Lorna Mitchell has shared some advice about correcting an issue with PHP and Gearman after she did an upgrade via PECL.

I upgraded PHP and related pecl modules on my development machine today, and ran into a problem with Gearman. Actually I ran into more than one! Firstly the challenge of getting the newest pecl version working with a gearman version. Then an error where my existing PHP application couldn't connect to gearman after upgrade.

Running on Ubuntu, she found this tutorial helpful in getting Gearman back into a working state and installed (version 1.1.1). The "unable to connect" error turned out to be a change in how the Gearman connection needed to be made - the addition of a port to the connection string made things work again.

Gonzalo Ayuso has written up a new post about a handling method he's worked up for working with multiple PDO instances (database connections) through the Symfony2 dependency injection container using custom YML definitions and a simple "Db" class.

I'm not a big fan of ORMs, especially in PHP world when all dies at the end of each request. Plain SQL is easy to understand and very powerful. Anyway in PHP we have Doctrine. Doctrine is a amazing project, probably (with permission of Symfony2) the most advanced PHP project, but I normally prefer to work with SQL instead of Doctrine. [...] Due to my daily work I need to connect to different databases (not only one) in my applications.

He shows the normal setup using the "parameters.yml" file to define the multiple database connections but notes that this isn't the most ideal solution. Instead, he walks you through the steps to create the "databases.yml" configuration file and a simple "Db" class that acts as an interface to pull the PDO objects from the container. You can then just call the "get" method on the container to extract the fully configured PDO object, ready for use.

Derick Rethans has a new post to his site detailing some of the "read" preferences that you can customize in the latest versions of the MongoClient functionality in the MongoDB PHP extension for replica sets and sharing setups.

Read Preferences are a new Replica Set and Sharding feature implemented by most MongoDB drivers that are supported by 10gen. This functionality requires MongoDB 2.2. In short, Read Preferences allow you to configure from which nodes you prefer the driver reads data from. In a Replica Set environment it is the driver that does the selection of the preferred node, and in a Sharded environment it is the mongos process that routes queries according to the defined Read Preferences.

He starts with a look at the read preference types (like "primary", "secondary" and "nearest") how the connection manager works to handle each type. He includes some code samples showing how to configure your MongoClient connections to use these various types of preferences. He also introduces the concept of "tags" for the replica set - aliases to make them a bit easier to identify when making a connection and how to define them in the connection string.

Derick Rethans has a new post that the developers out there using MongoDB in their applications will find useful - a look at debugging your connections with the PHP driver (and what kind of information it can provide).

In a previous article I already mentioned that the 1.3 version of the MongoDB driver has improved logging functionality to aid with debugging connection issues. I've already briefly introduced MongoClient::getConnections(), but it provides a bit more information than I have already shown. The other improvement are changes to the MongoLog class.

He includes details on the information that comes back from the MongoDB "getConnections" call including the hash of the connection, the "last ping" time, connection type and a set of tags. He also shows how to enable the Mongolog logging, the levels of logging it allows and what kind of log messages you can expect it to output.

Continuing on with his look at the newly released version of the MongoDB driver for PHP Derick Rethans has posted more detail about the advanced connection handling options this new driver version provides.

The 1.3 release series of the PHP MongoDB driver features a rewritten connection handling library. This is quite a large change and changes how the PHP driver deals with persistent connections and connection pooling.

He starts with an example of a v1.2 driver connection, how the connection is requested from a pool and how, based on the integration of a worker into the connection process, v1.3 handles the connection requests. He includes a bit about replica set connections and authentication connections, complete with PHP code examples showing them in practice.

In the spirit of Halloween coming next week PHPMaster.com has posted some spooky scary PHP code in their latest post from the editor of the site, Timothy Boronczyk.

Break out the candy corn and apple cider; it's that time of year again! The rest of the world may not celebrate Halloween as hog wild as in America, but I thought it'd be fun to share some scary PHP stuff to mark the holiday. This is a fun article, sharing with you some scary (but logical) behavior found in PHP itself, and spooky (and possibly quite illogical) ways in which some have twisted PHP to do their bidding. Think of this as my treat to you, a little bit of geek "mind-candy" - because why should all the trick-or-treaters have all goodies?

The code examples include "The Haunted Array", "The Phantom Database Connection" and "An API Worthy of Dr. Frankenstein". Enjoy! (and maybe share some of your own too)

PHPBuilder.com has posted a new tutorial about creating automated FTP scripts to pull down information from a remote server (using FTP streams).

In 2007 I began working on a website project for an investment company in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio USA. The purpose of this website was to automatically download financial data of traded securities from two (2) remote Web servers. [...] Both of these PHP scripts were set up on the Web server's "crontab manager" to automatically run at a set time each business day.

Code is included showing how to connect to the remote service (via curl) with a "ftp" stream-based URL as the location. Also included is an example using a fopen call to the URL and inserting the resulting data into their tracking tables. The other script pulls the data out and adds a new record to a transactions table for the current day.

In this new tutorial on NetTuts.com, they talk about one of the more fundamental connection types you can do in PHP - database connections. They want to be sure you're "doing it correctly" via PHP's PDO API.

We've covered PHP's PDO API a couple of times here on Nettuts+, but, generally, those articles focused more on the theory, and less on the application. This article will fix that! To put it plainly, if you're still using PHP's old mysql API to connect to your databases, read on!

They compare the three main methods for connecting to a MySQL database - mysql, mysqli and PDO - and how a typical mysql/mysqli codebase can be refactored to use PDO. They show examples of connections, error handling, fetching data, using prepared statements and snippets of code for CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) handling.

Be sure and check out the comments - there's some great tips there too!

Ilia Alshanetsky has a new post to his blog sharing a method for fallback with PDO when your database connection fails.

For our database connections we PDO at work and we've extended the class with PHP to offer some other convenience functionality and wrappers. One of the things I wanted to do recently is allow the constructor of the PDO class to fail-over to our backup database connection pool in the event the primary was not available.

He wanted his code to catch an exception if the object was created with a failed server host and to connect to the backup instead. PDO doesn't cooperate with this method and just destroys the object when there's a failure. His work around is in this patch to the PDO support in PHP to provide a new constant, PDO:: ATTR_KEEP_CLASS_CONN_FAILURE, that tells the script wether or not to destroy the PDO object when there's a problem.

In this latest post Gonzalo Ayuso his recent experiences with <1 href="http://nodephp.org/">React (Node.js in PHP) and an example of how he worked up a script to pool database connections.

Last saturday I meet a new hype: "React" also known as "node.php". Basically it's the same idea than node.js but built with PHP instead of javascript. [...] Basically I want to create a database connection pooling. It's one of the things that I miss in PHP. I wrote a post here some time ago with this idea with one exotic experiment building one connection pooling using gearman. Today the idea is the same but now with React.

He includes the sample script, also including the line to add to your composer.json file to install React and the SQL to create the sample tables. The script makes a PDO connection and assigns it to the pool, an instance of his "CPool" class. If you want to try it out, you can find the code over on github.