On the LeaseWeb Labs blog there's a continuation from a previous post about migrating your Symfony1 application over to Symfony2. In the first part of this series of posts, Stefan Koopmanschap talked about wrapping your code to make it work. In this second post, Maurtis van der Schee tackles two issues Stefan mentioned - performance problems and handling authorization/authentication.

On December 21, 2011 Stefan Koopmanschap wrote an excellent article on this blog titled "Painless (well, less painful) migration to Symfony2." [...] We were very much inspired by his passionate elucidation and we were fully convinced of the urge to start migrating to Symfony2 as soon as possible. However, he also provided us with a "A word of caution" about 2 things: performance and authentication/authorization. This might get some people worried, but not us: it challenged us to find a solution for those two open issues.

They explain why these two things are a problem and some of their solutions they've created - a .htaccess for routing and manually replicating the Symfony2 session in the Symfony1 code. Included in the post are the rewrite rules and code to make these two things happen (and a small configuration change to make them work).

On the VG Tech blog today there's a new post from André Roaldseth about using PHPUnit to test PHP streams, basing the assertions on the data rather than the functionality itself.

Using the memory/temporary stream provided by php:// stream wrapper you can create a stream with read and write access directly to RAM or to a temporary file [using "php://memory"]. This gives you the possibilty to write unit tests that does not rely on a specific file, resource or stream, but rather on data provided by the test itself.

There's no specific code examples here, but you can refer to the stream wrappers section of the PHP manual for more details on this and other handy built-in streams. Once created, it can then be used just as any other stream resource can. This could be useful to provide mocks in your testing, replacing any other stream-able resource with a "memory" or "temp" placeholder.

Jan Bodnar has pointed out a great PHP-GTK tutorial on ZetaCode.com that walks you through some of the major points of this graphical frontend for PHP:

This tutorial will teach you the basics of GUI programming with the PHP GTK. The tutorial has 8 chapters which cover the first steps with the library, menus, toolbars, dialogs and various widgets. It has some examples for drawing with Cairo library. The final chapter presents a small computer game; The Nibbles.

Each of the topics has sample code and screenshots of the resulting output for each. Also included is information on layouts and "painting" with Cairo - drawing shapes, rectangles, text, etc.

In a new post to his blog today Sameer Borate spotlights a translation wrapper for Bing that lets you easily use their API to translate text or determine what language the given text is in.

Microsoft Language translation is an interesting service. Not only can you do language translation, you can also detect the language of a particular text. The given class provides a PHP wrapper which will help developers translate text from one language to another in a easy manner. The library also supports caching, helping you keep your translations fast and simple.

His translation library requires an AppId for configuration and cURL to handle the messaging back and forth. Translation is as easy as calling "translate()" on a string, language fetching with "LanguageNames()" and even converting the text to speech with the "speak()" method.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has release their latest episode today - an interview with Michael Maclean, a developer on the Cairo PHP project.

Cal asks Michael his "three questions" about his

• Explain to us what Cairo PHP is and why PHP developers should be interested in it.
• What is your role in the project and how did you get involved in such a unique project?
• Give us some examples of some real-world projects that use Cairo PHP.

You can listen to this new episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

On DZone.com today there's a new post from Gonzalo Ayuso about using a stream wrapper to access CouchDb database directly from PHP (via a call to its local file).

Thanks to a comment in my last post (many thanks Benjamin) I've discovered that it's possible to create a stream wrapper in PHP (I thought it was only available with a C extension). It's pretty straightforward to create the wrapper. Of course it's only an approach. We can create more functionality to our stram wrapper but at least this example meets my needs.

His wrapper uses a client from his Nov framework to open the stream to the given path and gives read and write methods to work with the data inside the database. Code for the wrapper class is included as well as a bit of example code showing how it can be used with the custom stream protocol. You can find the complete code here.

In a recent post to the 3 Engineers blog, they take the usual "Two Step" approach the Zend Framework takes to generating view data (Zend_View + Zend_Layout) and takes it up one more step by using Three Step Layouts with a simple wrapper.

While the Two Step View pattern creates a reasonable paradigm for seperating layout presentation from page presentation, enabling Three-level Inheritance allows for even better separation. In other words, using 3 Step Layouts is a possible and often necessary investment to make when implementing front-ends in Zend Framework projects; they allow fine grain re-usability that provides for a DRYer presentation layer.

They have a three step process you can follow (complete with code snippets) that'll have you working with their 3 layers easily. The wrapper is a sort of "boostrap" for the layout. The nested layout is then pulled into this wrapper (for example's sake, theirs is called "default") and then the view can be served as normal and placed into the content location. There's also a bit of code showing how to switch out the layout if there's ever a need - like different layouts for the admin, user and main parts of your application.

Michael Maclean has a new article today talking about the Pango graphics library and how it can be coupled with the Cairo PECL extension to more easily create better looking text in dynamic images.

The PECL/Cairo library is pretty good at drawing vector graphics (in our opinion, as the developers, at least!), but one thing it's not able to do by itself is draw text with mildly advanced layout. [...] That's because the developers of the Cairo library decided to let another more specialised library handle the job of text layout.

Michael has created a wrapper for Pango in PHP (github) and some sample code that can be used as a test to ensure it's all setup and working. He steps through each part of the image creation and describes what's happening and what each method is doing along the way.

In a new post to his blog today Cal Evans mentions a new API wrapper he's developed to work with the Klout website (a site showing your "clout" on twitter).

In a previous tweet about playing with Klout and Twitter I talked about a project I am working on that mines Klout for interesting people. (Well, interesting to me) The main body of code remains procedural because...well because it works and it's not something I'm going to share so why bother cleaning it up. However parts of it may be useful to me in other projects. So I abstracted the Klout API into a class and have posted it for anyone who wants to use it.

His Klout wrapper for PHP (a github project) is largely procedural but gives you a good idea of how to talk to their API. Cal mentions some other things he's wanting to do with the script, but notes that it's ready for use now without any other changes. You can find out more about Klout on their website.

In his continuing look at using CouchDb as a file system, Gonzalo Ayuso has posted this third part in the group of articles about using streams to connect your scripts to the database instance.

I'm still working in my filesystem with CouchDb. After creating a library to enable working with PHP and CouchDB (see the post here), and after using Monkey Patching to override standard PHP's filesystem functions. I've created another solution now. Thanks to a comment in my last post (many thanks Benjamin) I've discovered that it's possible to create a stream wrapper in PHP (I thought it was only available with a C extension).

He includes the code for the stream connection wrapper, a pretty simple script that parses the string it's given and opens a read/write stream to the source. There's also a "url_stat" method that will return to you the size of the stream in bytes. Then you just register the wrapper and go about your normal file system calls to use the CouchDb directly.