Dave Marshall, a developer from Hull, England, has posted a few recommendations he thinks could help you land that next PHP job.

After reading this thread, I thought I'd spend some time writing about what I feel are some measures you can take to landing a job in PHP. This first part is going to concentrate on the kind of technical matters I think any PHP developer should at least have knowledge of, if not some kind of experience.

He suggests: as much programming experience as possible, experience with the full development lifecycle, knowing how to work with external libraries and frameworks, being able to adapt to development tools, knowing web application security, and some work with web services and a touch of system administration. He's not saying that you have to have all of these - just that the more you know, the better off you could be.

On the Make Me Pulse blog, there's a look at PHP6's support of Unicode in the SPL (Standard PHP Library) TextIterator handler.

I've just install the last version of PHP6 dev and I've decided to test the famous new feature, the PHP Unicode Support. I will not explain new things about PHP6 or Unicode or TextIterator, it's just my discoveries test on this features.

He steps through the process he followed - enabling Unicode support, testing various output methods (including just an echo and using the TextIterator) as well as some of the manipulation methods (next/first/current) that can be used to get certain characters out of a string.

On the WebMonkey site today, there's a new tutorial that looks at one of the most "pervasive" sites to come along in a long time, del.icio.us and how to interact with it's API via PHP.

Who's that with the catchy URL that's getting all the clicks?

Why, it's del.icio.us! No matter where you are on the "Web 2.0" lash or backlash, the pervasive influence of this little bookmark aggregator can't be denied.

The site offers a myriad ways of accessing its database, from HTML and RSS feeds, to JSON data, to browser integration of various types. Let's take a look at the public API, which offers flexible and easy access to del.icio.us.

In his example, he creates a script that, given the contents of an email message, filters out the URL, breaks it into its parts and sends it off to the del.icio.us API to be bookmarked under his account.

Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.

The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.

You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.

Alex Netkachov has posted some of his own thoughts about Microsoft's recent SQL server 205 driver for PHP:

I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community

He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.

Jeff Moore has posted and shared an interesting graph showing something I'd never thought about comparing one language versus another on - the number of keywords it uses.

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords.

Though not too meaningful, it is interesting to see how the different languages stack up in the number of reserved words you can't use for anything else. So, does that mean that Perl is the list limiting?

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans looks back some more at his experiences at this year's OSCON and mentions his personal favorite session attended while there - the PHP Lightning talks.

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.

Following up on some of his previous posts to the SitePoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks has posted this quick guide with some "hot UTF-8 tips" to share with the community.

As a result of all the noise about UTF-8, got an email from Marek Gayer with some very smart tips on handling UTF-8. What follows is a discussion illustrating what happens when you get obsessed with performance and optimizations (be warned - may be boring, depending on your perspective).

He talks mainly about using the native PHP functionality to avoid the mbstring issues that could arise by restricting locale behavior and using a fast case conversion function to handle strings correctly. The other tip involves delivery methods to those not able to recieve UTF-8 formatted content - checking their character set and responding accordingly.

The Zend Developer Zone today is asking for more real life case studies for the Zend Conference 2006, which will be happening on between October 29th and November 2nd in San Jose.

Do you have a great customer case study to share with the community? We've had a terrific response to the Call for Papers for the Zend/PHP Conference but we'd really like to include more real-life customer case studies.

You know you want to submit something, go on, help Zend make the conference as good as last years!

Chris points out today that the OWASP (the Open Web Application Security Project) is now publishing a PHP Top 5 list, detailing the top 5 PHP security concerns.

The PHP Top 5 is based upon attack frequency in 2005 as reported to Bugtraq. This information is a valuable insight into the most devastating attacks against the world's most popular web application framework.

The list is spot on, and Chris goes on to highlight some new PHP 6 security features and also his recommendation to use PDO to sotp SQL injection.