On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new tutorial showing you how to integrate your application with Flickr with some help from components in the Zend Framework.

Like many Web 2.0 applications, Flickr exposes its data to the public via a REST API, making it possible to develop customized applications that run on top of the base service. This REST API allows access to a number of important functions, including photo searching, tagging and uploading; photoset retrieval; contact retrieval; and panda recommendations.

The tutorial uses the Zend_Rest_Client component of the Zend Framework to make the actual request to the Flickr API and you'll need a API key/shared secret to be able to use it. The rest of the tutorial is code dedicated to helping you connect to the service, fetch data, search the API (and output the results), and looking at some of the "interestingness" magic Flickr has to share.

In a recent post to the Web Development Blog there's a tutorial about creating a simple script to connect to Flickr and run a search to return matching image thumbnail information.

Our last tutorial about the flickr API was an example on how-to search the flickr photo database for images using some short PHP code. This time we will use parts from the past tutorial together with some jQuery Ajax requests to show our photo search result without reloading the web page.

They include the code for the different parts of the application - the HTML for the frontend form, the Ajax functions to access the PHP backend interface and the PHP code to make the request over to the Flickr API for images matching your search term.

On the Web Development Blog there's a recent post about connecting your PHP application with the Flickr API to search for photos with the help of a simple class.

We will be using the php function "file_get_contents" to receive data from flickr. The data which we will receive will be a serialized PHP array which means all we need to do is unserialize the array and we will easily be able to use the data returned. As an alternative we can use a cURL function to get the data, for example if the function "file_get_contents" is not allowed on your web host.

They show how to get your API key from the Flickr website and the sample code that you'll need to make a GET request (with file_get_contents) and an example of a loop displaying the response.

On DZone.com today there's a new screencast posted from the NetBeans IDE group showing how to create a simple Flickr slide show inside the application.

In this screencast, Justin Bolter, Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems, shows you how to build a PHP Flickr slideshow using NetBeans IDE 6.5 . Bolter walks through the various ways in which NetBeans IDE 6.5 supports PHP development, including project support, run configurations, code completion, syntax highlighting, documentation, refactoring and debugging.

If you can't view the screencast, the full transcript of it is also included in the post.

The Dutch PHP Conference for this year has finished and the wrapups and reviews are already starting to pop up. Here's a listing of several bloggers that have already shared their memories:

• Rob Allen
• Tibo Beijen
• Cal Evans (on the Ibuildings blog)
• Lorna Mitchell
• Stefan Koopmanschap
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Eli White (on the Zend Developer Zone)
• Sessions and slides (on the Ibuildings blog)
• Flickr images from multiple attendees
• Joind.in reviews of both the event and speakers

Keep an eye here for more summaries to be added to the list as they're posted.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a real world benchmark as justification for moving from a PHP 4 to PHP 5 environment - evidence from Flickr's change.

Benchmarks such as the PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark I posted quite a while ago on this blog are synthetic. They test "raw bytecode execution" speed that cannot be translated into real-world situations per se. Flickr recently migrated from PHP 4 to PHP 5. And here are their real world numbers.

The graph shows a dramatic drop in processing needed (CPU usage) at the moment they made the switch over from PHP4 to PHP5.The system processing usage stayed about the same (system processes like logging and memory handling) but the user CPU usage (like what the web server would use) saw an immediate change by almost twenty percent.

In this new tutorial from NETTUTS.com there's information on how to create a gallery of the images from your Flickr account with help from SimplePie, a PHP tool for parsing XML feeds (like RSS).

Ok, so we're going to be touching on a number of technologies for this tutorial. We'll be using an RSS feed from Flickr, a bit of PHP, and some jQuery to make things nice and interactive! We'll use SimplePie to handle the RSS feed, as it makes life much easier, and can be used in any other projects where RSS feeds are involved.

They pull in the public photo information for a given user ID and parse details like the title of the gallery and each image's details, including descriptions. Add in a few links, some Javascript (jQuery) and HTML and you have a simple image gallery that automatically updates when you upload new photos to Flickr. You can grab the source here or just see it in action in their demo.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted his summary of the recent BugHuntDay that happened in Roosendaal (the Netherlands) this past weekend:

Bughuntday is a whole day developers can come together to start fixing bugs for open-source frameworks and libraries. This Saturday we started these series with Zend Framework, a hugely adopted PHP framework within enterprise and professional web application development.

He also includes the slides from the presentation and a video of Jurien Stutterheim's talk introducing everyone to testing and the Zend Framework. There's pictures of the event on Flickr too.

Check here for an updated video from the event.

The PHP Appalachia unconference happened from October 11th through 14th in Pigeon Forge, TN with plenty of talks, community interaction and relaxation. Here's a few posts from those that were there:

• Elizabeth Naramore's wrapup of the event
• Brandon Savage's thoughts about the days
• Brian Moon's few corrections on parts of his talk
• Sara Golemon's wrap-up
• Keith Casy's final thoughts on the conference and the PHP community
• a wrapup from Brian DeShong

There was plenty of activity on Flickr and twitter during the conference - here's the links:

• Twitter tagged with phpappalachia or phpapp
• Flickr pics tagged with phpapp

Elizabeth summed it up well:

Imagine sticking roughly 25 geeks together in a house in the mountains for 4 days and see what comes of it. Cooking together, hacking together, talking PHP together, playing some video games together and of course drinking together. I think everyone would agree that it's worth the $15 plus travel and the cost of the cabin.

Cal Evans and Ivo Jansch have started up a bit of a contest for those owners of elePHPants out there - the elePHPant World Tour (ewt08):

Here's the basic premise. It seems obvious that elePHPants love to travel. Equally obvious is the fact that a lot of PHP developers love to take pictures. So, let's combine the two. If you spot an elePHPant while traveling, like near a landmark, or making it's way through the airport, snap a picture. Upload it to flickr and tag it with ewt08. Thanks in no small part to a bit of Web 2.0 magic and Wordpress, we'll steal the picture from flickr and post it on the blog.

In January of 2009 the PHP Women group will take a look at all of the photos and pick the best ones. There's multiple prizes so far including a copy of Zend Studio Professional and admission to the Dutch PHP Conference '09 (check out the about page for more).