Henry Hayes has a recent post to his blog looking at a the change for the user agent support for the browser detection functionality in the Zend Framework.

Recently it has come to light that Zend Framework are dropping support for the WurflApi Features Adapter in the Zend_Http_UserAgent component. This is due to licensing issues. As of version 1.12 Zend_Http_UserAgent_Mobile constant DEFAULT_FEATURES_ADAPTER_CLASSNAME now specifies that Zend_Http_UserAgent_Features_Adapter_Browscap is now the default mobile adapter.

He shows you how to get the browscap support set up and configured for your PHP installation and what needs to be done to a pre-1.12 ZF release application (using this library) and in a post-1.12 application (almost nothing).

Kevin Schroeder, in his move towards doing some mobile development, has a new post to his blog about why he's still going to stick with PHP for the backend of this new development work.

I do like working with client/server-like architectures and so I intend to be building apps that have a fair amount of server-side processing to back it up. More details on that to come in the next few months. [...] I have decided that, for the time being, to use PhoneGap for my frontend development. [...] So the question was what to use for the backend development and, to nobody's surprise I presume, PHP is my chosen way to go.

Some of his reasons for the choice include:

• PHP is stupid easy to scale
• It is tied to the web
• (Available) Frameworks
• Tons of blogs
• It integrates with everything

Check out the post for more of his reasons.

On PHPMaster.com today, they've started a new series about integrating two popular technologies - PHP and the Android OS - in this new tutorial from Matthew Turland. He'll show both sides of the code needed to get your Android app talking to a PHP backend.

This two-part article will guide you through the process of building an efficient PHP-based REST web service to be consumed by an Android-based application. Some of the concepts presented here are also applicable to other mobile platforms, such as iOS. I assume you already know the basics of PHP and Android development and that you have a suitable development environments set up for both. I'll focus mainly on showing you how to handle data serialization and compression in both environments.

In this first part, he starts from the client side, creating the code (Java) that's needed to create the connection to the backend. He stets it up as a background task so its execution won't block the main app from working. He shows how to execute it, running an "on create" method and checking to ensure the network is available for the request.

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.