On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to implement OAuth authentication in your application using the Opauth Php library. This library lets you connect to any of a number of OAuth service providers and authenticate.

Open Authentication has evolved as a standard for third-party authentication in recent years and allows us to securely authenticate our application's users through a standard interface. Twitter and Facebook has been the standouts among dozens of authentication service providers. [...] In this article we'll explore how we can effectively use Opauth to standardize our authentication strategies. I'll be using CodeIgniter here, but even if you're not familiar with CodeIgniter, I suggest you continue reading since it will be similar for other frameworks as well. Once you understand the necessary details for integration, adapting to any framework is super simple.

He talks some about the Opauth library and shows the full authentication flow that your script will follow when using it. Code is included showing how to include and integrate the Opauth library including setup and configuration of the object and the controller/view code to implement the login form.

With the PSR-3 logging interface recently accepted by the PHP-FIG, Jamie Munro has written up a post for PHPMaster.com that shows how to implement the interface with log4php, the Apache logging tool.

With the recent passage of PSR-3, a standard for a common interface for logging libraries, it seems appropriate to discuss the implementation with my favorite logging library. log4php is an open source Apache project that is a very versatile logging framework. Through log4php's configuration files, logging has a variety of output locations, so it's possible to send specific log levels to different output locations.

He includes the Composer requirements for the interface and shares the code for a wrapper class that implements the Logger interface and defines methods for each of the logging levels (alert, notice, debug, etc). Also in the post is an example XML configuration for log4php and how to load it into your class instance.

Josh Adell has a new post today looking at the "powerful combination" of using traits and interfaces in PHP applications. He shows how, despite traits not implementing the interface directly, they can be used to make other classes adhere to them simply by "using" them.

If you're not using interfaces in PHP, you are missing out on a powerful object-oriented programming feature. An interface defines how to interact with a class. By defining an interface and then implementing it, you can guarantee a "contract" for consumers of a class. Interfaces can be used across unrelated classes. And they become even more useful when combined with the new traits feature in PHP 5.4.

He illustrates with a package shipping example and uses an "Addressable" Interface to define the structure for both a Company and Users class. He includes code showing how to implement it in a more traditional "implements" way in a class, but also shows an interesting way to achieve the same thing with traits. Having a trait that follows the interface makes it easy to have a class adhere to the interface just by including the trait (or "using" it).

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial that talks about creating interfaces in PHP and how to use them to effectively structure your application.

Starting with PHP 5 the object model was rewritten to add features and bring PHP in line with languages such as Java and Visual Basic .NET. In this article I'll discuss interfaces, which is among the most important features in PHP 5. Other important features include abstract and final classes, methods and additional magic methods. You will learn how to define your own interfaces and how to work with them using different object model mechanisms.

The introduce you to some of the basic concepts behind using interfaces and how to create a basic one - a simple definition of a string class with one method, "getString". They then show how to extend a different example (a RandomNumber interface) and add on an additional method. He also shows how to extend multiple interfaces and integrate functionality from multiple sources, overloading and overrides.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial posted that wants to provide a guide to walk you through a trio of ideas to help with code/idea reuse in your applications - inheritance, composition and delegation.

The popular belief is that reusing implementation, thus producing DRYer code, boils down to exploiting the benefits that Inheritance provides, right? Well, I wish it was that easy! [...] If you don't know what path to travel when it comes to reusing implementation, in this article I'll be doing a humble walk-through on the Inheritance/Composition/Delegation trio in an attempt to showcase, side by side, some of their most appealing virtues and clunky drawbacks.

He starts off with a look at Inheritance, showing with a small code sample showing the creation of an interface and a resulting PDO adapter class implementing it. He also shows the concept of composition, following the ideas of the Adapter pattern. In his Delegation example he shows how to implement the creation of the connection object as a part of the class' creation.

In a new post to his blog Sameer Borate shows how to create a lexer and parser in PHP to work directly with the tokens of a PHP script.

After looking around for a while [for a good resource on compilers] I settled for Terence Parr's Language Implementation Patterns. This is exactly what I needed - bit sized patterns on compiler and parser design with working code. The book provides a recipe style approach, gradually moving from simple to complex compiler/parser design issues. As I primarily work with PHP, I thought of porting some code to PHP to see how it works.

He shows examples using his custom tool to show a basic lexer output for a list and a complete listing of the code involved. Ultimately, though, he finds that PHP isn't overly suited to the task - anything more than his simple example could be more trouble than it's worth.

Following up on their earlier simple object iterators post, the SitePoint PHP blog is back with a look at more sophisticated iterators you can use to work with database record objects.

In my previous post, Simple Object Iterators in PHP, we discovered how to iterate over array items defined within an object using a foreach loop. However, what if you need to iterate over items which are not stored in an array, e.g. records from a database or lines of text read from a file?

He shows how to create a script that pulls in the users from a database object (PDO, in this case) and implements the Countable and Iterator interfaces. These interfaces give it some special methods that can give counts of the results and help you iterate through the results - current, rewind, next and valid.

Jeremy Brown, after working tirelessly on a REST API based around the Zend Framework (and a few other technologies), has come up with his three tenets for implementing a REST API to hopefully help you along the straight and narrow path that he forged himself.

In the course of performing my duties at my day job I recently came across the need for our data to be accessible via an API. After researching the various types available, I settled on developing a REST API. The selection process wasn't the interesting part of this exercise though. Actually implementing a REST API is what was.

His advice ranges from the general to very specific, sharing tips on how to most effectively create the service's API:

• REST is a set of principles (and not a specification)
• Do not use custom media types
• Represent the headers in the response payload

On his blog today Matt Williams has a quick tutorial about setting up your CodeIgniter application to use the new oAuth authentication feature that Twitter with the help of this library.

On August 31st Twitter will be axing basic auth GET requests, which is being overtaken by the more secure oAuth, there are a few tutorials out there on how to use oAuth and how to get started creating an app with CodeIgniter, but not many with actually helpful advice so here is my 2 penneth.

The library makes it simple to connect to the Twitter servers with your key/token combination and run a check against the credentials via a simple "oauth()" method call. Sample code is included in the post to make implementing easier.

Aaron McGowan has posted his list of five things he wishes PHP could change (or even had) in future versions of the language.

Recently I have been hard at work trying to finish up a few major source packages and one application - but I have recently found myself thinking about how much better and more "grown" up PHP would be if it had a few things that other technologies such as C++ and C# have.

The five things on his list are:

• Operator Overloading
• Method and function Overloading
• Advancement of Namespaces
• Use of final keyword for class member variables
• 'Getters' & 'Setters' similar to C#'s for class member variables

Each point comes with a summary and a bit of code to show what he's talking about. He sees these things as major steps in PHP "growing up" and as features that could help it make a translation over from things like .NET simpler.