on his blog for anyone out there running their own PEAR channels - "please watch pear-qa".
Just a quick note to all of you PEAR channel administrators: Please take a moment to either join the pear-qa@lists.php.net mailing list, or follow php.pear.qa at news.php.net. Why?
Every time a new release of the core PEAR package is slated, I (or whoever is in charge of the release) will post a message to the pear-qa list asking for testing of the new version 1 full week ahead of the scheduled release date. This is the one opportunity to test for critical errors that unit tests or myself have missed.
There's a specific instance he mentions of where this happened (in 1.4.7 involving channel names with a "-") and the code was still released. Of course, once it was applied, many users were upset that their installs had just "stopped working".
It would be very helpful to have channel administrators take a second to try out stable versions of PEAR as they approach release.

Christian Wenz's Blog: Zend and Oracle, again

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:46:00 -0600
Christian Wenz has posted this new item on his blog today with a report relating to the Oracle/Zend rumors that have been floating around.
Well, the rumors (that also made it into blogosphere, including Toby's post) obviously could not be ignored by Zend any longer. Therefore, the German division of Zend just sent out an email to a couple of people officially stating that Zend is currently not negotiating a sale to Oracle.
I suppose only time will tell on the deal, but it seems for now that the sale is not going to happen (and that there never was a sale in talks at all).