Chris Tankersley has a new post to how blog looking at a powerful but sometimes seldom used feature of PHP - Reflection. His post introduces you to some of the basics you can use to have your code find out more about itself.

Reflection is a metaprogramming construct that allows a program to look into itself and do a multitude of different things - gain meaning, watch execution, call code, or even provide feedback. [...] With PHP 5, PHP gained a robust reflection class that allows a developer to gain access to just about every aspect of an object and interact with it. The key is figuring out what is available, and then exploiting it to gain additional benefits.

He gives examples from his project where it uses the ReflectionClass feature to pull in the values of a class including properties and methods in a class (a set of ReflectionMethods). Some code is provided to make the examples a bit more clear.

Brian Swan has a new post to his blog today about consuming protected feeds of OData coming from SQL Azure in a PHP application.

I did write a post a few weeks ago that described how to enable anonymous access to SQL Azure OData feeds (Consuming SQL Azure Data with the OData SDK for PHP), but I had a few things to learn about AppFabric access control before I felt comfortable writing about authenticated access to these feeds.

He starts from the Azure side, creating a sample OData feed and adding permissions to only allow access to a specific (database) user for the feed. You'll use a set of data to connect to the feed - a username, a secret key, an issuer name and the OData endpoint address. Then, using the OData SDK he shows how to generate the needed classes with the automatic tool and use them to connect to the endpoint and retrieve data from the feed. He also includes a little snippet for those that might not want to use the SDK - an example using curl to connect and authorize the session.

Lorna Mitchell has posted her second part of her "tips for [tech] event hosting" series (first part here) with some suggestions for the day of the event - those last minute things that might get forgotten.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. [...] As an organiser you see all the small behind-the-scenes crises, but if they are invisible to the average attendee, then you're doing really well.

She makes suggestions about the little things - ensuring name badges are ready, a posted schedule of the happenings at the event (not every event will have programs), check in on all of the tech like projectors, wifi and the like as well as keeping track of things like hashtags on twitter to see what people like and don't like more immediately.

Kevin Schroeder has the latest excerpt from his book posted ("You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?") with a focus on the SPL - Standard PHP Library. He specifically takes a quick look at Iterators.

If you are doing any data processing whatsoever you are using arrays. And most likely you are doing database queries, iterating over the results and doing your algorithm-ing. But what if you have additional functionality that you need to have integrated with your data. You could go the traditional route and copy and paste half your application around or you could build, what we like to call structured applications. SPL allows you to do that.

In the excerpt he mentions the methods that come built in to Iterators like rewind, current and valid. There's also some sample code showing a custom iterator that works with some user data to output the information set in the constructor. You can find out more about this chapter and the rest in Kevin's book.

On the SitePoint blogs today there's a new tutorial posted, the first part of a series, from Raj Deut about making the move away from the basic authorization for connecting to the Twitter API and towards their new OAuth method for Twitter Apps.

As of August 31, Twitter's HTTP Basic Authenticated API service has been disabled entirely. Now, any interface with the API will be required to use a token-based authentication method known an OAuth. [...] At first glance, the task of implementing OAuth can appear daunting, and OAuth's token exchange system can be confusing if you're unfamiliar with it. Fortunately, there are some rather clever individuals who've done the groundwork for us.

They show you how to register your application with Twitter and use the TwitterOAuth library to make a sample connection to their servers. They also show how to generate the tokens for the URL and the ones for accessing the site as a user. With tokens in hand, the script can then connect to the system and make a sample tweet (complete code included).

On the PHPFreaks.com site there's a new post that's a guide for creating a basic development environment on a Debian system (complete with VirtualHosts).

This is just a quick walkthrough describing how to setup a decent development environment allowing the easy setup of multiple sites. It already assumes you have a working Debian or Ubuntu OS installed and configured with PHP, MySql & Apache already running. You will also need to have a working sudo.

They add a group for the web server user (www), change some permissions on the web root directory and edit the base Apache2 "sites" file where the VirtualHosts live. They create a sample PHP file - a phpinfo page - in the directory and add a record to the local hosts file for the new domain. Commands for all of the above are included.

On NETTUTS.com today there's an intermediate tutorial showing you how to create a simple polling system for your site - complete with a database backend and a CSS styled results view.

Polls are nearly ubiquitous on the web today, and there are plenty of services that will provide a drop-in poll for you. But what if you want to write one yourself? This tutorial will take you through the steps to create a simple PHP-based poll, including database setup, vote processing, and displaying the poll.

They include all of the code and markup you'll need ready for cut & paste - the SQL for the database backend (they chose SQLite), the HTML for the question and answer sides and the CSS to style them both. No javascript is needed to make the example work. There's even some process flows to help you understand the paths the application can take.

• Developer.com: Quercus: Bring Java's Power to Your PHP Development (and Vice Versa)
• Jani Hartikainen's Blog: Now you can write PHP code...without writing any code
• NerdMom Blog: Kohana 3 & CodeIgniter 2
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• Klaus Graefensteiner's Blog: Climbing the CodeIgniter PHP MVC framework learning curve
• Web Builder Zone: NetBeans vs. Vim for PHP development
• Site News: Job Postings for the week of 08.22.2010
• SeeIT Consult Blog: PHP mail() with Ubuntu Desktop and Gmail
• Gonzalo Ayuso's Blog: Using CouchDb as filesystem with PHP
• PHPBuilder.com: Downloading and Parsing Gmail Messages in PHP

Gonzalo Ayuso takes his "CouchDb as a filesystem" approach one step further (see the previous post about it here) with this new post talking about monkey patching to store files into the CouchDb server using the normal PHP file handling functions.

Since PHP5.3 a new design pattern is available for us: Monkey Patching. With this pattern we can override PHP's core functions with a home-made functions in a different namespace (another example here). That's means if I have fopen function in the above example, PHP uses the filesystem function "fopen" but if we set a namespace in our example, PHP will search first the function within the current namespace.

By defining the new interface inside of a namespace (with functions to override the default PHP file handlers) you can have the rest of the code call the same functions (fopen, fread, etc) but they'll do different things. In this case it handles them as push and pull to the CouchDb instead of the normal filesystem. You can grab the source for this example here.

Kevin Schroeder has another new post to his blog today with an excerpt from his "You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?" book. This new post is a section from the fourth chapter looking at stream handling.

Communication is key to building applications now and for the future. While it is not something that I think that everyone should do, I have not seem many applications that make good use of streams in PHP. Streams can be immensely useful in the right situations, but a lot of developers are not really aware of how streams can be used. [...] While I don't think you will end up basing your application around streams it is a really good idea to know how streams work.

The sample code (and description) talk about changing the properties of a stream on the fly. He shows how, with a fgets loop checking the input, he can catch a command from the already running script and change the compression setting on the currently open stream. The compression changes the stream's data from plain text to a binary format as handled by the streams functionality.