Tony Freixas continues his introductory look at "booting" a PHP script with part two of his series (here's part one) looking at using libraries.

In the good old days, if you wanted to create re-usable code, you would create a library of related functions or objects. Now, the excitement is all around frameworks. Everyone has one. What is the difference between the two?

He compares a library and a framework, pointing out key differences like how they fit with the application (controlled by or controlling) and dependencies they require. He rounds out his boot sequence, adding a few new parts to the structure of his example application.

Christopher Kunz has shared about a resource he came across that offers complete PHP encoding for a much lower price than some of the other services - phpshield.com. It seems a little too good to be true, though:

However, the phpShield.com home page did not offer the slightest clue who actually is behind that product. [...] It's common practice to whitelabel your solutions and sell them under different brands with different feature sets to different target audiences. However, we always clearly state who is behind the whitelabelled solution.

A little more digging shows an interesting relationship between the company that sells SourceGuardian and the company behind this PHPShield (Inovica). He sees the deception counting against the company and has just "struck one off the list" from his search for encoding methods.

No Starch Press has officially released their PHP title "Wicked Cool PHP" (Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems).

Here's a bit from the press release:

Wicked Cool PHP [...] is a different breed of PHP book. It's made specifically for the developer who wants to know how to get things done without mucking around and wasting a lot of time. This is not a weighty PHP complete reference or bible that threatens to take down your bookshelf and the rest of the bookcase. This is a book for coders to pick up and use, not wade through.

It provides the reader with "76 immediately useful PHP scripts" that do a variety of things like send/receive email notifications, do some web scraping, track users with cookies and sessions and use web services like SOAP.

You can find out more about the book on this page on the O'Reilly website. The book will officially hit the stands February 15th.

The DevX.com site has posted some code that gives you methods for passing information back and forth between PHP and a Flash application.

When you need to develop a web form with a special design and great effects, you will probably elect to use Flash. But building and programming Flash forms is considerably different from building standard HTML-based forms. [...] To do that though, you need to know how to access data in the Flash form and (sometimes) how to update the Flash form from PHP as well.

They help you build a sample Flash form as a base to work with in the transfer methods including the ActionScript to get the data out of each field. The tutorial shows the two way communication that's possible - pushing the Flash values out to the PHP script via a getURL() call and pulling the results back in with a call to loadVars() from the PHP script's output.

On the ProDevTips site, Henrik has pointed out a handy application that can make HTML encoding characters outside the norm in PHP simple.

The standard htmlentities() function will encode special characters so that they display OK in the browser. However, sometimes you might want to encode different languages to entities too. I just found a script that will do that in the form of an html encode application.

He includes an example showing how to encode a string of non-english characters out to an easy-to-display HTMLified string.

Pierre-Alain Joye has posted an example of one way to use the XDebug software - to debug the symfony framework or any other script (with the help of vim).

Xdebug is one of the best debugger and profiler for php (maybe the only good one in open source :). The only problem is its lack of dedicated client. The only problem is its lack of dedicated client, however there is many plugins for many IDE or editors like Eclipse PDT or weaverslave and even for my favourite editor, Vim.

He quickyl runs through the installation of XDebug in your installation and the script needed to set up the debugging in vim. All that's left is to add the "XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1" flag to the end of your script name and letting the information flow in.

On the Developer Tutorials site today, there's a new tutorial posted that walks you through some of the useful features that PHP's CLI functionality can bring to your system administration.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use PHP-CLI, the command line interface for PHP, to get your maintenance under control using the technologies you're already familiar with. I'll also examine some of the By the time you've finished this tutorial, you'll be able to build human-assisted backup systems, automatic report generators.

It's a pretty basic introduction that talks about what the CLI environment is and what sorts of things PHP brings to the table. They include some sample scripts to do things like database cleanup and a method for taking in human interaction via the command line.

Richard Heyes has shared an epiphany he's come up with - a method for running scripts in a web-based environment using lynx.

OK maybe not to you, but it has just occurred to me, and things don't come to me all that fast these days. Cron jobs. [...] You can have a directory inside your webroot called "cron" (imaginative eh?) with scripts in there that are run via cron.

His method uses the cron daemon on the machine to invoke lynx and call the web page through its url. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages of the method (including having the script open to the world - scary). Be sure to check out the comments for other suggestions from fellow developers.