If you're in or near the Dublin, Ireland area and are interested at all in developing web applications on Microsoft's Azure platform, you really should check out a new post on the EchoLibre blog with details on a presentation from Josh Holmes (of Microsoft) that'll be happening On February 21st.

As part of their drive to let developers know about Azure, Microsoft have been reaching out to development communities that would traditionally be non-Microsoft centric - in particular PHP and Ruby. [...] So, this month Microsoft are bringing Josh Holmes to Dublin to talk directly to Irish developers about building and deploying web apps on the Azure platform.

It's a free event and all who are interested are welcome to come. It'll start February 21st at 7:30pm (19:30) at the Radisson Hotel on Golden Lane. There's no charge for the event, but you still need to register to reserve a spot - there's only so much room, after all.

In this new post to his blog Stanislav Malyshev looks at creating some Ruby-like iterators as close as they can get in PHP.

I've started playing with Ruby recently, and one of the things that got my attention in Ruby were iterators. They are different inside from regular loops but work in a similar way, and looks like people (at least ones that write tutorials and code examples) like to use them.

He saw how one of the iterators worked - iterating over a Ruby hash - and wondered how difficult it'd be to write up something comparable in PHP. He creates a simple iterator, an array class to lay on top of it and an example of it in use. The use isn't as clean as the Ruby iterator, but it works similarly. He also includes a modification that lets you use ranges for what to return.

On the Java section of the Sys-con.com site today there's an interesting perspective from the Java side of things as to why people (the "cool kids") choose Ruby or PHP over Java despite some of the things it has to offer.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do "cool kids" choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer.

He wonders why, when the Java community, toolset and user base seems so strong, would developers opt for PHP/Ruby to build their "middleware logic". He suggests that maybe Java is more difficult to use so developers shy away from it. He does mention one things that could cause a the sway more towards these simpler languages - that Java could be overkill for a good number of the smaller sites out there.

Check out the comments on the post for more thoughts and ideas from both the PHP/Ruby and Java sides of the discussion.

New from NETTUTS.com today there's a new article listing out some of the tools of the trade, the frameworks that web development professionals use (and not just with PHP).

New web development frameworks, promising rapid development and easy deployment, are sprouting out at a more rapid pace than you can keep up. In the last article, we looked at the various factors you'd have to consider when deciding on a framework. Today, we are going to look at the various frameworks available for each facet of web development.

PHP tools that made the list include CakePHP, the Zend Framework, Kohana and Symfony. Frameworks from some of the other languages include ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, jQuery and Blueprint.

In this new post to his KillerPHP blog Stefan Mischook voices his opinion on why he thinks PHP is the "King of the Web" (and wonders what happened to Ruby on Rails).

In 2006 I created killerphp.com because I wanted to make it easy for web designers to learn PHP. I thought PHP was THE predominate web programming language and I felt every web designer should include PHP as one of their core coding skills [...] Then Ruby came along...for a short while.

He looks back at the time when Rails was "the best thing since sliced bread" and was taking the web world by storm. Other Ruby frameworks have come along and are taking the lead (like a merge of Merb and Rails). So, what does Stefan think the problem was with RoR's climb to fame and popularity? The crucial pieces that were missing (libraries, functionality, etc) and its poor resource handling that could lead to some big problems with certain kinds of applications.

There's lots of great comments from both PHP and RoR-ers alike, so be sure to gives those a look too!

The Enterprise PHP Magazine has pointed out some facts (slightly skewed, it seems) about the availability of a few different types of programmers, PHP included, according to several search engines.

I updated the estimation so we can have most accurate results. The table below illustrates the results found, I have just truncated Bing results to 1M to have more readable chart, after all I don't believe there are 50M resumes indexed by Microsoft - and that's another topic.

The results show about 780,000 PHP-related resumes on Google, 541,000 on Yahoo and the (obviously incorrect) 59,700,000 from Bing.com. There are a lot of PHP developers out there, but I can't imagine quite that many. Either way, even the numbers from the other search engines come in over the counts of the other three languages.

Matthias Willerich has posted a very complete guide to deploying PHP applications from a subversion repository with Vlad the Deployer (a Ruby-based deployment engine).

In my current day job I have to deploy a number of web apps every few weeks. The person I took over from did the whole thing in a manual and terribly cumbersome way. [...] In the following article, I'm going to describe how I went from there to deploying my Zend Framework-driven PHP apps with Vlad. To save yourself some time, feel free to skip the back story, the pre-requisite of installing ruby, gem and rake, or go straight to the deployment recipes.

He wanted a setup that would allow a "one-liner" for deployment, the ability to roll back and to have shares resources between releases. He walks you through the setup of all needed components, the configuration options and some example runs of his build/deploy process.

Raphael Stolt has done a review of a book that's helping bridge the gap between Rails and PHP for those already using the PHP language. The book "Rails for PHP Developers" (part of the Pragmatic Programmers series of books, authored by Derek DeVries and Mike Naberezny) is a guide to learning Ruby on Rails from a PHP developer's perspective.

The e-book version of the Pragmatic Programmers release Rails for PHP Developers written by Derek DeVries and Mike Naberezny occupies now some of my scarce hard drive space for several months, and today I managed to hit the last page of it. In case you're interested in knowing if it's worthy to sacrifice some rare hard drive or bookshelf space for this book read on.

He goes through the three parts of the book - a look at the MVC pattern, teaching some of the details of Ruby and comparing the structure of the two languages to help PHP developers relate a bit more. Raphael gives it good marks for being a great guide to not only Ruby and Rails but to also making it accessible for PHP developers to make a smoother transition from one to the other if they're interested.

Douglas Clifton has taken some time to look at a group of the web application frameworks out there (not just PHP - Pearl, Python and Ruby too) and offer up some opinions on them. This new post is the result.

It just wouldn't be fair after my last post to ignore the tried-and-true server-side Web application frameworks. I am certainly familiar with all of them, though I haven't necessarily used every one in a production environment.

The among the PHP frameworks mentioned are: Drupal, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony. His personal choice was CodeIgniter:

It's light weight, fast, and stays out of your way. There are any number of class modules to choose from, and you can discard what you don't need to lighten the load even more.

Lehi Sanchez has put together a tutorial showing how to get the combination of a Ubuntu, NGINX, Ruby, and PHP up and working.

I'm going to walk you through the process with the settings that I chose for my server setup. I am not a Linux guru or a web server guru. [...] This post is compiled of steps and configurations that I've found on the internet. I wanted to have a consolidated instruction manual so I'm writing this tutorial to help anyone who's in the same boat as me.

It's a full installation tutorial too - every step from the installation of the operating system down to installing the packages for the web server and two languages (apt-get, of course). There's even parts of the configuration files that you'll need to add/update to get it all integrated.