On his blog today Michael Kimsal asks a question that hasn't come up much in recent months - with all of the advancements browsers are adding in, why aren't there better hooks for measuring file downloads?

This current tirade stems from implementing a file upload progress meter in PHP5. Yes, PHP5.2 has some hook, and there's a PECL extension. [...] I realize this is partially a PHP issue I'm ranting about, but it's ultimately a hacky workaround to a basic piece of functionality that browsers should support.

He mentions an example where he basically directly asked a member of the IE team about it. It wasn't greeted seriously and still hasn't managed to be included in most of the popular browsers of today.

This new post from Troels Knak-Nielsen on the SitePoint PHP blog shares a few helpful in-browser development tools that could come in handy in your day to day coding.

While debuggers exists, there isn't much of a tradition for using them in PHP. People have largely come to rely on injecting debugging code directly into the program, for inspecting program scope.

Tools mentioned include traceers and error handlers (like XDebug), some debugging parts of the popular PHP frameworks and the set of *cachegrind tools to help you parse the output of XDebug for profiling your application.

Sebastian Bergamnn spotlights one of the features of the upcoming version of PHPUnit (a unit testing software suite for PHP) - the Selenium integration. Specifically, he looks at improvements made to the SeleniumTestCase extension.

Probably the most important improvement to SeleniumTestCase is the fact that you can now run each test using a set of browsers instead of just one browser. [...] Other improvements to SeleniumTestCase include more robust error handling and better error messages.

To illustrate the "run each test in multiple browsers" feature, Sebastian includes the code for a test that runs three times, once for three different types of browsers - IE, Safari, and Firefox.

There's plenty of 2D graphics libraries out there, some 3D ones as well, but that hasn't stopped Jakob Westhoff from creating his own driver for the Image_3d package to allow for live 3D image browser rendering.

Quite some time ago my friend Kore Nordmann had a talk at our local PHP Usergroup about 3D rendering techniques which was quite inspiring. Shortly after that talk I decided to write a simple 3D renderer. But, hey there are so many of them already out there, that I decided to do something more unusual.

I just started over and began to write a ECMA Script based live 3D renderer for browsers which understand the new "canvas" tag. After some simple tests I realized that it would be quite cool to implement this as a driver for Kore's Image_3D package, which is entirely written in PHP.

Be sure to check out his post to see what this new driver makes possible. There's an image complete with controls to rotate, zoom, turn of its axis and export to both the SVG and PNG formats. Definitely work checking out!

Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.

Now I have to admit to being curious about what is going on - after all anything new dealing with the web affects me as PHP coder. Since the W3C is supposedly interested in input from the Web community and content developers, I decided to see who from PHP would be there. Granted it is very early for the formation of the group so it didn't really surprise me to see no one from PHP that I know or heard about in there, but I wonder if anyone from the PHP Group will become a "invited expert" somewhere down the road.

The group is looking for members to help define this next generation of markup on the web. Check out their page for some of the qualifications needed to participate and for some of the upcoming events.W3C Launches New HTML Working Group

Richard Heyes has posted a quick script to help you tailor your site to the browser a viewer is using.

If you ever wanted some browser detecion code, here it is. It works along the same lines as the Ultimate Javascript Client Side Detector, however it's server side. It doesn't pollute the global namespace (much), and it's very simple. Just include the code and call the function. Easy.

The code is as simple to use as an include and a call to the GetUserAgent function to get what you need. You can download the script here.

Please note: this article was incorrectly attributed to PHPHacks.com. The correct author/site has been identified and the information below is the correct information.

phpPatterns brings another tutorial to the PHP community today with this guide to creating XUL applications with the help of PHP.

XUL, or the XML User Interface language, is the common thread running through all Mozilla-powered applications - both desktop and web-based. XUL is a way to describe an application's user interface using XML. XUL is similar in many ways to HTML, while borrowing from, yet not exactly imitating its syntax.

To start off with, we need a simple XUL file that contains a form. This form could consist of anything, but for this example, I will be using a simple Login form that you might be familiar with while building web applications.

They provide the full code of the XUL, PHP, and Javascript to make everything worrk together. They explain how it all goes together and even some of the basics of XUL.

In his latest blog post, Mike Potter shares some about a simple Flex application he's constructed that's now contained in the PHP RIA SDK from Adobe.

I have created a sample Flex application that lets you browse your MySQL databases and allows you to do simple filtering on that data. The application is part of the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe that I've updated today. It also includes some new samples and libraries, mostly done by community members.

He notes that it's not meant to be a replacement for things like phpMyAdmin, but it does have its place.

As any developer will tell you, putting a website out on the internet is only half of the equation. The other half is trying to figure out some of the visitors (and how many of them) coming to your site. That's where this new article from DevShed comes in.

If you have a website, especially one that sells products or services, it can be useful to track the visitors to your site. This article explains how to write a program that will do just that.

They offer a database-based suggestion for recording various pieces of visitor information, including: IP address, date/time of the visit, pages viewed, browser type, and the referring page. They give the database structure and the PHP code needed to push the data into it. They also include some simple analysis code/SQL to show the different habits of your visitors and place them into an easy-to-read dynamic HTML page.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new post about two new browser plugins that have been created surrounding the popular Zend Framework, both related to research/searching.

Some enterprising Zend Framework contributors have hacked together a couple plugins for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. Ralf Eggert has created a sidebar to allow easy access to commonly used links, as well as a search module. From this idea, Richard Thomas was inspired to create a plugin to search the framework wiki and mailing list using Firefox's built-in search box.

The browser sidebar allows you to have the framework manual at your fingertips, and the search widget can grab information directly from the mailing list and framework's wiki pages to display in your browser.