On PHPFreaks.com they have a new "top ten" list of signs to look out for to tell if you're dealing with crappy software or not.

Like it or not, as a professional developer, sooner or later you are going to do some customising (if you are lucky, "extending") of existing software. If you are not familiar with the software, it is good advice to look into it before accepting the job. I had to learn that the hard way. But how do you recognize crappy applications without getting knee deep into the code?

Their list of signs include:

• The software tries to reinvent the object model, or "fix" language features.
• Scattered HTML and SQL
• Multiple levels of inheritance
• In the code base, there is a directory called "core"

The PEAR blog has a quick note for users of PHP 5.3 and Windows:

Some users have reported that the windows builds of PHP 5.3 are not able to open the shipped go-pear.phar file.

If this is your situation, you can use their workaround (run the distributed phar version) or grab the non-pharred version.

Lorna Mitchell has posted the last article in her look at web services - a focus on status codes.

Unlike the other posts in this series, this one is quite specific to one type of service - REST - since it deals with status codes, specifically HTTP ones. The ideas are transferrable however and other types of service can return statuses in a similar way.

She mentions things to keep in mind in returning the codes, some of the more interesting codes as well as some typical situations where things like an error code 500 would be thrown.

Status codes are like a headline to the calling entity about what happened, and are a valuable tool in the web service toolkit.

John Lim has written up an article for the Oracle Technology Network about creating high performance systems with Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) and PHP.

Running a software application that is able to work reliably through hardware and software failures is incredibly hard. [...] In this article, I will cover the network, architecture and design of our RAC application. Then I will discuss the real-world experiences and problems we experienced.

He details their RAC setup - load balancers, application servers and their RAC servers - before working through the different technologies and how they're all installed and configured to work together most efficiently.

In the next to last article of their loader series, DevShed looks at replacing some of the file loading functionality in their examples with functions from the SPL.

As I mentioned before, the Standard PHP library comes bundled with some helpful functions, such as "spl_autoload()," "spl_register_extension()" and "spl_autoload_register()" that allow you to either use a default implementation of the "__autoload()" function, or create a custom one for it.

Their example defines the extensions to use for autoloading and the name of the file/class to pull in. The rest is done automagically.

• Community News: PHP Group Responds to Google's "Speed Tips" Recommendations
• PHP 10.0 Blog: PHP performance tips from Google
• SitePoint PHP Blog: A Note on Google's So-called Best Practices
• php|architect Blog: Confessions of a Hiring Manager: Get my attention, Get a Job
• NETTUTS.com: Easy Development With CodeIgniter
• Make Me Pulse Blog: Connect to Active Directory LDAP with PHP
• Zend Developer Zone: Accepting Credit Card Payments with OXID eShop CE and Authorize.Net
• Paul Jones' Blog: Scalable Internet Architecture
• PHP & jQuery: Calendars
• Stefan Mischook's Blog: PHP Video: Controllers in MVC

The PHP North West group has officially launched the website for this year's event - PHP North West 2009:

We're proud to announce the second edition of the PHP North West Conference, to be held on Saturday 10th October, 2009. Following from last year's successful debut, this event returns to bring a great mix of speakers and community from the north of England and beyond. With a local feel, there will be a packed day of talks from a range of speakers, socials Friday and Saturday night, and informal sessions running on Sunday for those making a weekend of it. We hope to see you there!

The site currently has links to their registration, Call for Papers and resources to use when linking to conference.

New on WebReference.com is this look (part of a series) at working with XML in PHP, this time it's specifically covering the DOM functionality.

With this series of articles, I will try to simplify and demystify the use and application of XML and the DOM. First, we will look at what XML is and then move on to what functions are available for use to manipulate and use XML.

The tutorial introduces XML and gives a sample structure of a document and breaks it down to explain each of the parts. Following that they look at some of the XML-related functionality to create their sample XML file.

Vinu Thomas has a new post to his blog looking at using the MS-Excel Stream Handler class to push your data out to Excel (in more than just a CSV file).

If you're looking for an easy way to output your data from a PHP script into a Excel file, you've got to check out this script which I came across at the PHP Classes site. What this script essentially does is to implement a stream handler interface to write Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files.

Code snippets are included showing how to structure the data for the import and how to push that generated Excel file out to the user's waiting client.

One of the features included in the PHP 5.x releases is type hinting for validating that you have the right values for your functions and methods coming in. In this new post to his blog Ilia Alshanetshy takes a look at the the feature and gives a patch to add it .

On a general level most people agree it would be a good idea to have, since it is an optional feature and does not introduce any regressions, heck you can even mix type hinted code with the non-type hinted one. The "PROBLEM" has always been combining of PHP's typeless nature with type hinting, which is where the consensus has been difficult (impossible) to reach.

He mentions an example of why its such an issue (technically, both 1 and "1" are valid numbers) and includes a link to a patch that gives a new hint to help with the problem.