Matt Williams has a quick post to his blog about using the combination of PHP and Apache's Solr to more powerful searching than something like a MySQL fulltext index can give you.

When data sets get large and MySQL database querying to search become too load heavy and slow, full indexing is required. Several solutions are available but in this article I will be demonstrating the Apache foundations Solr Java Lucene implementation. For this a Java build will be required. Linux or Mac is less of a problem but for windows I use the Apache Tomcat server.

He shows ho to use the Solr PHP interface to make the connection to the server, ping it to be sure the connection is working and, based on the schema and search information, return a set of results in a PHP object.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Jason Gilmore showing how you can interface your application with the Google Analytics service through its HTTP API. Jason shows ho to use the Google Analytics API PHP Interface tool to take most of the hard work out of it.

Google Analytics (GA) is the de facto solution for analyzing web site traffic and trends. [...] If you're not regularly relying upon Google Analytics or a similarly capable analytical service, then you're left at a major competitive disadvantage in terms of your ability to effectively understand the interests, demographics, and technical requirements of your audience.

Using the Google Analytics site is a pleasant experience, but having to log in just to check your numbers each day can get tiresome quickly. Jason introduces a way, using the GAPI class to pull things like traffic statistics and account information. More examples of how it can be used are shown on the GAPI website.

In a recent post to his blog Gonzalo Ayuso has a brief introduction to CouchDB and how you can use it in your application. Most of the post is made up of code samples showing some of the basic relational database operations translated over to a CouchDB database (found in this class).

I come from relational database world. NoSQL is new for me. Maybe I'm wrong but I want to use INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and SELECT statements in CouchDB in the same way I use them in Relational database. The class is focused in the HTTP Document API. There is a great tutorial here that explains the API. Now I'll show the interface I've made to perform the statements with CouchDB.

There's examples of both simple and more complex selects, updates and deletes as well as the handling of exceptions via two types he's included support for - NoDataFound and DupValOnIndex.

In a new post to his blog today Sameer Borate has a tutorial about linking your application to the Google Analytics backend and using the requestReportData method to pull back interesting statistics on your sites.

Although no standard library is available from Google for PHP, some small and easy interfaces are available out there. In this post we will see how to access Google Analytics data using PHP using the GAPI library.

The GAPI library is an open sourced project that provides a direct, easy to use interface you can use to connect directly to the Analytics service without having to handle all of the manual stuff yourself. Sameer shows how to get information from the service like the top ten sources and visit counts, regional information and how to do some filtering on the results returned.

In this new post to his blog Adam Jensen looks at creating cron jobs with the help of the Zend Framework without having to load up the entire MVC architecture to get there.

So, we're going to need a new application bootstrap and entry point, one that eschews the MVC routing and dispatch process in favor of something simpler. Essentially, all we'll need is to be able to run an arbitrary collection of cron "task plugins," the list of which can be configured in plain text via any of the various Zend_Config formats (e.g., the default application.ini file).

He starts with the base functionality, a task plugin interface that allows you to set up a "framework" to run the tasks in. He also creates a simple cron service that handles the execution of the tasks (this is the main executable) and includes the code for creating the bootstrap for the Zend Framework to understand how to use it all. Then to create a new task, all you have to do is extend the CronInterface.

On the ProDevTips.com site today there's a new tutorial showing how to create a simple CRUD (create, read, update, delete) interface to your database tables with PHP and jQuery (here's an example).

I recently made a very simple but functional administrational interface using jQuery and Ajax to avoid having to refresh the page all the time thus simplifying development. The only convention/requirement here is that any database table that uses the interface has a unique id column aptly named id.

Their example is pretty simple - it lets you view the contents of the cells, allows you to change their values in the form fields (or delete the record) and save the changes. Complete code - HTML, PHP and jQuery - is included.

According to the latest post on his blog Brandon Savage thinks interfaces rock:

When I first learned PHP 5's object oriented syntax and rules, I didn't see much of a point to the interface options. I felt that I could do more by defining abstract classes and at least filling in some of the methods with some details. [...] As a developer, I've often wished there was a way to know that an object - any object - had implemented certain methods. With type hinting and the instanceof operator, it is now possible to determine whether or not an object has those methods, and interfaces make this even easier.

He includes an example or two of how type hinting can help you enforce and predict what sort of methods are defined in other classes. He also points out that this can be one of the major drawbacks of interfaces as well - because they are so strict, they have to be adhered to exactly.

Popescu Valentin has submitted a tool that he and and Radu Gasler have created to help you run your PHPUnit tests via a web interface.

I made a web interface for runing PHPUnit test suites and seeing the results in a cool environment of AJAX. Features Runing speciffic tests or whole suite, seeing the errors and thrown exceptions connected to the test that thrown them, ability to see the code coverage result for the test suite. All these done in an interactive interface allowing run of the tests where the user can not interract with the system command line (web server). The software is totally free.

You can find complete details about the tool (and downloads) on its SourceForge page (as well as donate if you like it!)

On the Ask About PHP blog today there's a new tutorial (and a new class) helping you to connect your applications with the Google Analytics backend.

I've been thinking about how I can make use of this API to enhance the sites I'm working on. But before kicking off ideas, I had to find out how to access and use the API. I finally came up with a PHP class that will do all the grunt work of calling the API, you just need to supply your report's parameter and the PHP class will return you an array of Analytics data.

The class [zip] makes connecting to the Analytics backend as easy as dropping in a username/password, defining which profile to use and the date range. The getReport() method does the hard work

Juozas Kaziukenas (thanks to his work in the WinPHP Challenge) has posted his look at using the SQL native driver to allow the Zend Framework to interact with a MSSQL database backend.

Now some of these issues [that Stuart Herbert pointed out] are fixed, however Microsoft native Sql driver is still not used. [...] However, none of these is available in Zend Framwork. So my task now (because of Winphp competition) is to come up with something what can be used to connect to Microsft Sql database with the new driver.

He looks at how to set up two different options for a database configuration: with a PDO_ODBC adapter and an adapterNamespace setting to define the adapter type to use and the other with an MSSQL adapter type.