On the AndroidHive site there's a recent tutorial (plus screencast) about combining PHP, MySQL and SQLite to act as the backend authorization for your Android application.

In my previous article Android Login and Registration Screen Design i explained designing the login and registration interfaces, but it has no functionality. In this tutorial i am explaining how to build complete login and registration system in android using PHP, MySQL and SQLite. Also this tutorial covers how to build simple API using PHP and MySQL.

The tutorial walks you through each step of the process:

• Creating MySQL Database and Tables
• Building PHP API Classes
• Starting Android Project
• Making the JSON Parser, SQLite Database Handler and User Functions Classes
• Designing the Screens
• Switching between Activities
• Finally Updating AndroidManifest.xml

If you want to get started quickly, you can just download the final result and go.

In a new post to his blog, Oliver John Tibi has the first part of a series looking at mobile-izing your CakePHP application, making it mobile friendly when a mobile browser is detected.

I'll be writing a short series of posts on how to create a mobile version of your CakePHP app. I've always been bragging to my peers how awesome CakePHP is, and so now I'm writing a short tutorial on how to create a mobile-friendly version of a CakePHP app. I promise to make this as easy as possible.

In this first part of the series he helps you do two things - set up some custom routes for the mobile version of the site ("/m") and add in browser detection using the RequestHandler's "isMobile()" method.

From Tutorialzine.com today, they've posted the first part of a series looking at the construction of a full mobile website using PHP, MySQL and jQuery mobile.

In this two-part tutorial, we will be building a simple website with PHP and MySQL, using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. Finally, with the help of the jQuery Mobile framework, we will turn it into a touch-friendly mobile website, that works on any device and screen size. In this first part, we concentrate on the backend, discussing the database and MVC organization. Next time, we will be writing the views and integrating jQuery Mobile.

Their simple application lets you browse products in a storefront with products and their categories. They don't use any particular framework and instead opt for a "include all" approach in their example. This makes it simpler to bootstrap, but shouldn't be used in a production-ready version of the application. There's simple frameworks (like CodeIgniter out there that can help take it to the next level without much more complexity). You can see a demo of it in action or just download the source to get started hacking.

Rafael Dohms has posted a wrapup of this year's php|tek '11 conference and has included some of his thoughts about the "trending technologies" he saw during his time there.

Another edition of php|tek has come and gone and this year some very amazing topics came into view. The conference itself was once again a great experience, great people, incredible speakers, lots of activities and incredible hack-a-thons and unconference sessions.

Topics he noticed coming to the forefront at this year's event included:

• Cloud computing (and the PHP-specific offerings related to it)
• Mobile development
• API and external tool integration

He also mentions one thing he wouldn't mind seeing more of at events - the "soft skills" sort of presentations. They're less about the technology that's used and more about the "people skills" developers can use to make the best of their careers.

In an interesting move to help make things easier (and better for the environment) for the attendees of their tek11 conference, the php|architect group is going with an "all digital" format for their conference materials this year.

Conference programs are easily misplaced, pamphlets are often discarded, and so on, and so forth. The end result is an enormous amount of waste - I'm pretty sure that, last year, we probably shipped, handled, and handed out at least 500lbs. of paper - and less value than everyone would like. This year, therefore, we have set out to "go digital" and limit our paper usage as much as possible. As part of this initiative, we are going to introduce a few changes

This year you'll get a USB key instead of the usual bag of handouts, a conference program available in a wide variety of formats and a mobile application you can use to find upcoming sessions and communicate with fellow conference attendees. You can find out more about the conference including the schedule and how to get your ticket on the tek111 website.

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new webinar brought to you by Adobe (with Zend's own Kevin Schroeder) about building mobile applications by combining the Zend Framework and the Adobe AIR technology for devices.

Using Zend Framework 1.11 on the server and Adobe AIR for devices on the client, web developers will soon be able to deploy mobile applications across a wide range of smartphone and tablet devices.

The webinar will show off the features of the Zend Framework particularly handy for mobile developers and how the Zend_Amf component can be used to hook it into the AIR frontend to create multi-platform applications. If you'd like to check it out, it's free but you'll need to register. It's happening on January 26th from 9am-10am Pacific time (US).

Kevin Schroeder has been working on a Zend Framework-based mobile application (Android) and ran up against a debugging issue that he would normally solve with features of his IDE, but since those weren't available on the device, he got a bit more creative.

The solution is similar to what I did with Debugging an RPC call in Zend Framework. What this does is set the cookies from the remote browser to debug on the local instance of the Zend debugger. To kick it off simply open up the URL to the debug kickoff page. That will set the cookies in your mobile browser. Then go to the page that you want to debug from your mobile phone and reload it.

He includes the code you'll need (a method to drop into your Controller) to make that debugging work. It sets up an array of cookie values and, when the page to debug is reloaded, those values will be set again and the IDE (in his case, Zend Studio) will catch them as a key to start debugging.

In a recent post to his blog Dhiraj Patra introduces the iPFaces mobile PHP framework and shows how to create a simple "Hello World" kind of application.

iPFaces is a flexible solution for easy development of form-oriented network mobile applications. With the iPFaces solution, mobile devices are able to render content received from a server using their native UI components. It uses thin presentation client (must be installed on device) to render application content. Using iPFaces it is possible to build an application where users can use their device's specific component behavior and additional device features, such as location service and additional graphic components of the device (lists, pickers etc.).

He outlines the architecture of a typical application and includes a bit of PHP code to create a simple screen with a "Hello World Application" title and a "Hello World" message as well as a more complex application that uses a GPS element to figure out the distance between you and another location.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new post from Cal Evans about an article from the minds of Ryan Stewart (Adobe) and Kevin Schroeder (Zend) about the powerful combination of Flex and PHP.

These two have gotten together again to show how you can use Flex (Flash, ActionScript, AIR, you know the drill) and Zend Framework (Winner of a BOSSie) Their new article "Flex and PHP" from the most recent issue of Flash & Flex magazine, talks about using the same controllers and actions for returning both HTML and JSON. This concept of programming for multiple destinations is important in a web where your API may be more important than your HTML.

You can get the full article as a PDF from the DevZone site. It's an extended tutorial on getting Flex and PHP to work together via multiple formats (similar to what Kevin presented on his blog recently.

On the These Days blog there's a recent post talking about creating a mobile version of your site and how you can detect if the visitor is using a mobile browser or not using WURFL.

WURFL, The Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL) is an open source project which collects information about all of the different mobile devices in use. It is constantly being updated, so as long as you keep your WURFL definitions up-to-date you don't have to worry about your detection scripts not recognising new devices. By querying a WURFL database with your visitor's User Agent string, you can not only determine whether the device they are using is a mobile device, but whether it has a touch screen, can make phone calls, is a tablet (iPad) and more.

They include a snippet of code that uses the Tera-WURFL service and a call to getCapabilitiesFromAgent to see what kind of client is making the requests and what it supports.