Eirik Hoem has pointed out an online tool a coworker shared with him to work with regular expressions for multiple languages.

A coworker of mine has been working on a ajax enabled regex tool which lets you evaluate regex expressions in several languages (including PHP PCRE and PHP POSIX) with instant results.

The tool lets you put in the string you want to match again and the pattern you want to match with. The results are automatically populated below it, making it easy to fine-tune your expression to only what you want.

PHPBuilder.com has continued their series looking at building an Ajax-driven shopping cart with part two posted today (part one here). Last time they laid the PHP foundation for the example app, this time they add another layer - the Ajax functionality to manage the current contents of the cart.

Finally, a link to the shopping cart is provided, although you could just as easily have displayed the cart contents on the same page. For the sake of brevity I'll just show you how to integrate the add feature, and will leave the subtraction mechanism to you as an exercise.

The Ajax frontend calls a managecart.php backend file that calls addToCart and deleteFromCart based on which type of "task" is passed to it.

In a new blog post, Chris Hartjes asks what's the next stack coming up on the horizon. LAMP has been the king for so long now it's hard to think about what might be next, but he takes a stab at it:

So the next thing I've been wondering about is about what future PHP stacks will look like, at least on the open source side of things. Have we gotten to the point where this is as good as it gets?

He looks at other stacks he's been working with (like LNNP - Linux, nginx, Postgres and PHP) as well as the question of limitations. Are we limiting ourselves by relying on LAMP too much? What else is out there? Does Javascript have a permenant place in any of this? (jLAMP anyone?)

As both the Zend Developer Zone and Ajaxian point out, there's been two new projects based on the Ext JS user interface widget system adapted for PHP - PHP-Ext and ExtPHP.

PHP-Ext is an open source widget library written for PHP 4 and 5 to empower the UI Layer. It is based on Ext JS javascript widgets which provide a standard and powerful API to build Rich Internet Applications. It basically works as a convenient wrapper for the Ext JS Javascript Objects.

And from the ExtPHP site:

I needed to be the one person who would have to wrestle JavaScript when problems happened. I therefore needed a way to insulate them from the gory details, which is why I created ExtPHP. As you may have guessed from subtle hints, such as this entry's 12-feet tall header, ExtPHP creates a PHP wrapper for ExtJS.

The Ajaxian post also includes code examples for each of them, one showing form construction and the other a tabbed interface.

In a new post to his blog today, Stoyan Stefanov has a proposal to being something PHP users are very used to - superglobals - over to Javascript.

Javascript has implied globals. When you skip the var in var a = 1; and go a = 1;, then a becomes a global variable. Some consider this an error in the language. [...] In PHP on the other hand, variables are local. [...] So how about this: adopt the $GLOBALS convention in your JavaScripts?

His example proposes the creation of a GLOBALS object you can assign properties to that can be used anywhere. This helps to keep the variables you truely want to be global contained, though it doesn't do much except provide a convention.

On the ProDevTips blog today, Henrik has posted about an alternative to the popular Akismet plugin for the PHP blogging tool, WordPress, to help prevent even more comment spam from making it past - WP_Hashcash.

WP Hashcash is an antispam plugin that eradicates comment spam on Wordpress blogs. It works because your visitors must use obfuscated javascript to submit a proof-of-work that indicates they opened your website in a web browser, not a robot.

He includes the code that he needed to change to get the widget part of the plugin up and working correctly. You can find out more about this plugin from its page on Elliot Back's blog.

Wolfgang Drews (of DynamicWebPages) has posted a mini-tutorial on his personal blog showing how to integrate the popular Zend Framework with the YUI Javascript libraries from Yahoo! to create an autocomplete field in your app.

Maybe this short snippet helps someone out there when using YUI autocomplete feature together with the Zend Framework or any other Framework, that creates URLs like http://domain.tld/controller/action/param/value.

He modifies the Yahoo library to change a few of the defaults to make it more Zend Framework-friendly: changing the default query format and updating the "append parameters" concatenation to replace the ampersand with a slash.