The e-book version of the Pragmatic Programmers release Rails for PHP Developers written by Derek DeVries and Mike Naberezny occupies now some of my scarce hard drive space for several months, and today I managed to hit the last page of it. In case you're interested in knowing if it's worthy to sacrifice some rare hard drive or bookshelf space for this book read on.

He goes through the three parts of the book - a look at the MVC pattern, teaching some of the details of Ruby and comparing the structure of the two languages to help PHP developers relate a bit more. Raphael gives it good marks for being a great guide to not only Ruby and Rails but to also making it accessible for PHP developers to make a smoother transition from one to the other if they're interested.

It just wouldn't be fair after my last post to ignore the tried-and-true server-side Web application frameworks. I am certainly familiar with all of them, though I haven't necessarily used every one in a production environment.

The among the PHP frameworks mentioned are: Drupal, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony. His personal choice was CodeIgniter:

It's light weight, fast, and stays out of your way. There are any number of class modules to choose from, and you can discard what you don't need to lighten the load even more.

I'm going to walk you through the process with the settings that I chose for my server setup. I am not a Linux guru or a web server guru. [...] This post is compiled of steps and configurations that I've found on the internet. I wanted to have a consolidated instruction manual so I'm writing this tutorial to help anyone who's in the same boat as me.

It's a full installation tutorial too - every step from the installation of the operating system down to installing the packages for the web server and two languages (apt-get, of course). There's even parts of the configuration files that you'll need to add/update to get it all integrated.

So, a week before PHP|TEK 2008 I came up with the genius idea to take the Ruby on Rails logo, which is protected against re-use (hahaha), and parody it. I wanted to express my views of Ruby on Rails (though never have using RoR) through this modification.

I took the logo and simply changed the "R" to an "F" using a font that was almost identical to the original.

You can ask anyone that was at ZendCon this year about them - they were everywhere. Christian did a great job on a simple parody that shares the sentiment of many members of the PHP community (and others outside I'm sure). He has them for sale on his etsy shop if you'd like to pick up some of your own.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.

Representatives from (previously) Netscape, the Perl Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and the IronRuby team were all included. Topics asked about include the differing needs for different languages, trends on adoption and why some of these shifts are happening.

While reading yet another article on why PHP Sucks (today's witty twist, "but It Doesn't Matter") I realized yet another reason that I'm glad to be programming in Ruby.

He sees Ruby as a "big open playground" and languages like PHP as big industrial factories that are more efficient for some things but can also "suck the creativity and life out of the people working in them". He compares a simple bit of Ruby code to PHP code that do essentially the same ask asks why you'd want to do one over the other.

There's plenty of comments supporting things both ways ranging from "that's a bad example" to "I think PHP is more of a playground - a disorganized mess".

Maybe it took the PHP community a little longer to realize the importance of testing. But now that we know how to build applications that "just work", are fast and scalable, as well as secure, a big topic in the PHP community right now is to implement processes and use techniques that help us assure that the software works correctly throughout the its lifecycle.

He points to some comments made at a recent panel discussion about PHP and testing, the proliferation of frameworks for the language and the things that have no name that developers use every day to make their code "just work".

One thing that I think Symfony gets right is that it appears to use partitioned PHP code for its templates, in the spirit of Paul's Savant system.

I noticed in the Symfony demo that there is no separation of scope between variables passed to the template from the controller and local variables in the template. I'd like to see them scoped properly ("$this->products") but I can certainly understand why they did it this way. Using "$this->" in the template everywhere quickly gets messy.

He mentions a few other items he saw as well, including a way to correct the above mentioned problem (two ways - one more single-instance, the other more global).]]> Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:12:36 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9659 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9659 Mike Naberezny has posted a few more articles to the "Rails for PHP Developers" website (based on this book) covering some more of the basics.

There's three new tutorials posted:

• Ruby Block Scope - the basics of Ruby block scope, a common point of confusion for PHP developers new to Ruby.
• Variable Arguments - an article that shows two common API patterns found in Rails, variable arguments and option hashes, and how to implement them both in PHP.
• Regular Expressions in Ruby - a useful reference that maps all of the common PHP regular expression functions to the equivalents in Ruby.

Check out the rest of the site for even more great content.

Besides PHP itself, the most popular config file formats for PHP applications are INI and XML files. [...] YAML is a relatively new format that has been pioneered by the Ruby and Rails communities. It blends the best aspects of XML and INI, giving us a format with the flexibility of XML and the ease-of-use of INI.

He compares the YAML support - Ruby's built-in support and PHP's functionality via either the Spyc library/Syck extension or through a PEAR package from the Horde functionality. Quick code snippets are provided for each.