On the Script-Tutorials.com site today there's a new tutorial about form validation using a combination of jQuery on the frontend and PHP on the backend.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create an attractive, pleasant to look form for your website and then I will explain you how to dynamically validate them using Javascript. We'll also cover server-side validation with PHP to make everything 100% safe. This tutorial will help you to add more functionality to your forms which leads to better user experience and better quality of your website.

His sample form (name, password, email and gender) is made from some pretty simple HTML markup. The real trick comes with the jQuery validation on each field handled in an onKeyUp. Included are both a "password strength" method and an email validation method to check the format of the address. Errored fields have their background color changed to indicate that they've failed and some basic validation (length, password match, etc.) are also included. The PHP does much of the same validation once the form is posted and returns any error messages that might have come up.

You can download the code or try out a live demo to see the scripts together in action.

On the ServerGrove blog today there's a new post about using their TranslationEditorBundle (Symfony2) to handle multilingual support for your site.

We have been working a lot with Symfony2 translations lately (we translated our website to Spanish and we are in the process of translating our control panel too). Dealing with multiple translation files is not difficult, but it takes time, lots of copy & paste. We have found that is quite easy to make mistakes, create duplicate lines, etc... in short, it's messy. To tame the translation chaos we decided to create a simple web based editor to deal with Symfony2 translations. The result is the TranslationEditorBundle and it's publicly available for anyone to use and contribute to.

The bundle gives you a simple web frontend to the translation process, making it a lot simpler to input the different versions of the text as well as determine where any duplication might be happening. It also gives you things like the total number of entries and the number of them missing their translations.

On NetTuts.com there's a recent post from Nikko Bautista about creating an API-centric application and how it can help you make a more flexible, accessible application overall. Code is included to make a simple TODO list application based on this idea.

Planning to start working on a new web application? In this tutorial, we'll discuss how to create an API-centric web application, and explain why this is essential in today's multi-platform world. [...] An API-Centric Web Application is a web application that basically executes most, if not, all its functionality through API calls. [...] Another characteristic of an API-Centric Web Application is that the API will always be stateless, meaning it can't recognize API calls by session.

He talks about how doing the work like this, though it might seem like more trouble up front, can lead to an easier time later when you need to add multi-platform support (or even open it to customers directly). In the sample application, he shows the creation of a TODO application that can create, read, update and delete items via an API. Also included is a bit of code to help secure your service with an APP ID and APP SECRET authentication set. Full code for the backend API and the frontend to interface with it can be downloaded here.

Continuing on with his webcast series looking at using the Slim microframework to create a RESTful web service with JSON Output, John Lebensold takes the code from the previous tutorials (part one, two, three) and adds handling for DELETE to remove values from the data.

This tutorial will show you how to add jQuery RESTful calls for using the DELETE verb when deleting items via a JSON REST interface.

You'll definitely need to check out either the previous tutorials in the series to follow along with the code or grab the current source to see how everything's structured.

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 this new post to his blog, Johannes Schlüter looks at a high-performance solution to the usual storing PHP session information via a memcache frontend with a MySQL Cluster backend.

Unfortunately even such a system [using MySQL and InnoDB tables] has limits and unfortunately replication is no good solution here to scale further as we will always need a master for writing the updated session data. By using replication we can take some load from it and we can configure a slave which can be promoted to master to keep session alive if the primary master machine fails but at some point in time we need another solution ... but, happy news, again: One doesn't have to look far as MySQL cluster will be happy to help. MySQL Cluster "is a high-availability, high-redundancy version of MySQL adapted for the distributed computing environment," as the MySQL documentation states.

He describes the setup (after pointing to this post about installing MySQL Cluster for memcache) and includes some sample code/SQL/ini settings you'll need to use to get PHP's memcached functionality to cooperate with it.

On DZone.com today Girogio Sironi shares some of his experiences testing out the PHP bindings currently offered to work with Selenium, the web application frontend testing tool that's become a standard over the past few years.

After trying out Selenium 2, it was natural for me to look for its support in PHP code; however, there isn't an official PHP Api distributed on Selenium's website. I tested all the PHP bindings I could find to see which is the best choice today.

He tried out a few different technologies:

• PHPUnit_Selenium
• Facebook's php-webdriver
• the php-webdriver-bindings project
• WebDriver-PHP

The finishes the post with a quick summary for each of the offerings including strengths each has and situations where you might want to use them.

In a recent post to his blog Anson Cheung guides you through another tool that can help you optimize your web applications - using YSlow for the frontend to detect trouble spots early (whether they're actually caused by the frontend or not).

He goes through the thirteen rules to help improve your website's performance including:

• Make fewer HTTP requests
• Gzip components
• Make JS and CSS external
• Remove duplicate scripts
• Configure ETags

For more information about the YSlow extension (available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and mobile devices), check out the project's page on Yahoo's Developer section (including ten more rules it checks).

In a new post Stas Malyshev has shared some code for an OAuth provider he's written up to work specifically with Zend Framework applications.

Zend Framework has pretty good OAuth consumer implementation. However, it has no support for implementing OAuth provider, and it turns out that there aren't many other libraries for it. Most examples out there base on PECL oauth extension, which works just fine, with one caveat - you have to have this PECL extension installed, while ZF implementation does not require that. So I went ahead and wrote some code that allows to easily add OAuth provider to your ZF-based or ZF-using application. That should make writing OAuth provider easier.

His code just fleshes out the server portion of the provider, not all of the token generation and key handling it'll need on the backend - that'll still be the job of your scripts. You can find the library over on github in his Zend_OAuth_Provider repository.