Richard Thomas has posted a new "short" for users of the Solar Framework to delete cached data.

This one is simple but sweet, In your Models directory you define your Models and the basic rules they follow but do you know you can also make changes at the record level. Solar is smart and if it sees a Test/Record.php when creating records for the Test model it will load that class, this allows you to do all kinds of magic.

His example shows how the script can automatically check, on pre-save, to see if the data is different than that in the cache and remove it if so. This cached data is replaced the next time through with the latest information.

In a new post to his blog Ian Selby looks at working with REST requests in PHP. He includes some of the basics of REST too, for those not completely familiar with the term.

APIs have become a very commonplace part of many popular web sites and services...especially REST APIs. I've already discussed how you can roll your own REST API for your PHP apps, but I've also received countless requests to go over how to actually make RESTful requests. That's exactly what we'll take a look at in this article

His tool of choice is the curl extension, making it simple to create a class wrapper with methods like executePost, executeGet, setAuth and, of course, execute. He outlines the class and gives the code blocks that fit inside each of the major functions. In the end you'll have a class that can make GET, POST, PUT and DELETE requests and be able to correctly parse the response.

DevShed has posted the next article in their Active Record series. This time it's a look at updating and deleting records from the database (the previous article was about selecting and inserting).

This pattern permits you to achieve a high level of abstraction when performing typical operations, such as insertions, updates and deletions of records, since all of these tasks are handled transparently by data mappers objects or a data access class. [...] Now, it's time to learn how to use the active record pattern for performing database updates and deletions in a few simple steps.

After reviewing the previous article, they add some new features onto the MySQL access class to let you update and remove data through a similar interface.

Using this article from Johannes Schluter as a starting point Vinu Thomas has worked up his own example of how the technique is used in the example on the Launchpad page.

This article is interesting because of the uses which come up when you can create custom Storage Engines using PHP. An interesting usecase for this is in creating test cases, where you can feed the data for a query from PHP and trap the activities on the database.

The example code defines methods for update, write and delete and the SQL to create the table and insert/manipulate rows is included (for a table created with "ENGINE=PHP").

In this new post to his blog Johannes Schluter looks at creating a storage engine plugin for MySQL via its plugin interface.

MySQL 5.1 has a plugin interface to easily add storage engines. PHP can easily embedded into other applications. So why not combine these two things? - Writing a MySQL Storage Engine which reads data by calling a PHP script.

He starts with a basic example with create_table and open_table functions that can pull the data from the table marked with the "Engine" setting of PHP. He expands on this to allow for more functionality - update, delete and write methods are added.

Kris Jordan recently posted five tips to help you get a "more correct" REST interface in your application.

As we entered a programmable web of applications with APIs the decision to ignore HTTP gave us problems we're still dealing with today. We have an internet full of applications with different interfaces (GET /user/1/delete vs. POST /user/delete {id=1}). With REST we can say /user/1 is a resource and use the HTTP DELETE verb to delete it.

Here's the five (six?) tips:

• Using PUT and DELETE methods
• Send Custom HTTP/1.1 Headers
• Send Meaningful HTTP Headers
• Don't Use $_SESSION
• Test with cURL or rest-client
• Use a RESTful PHP Framework

DevShed continues their series focusing on the CodeIgniter framework with the seventh part - a look at interacting with the database to update, delete and insert rows from your application.

You've seen some of the things you can accomplish with the Code Igniter PHP framework in earlier parts of this series. In this seventh part of the series, you will learn, through copious examples, how to perform insertions, updates and deletions on a selected MySQL table by using Code Igniter's database class. You'll see that these tasks are very intuitive and easy to grasp, thanks to Code Igniter's friendly learning curve.

They show how to make conditional select statements (with where clauses) and do both inserts of new information and updates to current information, all with the built-in model functionality the framework provides.

In this new post to the symfony blog today Fabien talks about some of the "small things" that help to make this latest version of the framework (1.2) even better.

As for every symfony version, we try to simplify the API and make it more intuitive and powerful. Here are some examples that you will soon enjoy in symfony 1.2.

There's four included in the post (and many more in the framework):

• Application name in CLI tasks
• Native PUT and DELETE support from the browser
• Shortcuts in the response
• sfValidatorSchemaCompare validator

In a fourth part of their series looking at using Doctrine in PHP, the ProDevTips blog moves on to implementing it in a typical CRUD interface.

They create the links between the tables (two hasOne relationships), a search() method to find the destinations for a user, a sorting method to multisort based on the subkeys of the value passed in and the methods for updating the information already in the database.

That's it for now, feel free to download this tiny Smarty and Doctrine framework. Note that for this to work you have to put Smarty and Doctrine in the lib folder. There is a login interface involved, just click submit there without entering anything. There is also an SQL file in the trip_selector folder if you want to try this out with some test data (same as in the picture above).

The Total PHP site has another introductory tutorial posted showing you how to correctly delete files in your PHP scripts.

Following our tutorials on uploading files and listing files, this tutorial will walk you through deleting files from a directory. This is done using the unlink() function.

Their example is pretty simple (as is the concept) - they show how to check to be sure that the file you want to remove isn't in use/open and then issue the unlink to remove it from the file system.