Lorna Mitchell has a new post to her blog today looking at one of the differences she's found in her work with the Magento API between version 1 and version 2.

I must say that I am always pleased when I see that these products do include some kind of API. The Magento one is a bit interesting, although there is some half-decent API documentation for the original API. However they have then released a new version of the API, with very little documentation.

Her example code shows the difference in a call to grab a customer list from the SOAP interface - the version 1 method used a "customer.list" request while the version 2 method just made use of a normal SOAP method call to the "customerCustomerList" method on the service.

On his blog today Alan Sorkin has a humorous take on what the difference is between computer scientists, programmers and developers according to where they place their focus.

I have often used those three terms almost interchangeably, yes, even computer scientist. After all, most of us have a degree in computer science, so what does that make us? However, recently I find that those three things have come to take on more and more distinct personalities in my mind. [...] It is difficult to define what each one should be, (it is more of a gut feel rather than a strict delineation) they are very similar (and rightly so), but I am going to attempt to do it anyway.

He splits them up according to a few criteria - how their code looks, how it works and what level their math skills are at. The photos he uses to further define each are pretty dead on too.

In this recent post to his blog Doug Brown spends a little time comparing (at a high-level) some of the differences between ASP and PHP.

The difference between PHP and ASP is that ASP is a Microsoft product based on visual basic syntax whereas PHP has C and Java based syntax. ASP works better on Microsoft servers.

He describes the target audience for each language and talks about the environments that they work best in as well as some general statements about their speed and flexibility. Basing his judgment on the facts he noted, he suggests PHP as the best alternative of the two for being more flexible, running in more places and being a bit faster overall.

Adam Hosker has posted some of the differences between PHP4 and PHP5 to help you make the transition.

He's broken it up into a few different sections:

• Language Features
• Objects
• Magic Methods
• Selected New Extensions
• Error Management

Each of the sections has several subpoints detailing changes, updates and tips. The post is a part of his studies working up to talking the Zend Certified Engineer test.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new article that looks to answer the question in its title - "Why should I care what server my application is running on?" (by Eddo Rotman)

Imagine this - you develop an application on your machine and then, when you come to deploy it to the production server, all of a sudden, you encounter various errors and failures. Or maybe, when you decide to switch your hosting provider, your application stops behaving the way it should. How about this -... one day, out of the blue (well, out of your IT manager's whim) your application just misbehaves. Sounds familiar?

Times like can never be completely avoided (yes, there'll always be bugs) but you can take some steps to help prevent most of the major failing points. He points out some of the key configuration directives to watch out for, differences in some functions' responses based on the OS, and the differences in character sets between a unix-based and Windows based environment (like rn versus just n).

Christopher Kunz has gone back and revisited the PHPShield product that he'd looked at previously with data obscured to make potential customer think that it had nothing to do with either SourceGuardian or Inovica.

Checking up on it again, he was happily surprised with some of the results:

I asked him again today via private mail and his response was swift. The whois entries for phpshield.com now point to his person and we can expect additional information on the web site itself soon. I like it when things can be resolved like that and I actually think this is a chance for his product rather than a possible competition issue.

This helps to more clearly define the difference between the PHPShield and SourceGuarian products. You can find out more information about each product from their sites - PHPShield and SourceGuarian. Both are encoding packages to help protect and distribute your code.

Hasin Hayder has posted his own response to a recent "relative time" article (showing users things like "received 2 days and 3 hours ago") with a more precise method for doing something similar:

This function is production ready and you can use it in any of your application which mainly works with these date difference. I have found it somewhere in web, just forgot the source. Thanks to the unknown author of this excellent function.

The rest of the post is the function itself that takes in the interval string (formatting), the start date, end date and whether to use timestamps or not.

Reinhold Weber has posted his lists of some of the similarities and differences between Ruby and PHP:

If you are a PHP developer chances are you have heard some of the buzz on Ruby on Rails, an open source web framework for rapid application development. [...] These are similarities and differences of Ruby compared to PHP. If you know PHP, this should give you a good and quick insight in what Ruby is all about and how it compares to PHP.

Some of the similarities include the dynamic typing, class scoping, heredoc abilities and current object references. Differences include syntax differences, method calling, naming conditions and Ruby's lack of interface/abstract classes.

From the RefreshinglyBlue blog, there's a new post that makes a comparison between two of the most popular web scripting languages - PHP and Ruby - on a practical, basic level.

There are rather significant syntactical differences between PHP and Ruby. For example PHP requires semicolons at the end of lines and generally requires curly brackets to enclose blocks of code. Ruby, on the other hand, uses newline characters to denote the end of a line of code...

The post goes through other differences like: value return methods, function/method naming, similarities between them, frameworks, namespaces, documentation and hosting options.

On the Photogapple.co.uk blog today, there's some handy code that can definitely be useful when working with dates in PHP - a function to find the difference between the current time and a timestamp you give it.

I found it incredibly difficult to find any form of time_since function in php so to save anyone else the trouble to hunting through hundreds of useless websites here is the function you may want to use, written by Natalie Downe (you don't want to know how long it took to hunt it down).

The function takes in the value, subtracts the two timestamps and loops through an array of "time chunks" to each other to show nicely formatted output of how long the difference it.