PHPDeveloper.org

Atlanta PHP Users Group: May Meeting Location Update

Mon, 01 May 2006 07:41:51 -0500

The Atlanta PHP User Group has posted an update to the information for their May meeting - they've found a place to have it, temporary though it may be.

We have an interim meeting place for the May meeting! Kevin Roberts has secured a room at the Consulate General of Canada in Midtown at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets. Click here for directions. Again, this is only an interim meeting place. I am still trying to secure a more permanent location.

This month's meeting will be a discussion of the Zend Framework - taking it for a test-drive, mentioning its current state/direction it's going, and showing quickly how to use it all (a code tutorial).

Justin Silverton's Blog: PHP Games

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 07:10:18 -0500

Justin Silverton has a list on his blog of some of the PHP-based games out there today, including several RPGs and various smaller, lighter games.

The list includes:

Not all of them are smaller, independant sites either - the Heroes of Might and Magic site is related to the widely popular Ubisoft game of the same title. Always great to see PHP being used in major ways!

Professional PHP Blog: PHP Games

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 06:52:42 -0500

From the Professional PHP site today, there's an interesting new post about a game the author found (via digg) of "Heroes of Might and Magic" online minigame. What makes it even cooler? It's written in PHP and uses Prototype and Scriptaculous for the interface.

The interface is very drag and drop oriented and it uses Ajax to update game status. The graphics are very good. No flash as far as I can tell.

Their server is getting crushed right now, intermittently not responding and running out of MySQL connections. The javascript crashed my browser a couple times. Still, I was intrigued by the combination of Ajax and PHP and I liked the interface. Definitely one to bookmark for later.

The game is a bit less overloaded now, but still a bit slow. The interface is wonderfully done, and easy to understand. It's great to see the popular pairing of Ajax and PHP starting to show up in commercial applications, too.

John Anderson's Blog: Sip of Java

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:42:23 -0600

John Anderson has posted some of his thoughts in a journey he was forced to travel by a school project - working with Java - from a PHP developer's perspective.

As you might be able to gather from my involvement with Cake, I've always been a pretty big fan of PHP for web development. For some reason, PHP gets a little bit of bad press, and I've always wondered why, because my own experience has been extremely positive. PHP is often cast in a light that shows it to be the language of 15 year old script kiddies, and smaller unmanageable websites. I've never seen it that way.

I'm finishing up my degree in Information Technology at BYU, and as part of that program, students must pass a year long capstone project course. On its face, the course feels like a mix of project management and organizational behavior, but underneath is a lot of project meetings, coding and politics. Our project is a web-based application, and the decision was made that the project be written in Java.

He looks at a few topics, explaining the difficulties/advantages that he found along the way. Topics he covers are:

Object Usage
Application Structure
Database Interaction
Error Reporting
Scalability and Performance

Justin's Blog: Using PHP in large websites

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 07:16:53 -0600

In one of his latest blog entries, Justin has posted an article from Aaron Crane that talks about using PHP in large websites - some of the issues, methods, and suggestions that he's noticed over time.

The PHP scripting language has an enjoyed an enormous growth in popularity over the past few years. It benefits from being particularly easy to pick up, and from having been designed as a language specifically for producing webpages. This means that choosing PHP as your implementation language allows you to build a dynamically-generated webpage quickly and easily.

However, it is not clear how well PHP scales for use in larger commercial websites. This paper examines the issues in trying to do so.

He invesigates topics like:

Separation of presentation from business logic
Areas where PHP's initial simplicity can actually make things more complicated
Using a team of developers to build a site

For each item, he looks in detail about what the topic is and how a manage/develoeper can get a handle on it. There are good and bad sides to all, but finding the right balance is key.

Joshua Eichorn's Blog: HTML_AJAX Feature of the Week - Javascript Behaviors

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 07:09:29 -0600

On our sister site, AjaxDeveloper.org, today, there's a new post that mentions the latest blog post from Joshua Eichorn - a look at Javascript behaviors in his PEAR package, HTML_AJAX.

Welcome to part two of the series "Sending email with AJAX." In three parts, this series goes through the making of a simple web-based email application. It uses AJAX as the driving technology for fetching the files responsible for sending email from the server, as well as for adding and updating contacts.

This part covers the development of a "email sender" module, a "contact listing" module, the "contact insertion" module, and, finally, starting things up with the initializeEmailClient function.

Joshua Eichorn's Blog: ZActiveRecord can't work?

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 07:22:55 -0600

On his blog today, Joshua Eichorn has a look at the ZActiveRecord functionality that was shown off in the Zend Framework Webcast - and how it might now work as planned.

In the webcast the following active record example was shown. This looks nice and slick but I don't see how its possible, at least in php 5.1. There is no way to get the class name of the child in in the find all method.

Anyone have a clue on how Zend is planning to get around this problem. From what I can tell its impossible and I haven't seen anything on 5.1.2dev that would solve the problem but I could just be missing something and there is an easy way around the problem. To me it looks like PHP forces you to do a none static activerecord implmentation.

There are a few updates to his post and some comments with more to say on the topic - including pointing out that it's more of a PHP bug than just a ZActiveRecord issue...

Aaron Wormus' Blog: PHPBB on list of Best Open Source Websites

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 06:36:49 -0600

Via this post on Aaron Wormus' blog today, there's a link to an article over on The Independent.

At first my intelligence was insulted [that phpBB made the list of Best Open Source Websites], but then I saw the subtitle of the article:

Ana Kronschnabl and Tomas Rawlings pick the best open source websites where users can change the content

and then, while obviously not in the way the authors had intended it, it made perfect sense.

Some of the other sites/software (non-PHP) makes up for its inclusion in the list, including: Wikipedia, Firefox, GIMP, and SourceForge...

PHP Magazine: The State of the PEAR Address

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 07:49:25 -0600

PHP Magazine has posted this new article from Lukas Smith today with a "State of the PEAR Address", an overview of where PEAR stands in the PHP community today.

For those of you who have been living under a rock the last few years, you may have managed to evade PEAR. However, avid readers of the International PHP Magazine will know PEAR quite well, so here is a quick run down.

He goes through a look at what PEAR is, the debates over its structure, monitoring for "high-quality non-redundant code", what checks and balances are in place, the myth of bloated PEAR code, how you can contribute, and a call to action for all developers out there to get involved. There's a lot more in there than that, but you'll have to check out the whole article for that...