The /Dev/Hell podcast has posted their latest episode - #30 - "It's Episode 30, You Guys":

In our action-packed 30th episode Ed and Chris discussed their experiences with JavaScript testing tools, specifically how certain tools push you towards specific refactoring patterns. Chris talked about the successful launch of his latest book on using PHPUnit and got into some honest talk about revenue and how the product development course helped him make this book do 4 times the launch day revenue of his previous one. Ed discussed his plans to talk about mental illness on the conference circuit this year. Please help out by donating to the campaign!

You can listen to this latest episode either using the downloading the mp3. You can also subscribe to the feed to get this and future episodes as they're released.

PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted showing you how to create a simple poll using the PHPixie PHP framework, a MySQL backend and a little bit of Javascript.

When choosing a PHP framework you need to make sure that it emphasizes features which are the most important to you. If you are looking for something fast, simple, and easy to learn than PHPixie may be a perfect choice. To illustrate the basics of developing with PHPixie we will create a small polling application. By the end of this tutorial you will have a working poll application and an understanding of how easy it is to code projects using PHPixie.

They provide you with all of the parts you'll need - the database table definition, the code for the modules/views/controllers and the Javascript to handle the addition of new options. You can find the full code on the PHPMaster github account.

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial from Vito Tardia about using the Mozilla Persona authentication system in your PHP application - an abstracted authentication system that keeps only a token representing the user in your system.

Mozilla Persona is built upon the BrowserID technology also developed by Mozilla. You can find an expanded explanation of the concepts in the article How BrowserID Works by Lloyd Hilaiel. [...] An email address is an identity and it's verified by the email provider [then the] authentication takes place in the browser.

He talks about the three steps in the process (certificate provisioning, assertion generation and assertion verification) and includes some sample code that does the work for you with some PHP, HTML and Javascript. In his example he just authenticates the user and returns the success/fail back to the calling script. You could take it one step further and integrate it with the session handler as well.

Grzegorz Godlewski has written up a post about a piece of PHP-related malware that, if it gets into your application, can render your site inaccessible (not to mention blocked by Google's "safe browsing") - PHP.Kryptik.AB.

One could think a PHP Developer is free from viruses and malware - and be wrong. Meet PHP.Kryptik.AB - the PHP malware. If you already know this bastard - high five! But if you don't - be prepared! Basically the story starts from a standard computer trojan which (I suppose) attacks popular FTP clients that store FTP login credentials unencrypted. Then it sends fetched informations to a remote host which (by the cover of night) logs into the FTP servers and infects PHP base web-pages by injecting a piece of JavaScript code, that gets executed when a user enters a site.

He describes the injected code, what kind of files the malware looks for when it executes and how you can fix the problem if you've already been infected. There's also a bit about how you can prevent yourself from being infected (including the suggestion of using something like KeePass or 1Password to manage and create harder to crack passwords).

On NetTuts.com there's a great list of tips and things to keep in mind if you're a budding programmer - a set of common pitfalls to watch out for as you hone your skills.

Regardless of our current skill level, we all were beginners at one point in time. Making classic beginner mistakes comes with the territory. Today, we've asked a variety of Nettuts+ staff authors to chime in with their list of pitfalls and solutions - in a variety of languages. Learn from our mistakes; don't do these things!

The article starts off with some Javascript tips, but quickly gets into some more PHP specific things like:

• Use Ternary When Appropriate
• Use Guard Clauses
• Keep Methods Maintainable
• Avoid Deep Nesting
• Don't Overuse Variables

There's also two "extras" thrown in more concerning general programming practices - using methods to represent actions and some basic code readability suggestions.

PHPClasses.org has posted the latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series - Episode #27, "Running PHP code with JavaScript and Python VM".

PHP applications popularity is so high that developers which prefer using other languages are trying to compile PHP code in languages like JavaScript and Python using new virtual machine projects. [...] They also cover the latest PHP releases and the new features planned for PHP 5.5, as well the new PHP elephant plush toys that were produced by the PHPClasses site to give away to the best contributors of the site.

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - either by downloading the mp3, subscribing to their feed or watching the video on their Youtube channel.

In a new post to the Zumba Engineering blog, they share an interface they use for testing on their API (after working with something similar from another company).

They provide the documentation to the methods and I saw they have a simple interface to test their methods: Ooyala API Scratchpad. This interface was very useful while we integrate with them and I thought: "Why we don't have one interface like that for our API?" I started a page with Twitter Bootstrap to have a similar functionality, which the goal was to get an interface easy to developers see the response for multiple HTTP protocols, set the parameters, etc.

The interface uses Javascript to make requests over to a RESTful API and returns the response JSON directly to the page. It's a little bit customized to how their API works, but it's a good foundation for anyone looking to implement something similar. You can get the full code for it over on github.

From the "Web Love PHP" blog there's a new post showing how to use the V8 Javascript engine as a PHP extension in your application.

Just got to something described as: This extension embeds the V8 Javascript Engine into PHP. It is called v8js and the documentation is already available on php.net, examples and the sources are here. V8 is known to work well in browsers and webservers like node.js, but does it work inside PHP? YES!

They show how to get it installed (on Ubuntu) via a PECL install and a test script with some Javascript in a string variable that's parsed by the "executeString" function on a V8 object. There's also an example of how you can mix the functionality between the two - a simple script that uses a PHP PDO object fron inside the Javascript to perform a SQL query and set some information into the session.

On the BinaryTides.com site there's a recent post for those familiar with Javascript and wanting to have the same kind of object-style literals in PHP.

As similar thing [to Javascript object literals] can be done in PHP using anonymous functions (since 5.3) [...] Since version 5.3 Php added support for closures and that feature has been used above to create javascript style object literals. The use(&$a) expression makes the variable $a available inside the function happy.

Code snippets are included showing how to create these objects via the use of closures and a little trickery with call_user_func_array and __call to make assigning properties easier.

Jeff Carouth has posted some of his thoughts about the PHP micro-framework and Javascript combination (following a recent presentation on the subject).

As I mentioned, I was accepted as a speaker at LoneStarPHP 2012 to give a session on MicroPHP Framework and JavaScript Applications. The session went reasonably well and I received some decent feedback both at the conference and on joind.in. I will address a couple issues with the talk to, hopefully, inspire you as I intended with this talk.

He talks about some of the things that need fixing about his presentation (like the lack of time to get into the needed depth) and how his talk should "inspire the attendees" to create apps with this powerful combination. His goal was to describe the use of the micro-framework (Slim) as a RESTful interface into your application, not to make the application inside of it.

He also mentions that maybe making an introduction to the MicroPHP Manifesto and describing how to use a framework that applies to it in one shot might have been too much.