DevShed has the second of a two part tutorial posted today on sending emails with the included mail() function.

In this article we will look at the protocol that is involved in sending email messages. We will also examine the thorny issue of how to send an attachment with an email message. This article is the second of two parts.

They include examples of sending simple messages and more complex ones with things like attachments and custom headers. They also tack on a look at the PEAR::Mail package to the end showing how it can make sending some things a little less painful.

On the PHPFreaks website, there's a new tutorial talking about sessions and cookies in PHP:

HTTP is a stateless protocol. This means that each request is handled independently of all the other requests and it means that a server or a script cannot remember if a user has been there before. However, knowing if a user has been there before is often required and therefore something known as cookies and sessions have been implemented in order to cope with that problem.

The tutorial is pretty introductory, so if you're not new to the PHP world, you won't learn much. New developers, though, will learn how to set cookies, use sessions and learn a bit about the security of both.

On DevShed today, there's a new tutorial on showing how to create a simple application to use one of the simpler protocols - FTP.

PHP has many functions that help us to implement Internet and/or networking protocols. In this article, we will look at how to implement some of those protocols using PHP.

They introduce the FTP functions for PHP (a basic list, PHP manual style) and include the code - the CSS to make it easier to use and the PHP code to make the FTP connection and grab the remote file listing. A screenshot is included to give you an idea of the end result.

In a new post to the SitePoint PHP blog Troels Knak-Nielsen gives a check up for a project he's worked some on - an interface he came up with to talk, via the dbgp-protocol, to a XUL frontend.

Spectator is a XUL application, which should make it cross platform. I have tinkered a bit with XUL before, but not a full application. [...] So what can spectator do? Mind that this is a first version and I really just meant it as a proof of concept. I think I got a bit further than that, but it probably still has a few bugs. Still, with the current version, you can step through a program, set breakpoints and inspect the stack. Really all you would expect from a debugger.

You can grab the latest version from the subversion repository on the Google Code website.

In a new post on his blog, Guy Harpaz answers a few questions people have been having about the debugger protocol that the PHP IDE project uses.

Debugging a PHP application or a PHP web server requires connectivity between an IDE and a Debugger engine (a PHP module which is installed on the web server). The debug protocol defines this connection. [...] When the Eclipse Foundation approved the PHP IDE project, Zend Studio's debug protocol was opened source and was chosen to be the debug protocol of the PHP IDE project.

He goes through why they made the choice, touches a bit on the security aspect of the two debugging protocols he mentioned (DBGp and Zend Studio's) as well as their common methods for output.

In a new post today, Alexey Zakhlestin talks about "limited implementation" of the SCGI protocol that he created in PHP.

I finally found some time (and inspiration) to do something in direction of implementing FastCGI the way I see it. Initially, I was going to implement FastCGI-functions in php-extension, but that would require more time than I currently have, so I started with a simplier task: I implemented SCGI protocol (which is way simplier than FastCGI) in pure php-code (which is easier, again, and let's me change API faster, during development).

The result is this project (hosted on the Google Code site) that allows you to use it with any SCGI-enabled server (apache and lighttpd. He includes a source code example to clarify its use.

It's one of the most base aspects of the internet and helps to connect users to the resources they're searching for, but it's surprising how many developers out there don't know how to work with it directly. WebReference.com is here to help with that in their new tutorial looking at the basics of the HTTP protocol.

The article is actually an excerpt from the Sams book "Teach Yourself Ajax in Ten Minutes", but it's one of the better overviews that I've seen. It introduces what HTTP is and some of the base components (request, response, formats, etc). There are brief code examples along the way to help with formats of things like the headers sent back and forth.

They move on to the status codes that can be returned and what each means. With the basic knowledge of a message format under your belt, they get into an example - working with GET and POST requests via a simple form (and what it's sending).

Derick Rethans has posted a part two to the post from Guy Harpaz yesterday concerning the debugging protocol "shootout" that Derick began in previous posts.

Derick's latest post looks at some of the comments Guy made, including comments about Zend's choice of implementation and their suggestions as to why you should choose the Zend Studio's debugging protocol over DBGp.

Other topics that Derick comments on in the post include the mentions of bugs in DBGp's Proxy mechanism, proxy requirements, and the functionality of Zend's "specific protocol for PHP" in handling headers/body informzation.

Guy Harpaz, the product manager for Zend Studio, has sterted a new blog up today, and has already posted his first item, a look at PHP IDE debug protocols and why to choose Zend's.

Lately there were many questions and comments on blogs and in PHP related forums regarding the debugger protocol, which will be used in the PHP IDE project at Eclipse.org.

When the Eclipse Foundation approved the PHP IDE project, Zend Studio's debug protocol was opened source and was chosen to be the debug protocol of the PHP IDE project. Zend Studio was known for its debugging capability and it is considered one of its big advantages, therefore, the decision to open source the protocol was obviously a big decision.

He follows this with two reasons to make the choice of Zend's offering, and includes two more topics looking at the differences between the two main protocols (DBGp and PHP IDE debug).

Derick Rethans has posted a shootout of a few of the debugging protocols out there, really a comparison between the debugger that Zend is using in its Eclipse PHP IDE and the DBGp package.

He talks about some of the controversy that's surrounded Zend's choice and methods for their debugger and how it compares on various levels to DBGp (the debugger used in Komodo and various other places).

The topics he compares them under include:

• Protocol Communication
• Session Initialization
• Transporting Variables
• Breakpoint Support
• Output Capturing

Under each, there's mentions of how they are supported (or not supported, as the case my be) and what kind of options each has to offer.