On the AjaxRay site today there's a new review of an introductory book from Packt Publishing about unofficial wiki is a BIG try to help in this issue. Besides, recently Packt has published the first book on Kohana "Kohana 3.0 Beginner's Guide". Jason D. Straughan wrote this book for Kohana version 3.x.

The review includes an overall assessment of the book, a detailed description of how the chapters are laid out and some of the complaints he had about the book's contents - a lack of code examples in some places, demos/screenshots pointing out what the framework can really do and the inclusion of some deprecated methods.

Overall, the book is well organized, focused and will be helpful on it's purpose. I felt it's capable to teach Kohana to a new guy, in a smooth way. Yes, there have some printing mistakes, old (because they are changed in new version) function use and some other minor issues, but seems ignorable to me. I'd recommend it for Kohana beginners.

On his blog today Kowser introduces you to Kohana, an easy to use, lightweight PHP HMVC framework that can help you get applications up and running quickly. In his tutorial he walks you through the creation of a simple application - a typical blog.

Kohana is the framework I liked best among other PHP framework. Its an easy one also . To me it is organized, highly object oriented, having clear separation of model, view & controller. Autoloading of classes is nice feature here also. Here is the tutorial I prepared. [...] Probably you have downloaded the zip file from here.

He walks you through the initial setup and configuration first then jumps right into the code with an "Article" controller, a view to match and a simple model to hook into a "kohana_blog" table (creation SQL provided). Using this setup, he shows how to get a list of the current articles and update current ones/add new ones via a basic form.

Matthew Wells has a new post that looks at combining Kohana and Gearman to create a system to handle large data processing without slowing down the rest of the application.

A commonly identified bottleneck arises when dealing with large, 'expensive' data. This is commonly seen when an application posts a large volume of well structured data to the API (that some process must be carried out upon), before some form of structured receipt is then returned as a request response. [...] Analysing such a request tends to show high PHP CPU usage with lower database consumption. [...] The structured nature of data exchanged via an API means that we can, relatively simply and reliably, divide the submitted data and process it simultaneously with the help of a great tool called Gearman.

He walks you through the entire process including his initial thoughts on what the system should be and how it should behave when the requests are made. He shares the code he used to implement the system - a simple worker that processes part of the request and returns the results. The command-line calls to run the worker manually for testing are also included.

Shameer Chamal has a quick tutorial posted to his blog today showing how you can create a basic ajax validation feature for your Kohana-based web application.

If you are new to Kohana framework, implementing validation will be an adventure, especially if you are looking for ajax validation. In this article I will present a simple way to implement some necessary validations using ajax in a sign up form.

He starts with a simple view containing the login form and including a few extra files (like the Javascript helper for the validation). Next he creates the user model that will do the backend check to see if the user already exists. Finally the controller and Javascript are created to bring all the pieces together. The Javascript uses the jQuery framework to make things a bit more convenient and runs a check against the backend for the given username with the response returned as a JSON message.

On the Query7.com blog today Logan shows you how to create a simple wiki with the help of the Kohana framework, a HMVC PHP5 framework that includes several tools (including UTF-8 suport and a cascading filesystem) to make a developer's life easier.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a simple wiki using the PHP framework Kohana version 3.1. Several years ago Siddharta Govindaraj created a screencast demonstrating how to create a wiki using Django, this is essentially the Kohana version of that. It covers using Kohana's Routing, ORM and MVC systems. Full source code of the application is available on github.

You'll need to be at least a bit familiar with the framework to follow along, but he takes it step-by-step to be sure things are easy to follow. He shows the configuration changes you'll need to make to the boostrap and the database configuration. He shows you the creation of a model and the SQL to match as well as the routing change for the new addition. Views are next on the list, then the controller - all with full code included.

On StackOverflow a question was asked about how to tweak and tune the performance of a Kohana-powered website. The result was a detailed answer from Pascal Martin that can be applied to just about any kind of web application out there, not just ones written in PHP.

Here are some points that come to my mind when talking about performances, scalability, PHP, ...First of all, there are many aspects/questions that are to consider : configuration of the server (both PHP, MySQL, and system) ; you might get more help about that on serverfault, I suppose, PHP code, database queries, using or not your webserver? Can you use any kind of caching mechanism ? Or do you need always more that up to date data on the website ?

He goes on to give tips about using a reverse proxy (like Varnish), using an opcode cache, caching data as well, profiling and optimizing SQL queries. He finishes it off with a more specific look at Kohana and how you can use some of its built in tools to accomplish these same goals.

On his blog today Shameer Chamal has a new post about a framework he's recently developed an appreciation for (he calls it "awesome" in fact) - Kohana.

In this article we will discuss some important features of Kohana, a promising and the sexiest community driven php framework. This article is pretty basic and intended to instigate those who are still not familiar with this framework. One of the problem with this framework is the lack of well organized documentation. Anyway there are many useful resources available and I have mentioned some of them at the end of this article.

He talks about some of the things he likes best about the framework including its HMVC (hierarchical Model view controller) support allowing you to cascade files down, allowing overrides at any level (good illustration here). He also talks about the scalability it offers and how, because of the HMVC functionality, you can split things up into interchangeable parts that can be pulled in based on the situation. Other features briefly mentioned include easy configuration, security and the exception handling and profiling.

Phil Sturgeon has made a new post to his blog today introducing the framework he and a few other developers have been working up - FuelPHP, a PHP 5.3 framework.

Like CodeIgniter, FuelPHP will be keeping things simple but moving to a better PHP 5 syntax. Sounds like Kohana right? Well... kinda. Kohana got a lot of things right in 2.x but the 3.x re-write was a confusing one. [...] odeIgniter and Kohana are the two main frameworks FuelPHP is based around but all of the base code is original with only some small parts sourced from other places. We have taken a few ideas from Rails for parts like code generation but this will not be a huge complicated convention-based framework. The idea is if we can improve on CodeIgniter and Kohana a little then we already have a player in the world of frameworks.

He talks about the other members of the development team (Jelmer Schreuder and Harro Verton) as well as some of the cool features about the framework like its cascading file system, its use of HMVC, packages and the "oil" command line utility (that lets you do simple migrations).

In a new post to his blog, Bence Eros takes a look at the request execution path that your Kohana-based application goes through each time a page request is made.

Yesterday Kohana 3.1 RC1 has been announced and tagged. I think now it's time to get familiar it. In this post I'm going to examine the refactored request execution workflow. Let's start with the bootstrap mechanism.

He notes that most of the changes don't happen at the boostrap level. They're more behind the scenes than that, with changes in how it works within the HMVC design pattern. He talks about the changes in the Request objetct's constructor, factory and client methods. He also includes a full flow of a request for a sample welcome controller, describing the steps it falls into and a list of classes that the Request object may have used.

Flyn San has a new post to his blog today about a better Doctrine 2 module he's created for use with Kohana framework-based applications.

Since releasing my original Doctrine 2 module for Kohana 3 (found here), I've done a bit of reshuffling of folders and added some additional features from my old Doctrine 1.2 module. Due to the extent of modifications, I decided to put up a new post with some added information on how to use the new module. For the impatient ones out there, here's the download link: Doctrine 2 Module for Kohana 3

He spends the rest of the post explaining the structure of the module, how to get it installed and working and some sample schema files (for Product and Serial tables in yaml) you can import and test with.