In a new post to her blog Zoe Slattery points out a big step in PHP's presence in systems all around the world - the inclusion of it into the CISC systems.
You probably don't realise it but it's very likely that sometime during the last week you will have have used IBM's CICS technology. [...] Last week PHP made it into CICS, PHP is now being used to build agile front ends and RESTful interfaces for the technology that underpins most of the world's large scale commercial systems. You don't get much more into The Enterprise than that!
IBM made the announcement back on Friday the 12th about the upgrade to the sMash WebSphere software. The update, a SupportPac lets developers run PHP inside of a CICS transaction and can be used to create REST services other applications/interfaces can use to directly communicate with the CICS system.
Due to unfortunate circumstances Windows binaries for PECL extensions will no longer be available on http://pecl4win.php.net. Work is being done to incorporate Windows binaries for PECL extensions into pecl.php.net and will hopefully be ready early 2009.
If you are interested in helping out on the project, join up on PHP Windows Development mailing list.
On the NETTUTS.com website today Alex Villmannwalks you through setting up a dedicated web server running Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
All great websites have a great server behind them. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up a dedicated web server (with Apache, MySQL, and PHP) using that old computer you have lying around the house and some free software.
The tutorial comes with plenty of screenshots for the Ubuntu install as well as the changes you'll need to make to the configuration files for the software to get things up and running. In the end you'll have a dedicated server you can drop anywhere and use to host your site.
This recent article from the Builder.com.au website shows exactly how simple it is to get a LAMP server up and running on your Ubuntu installation.
I can't tell you how many times I have been asked what is the fastest, easiest way to install a LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL, PHP) server on Ubuntu. Well, I guess it's time I just post it here for everyone to enjoy.
You're just two apt-get calls and a few various commands away from pulling in an Apache 2 web server and a PHP5 module that has MySQL support already built in. Set the password for the MySQL installation and you're all set to go.
In a new post todayStuart Herbert asks the question "is it possible to secure a shared server with PHP and FastCGI installed on it?" His answer follows...
The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. PHP has built-in features to help, but ultimately it's the wrong place to address the problem. [...] Before we can look at performance, the first question is: how exactly do we get PHP and FastCGI running as different users on the one web server in the first place?
He follows through on this, giving a little mini-tutorial on getting the environment installed on an Apache web server. He includes some benchmarks on the difference between using the Apache 1.3.x series and Apache 2 (generated using the ab benchmarking tool).
Lorna Mitchell has posted the last part of her development process towards creating a sample REST server in PHP:
This is part 3 of my article about writing a restful service server. If you haven't already, you might like to read part 1 (covering the core library and grabbing the information we need from the incoming request) and part 2 (covering the service handler itself) before reading this section. This part covers the Response object that I used to return the data to the user in the correct format.
She show how she created the object to push the response back out to the client with an output() method that displays the XML response in a manually generated format.
Lorna Mitchell has posted the second part of her series detailing her REST server development project (part one is here).
This is part 2 of my rest service writing article. In part 1 we saw the library which holds the functionality we will be using, and we also handled the incoming request and captured all the data we'll be using.
In this second part she gets into the details behind the handle() method of the class. It splits the URL into its parts and, based on the action requested, hands it off to the right method and calls the output() method to return to the user. Some error handling is also included (with custom exceptions).
In a new post to the ThinkPHP blog today there's a look at combining Comet with PHP to make a simple method for the client to talk back to the server outside the usual methods.
If a couple of users have opened the application there are already some hundred or thousand requests per second. The outcome of this is a big load for your server and a highly increased traffic - your server will in a senseless way be overloaded. In conclusion, our problem is the enormous amount of polling without knowing whether the server really wants to send a new push. Let's turn the initial situation around. And we get the solution to our problem: Comet.
With Coment, the model changes and the request is "cached" on the server-side automatically in a single Comet instance. Coordinate this with another recommendation of theirs, a PHP socket server, and you can do some pretty interesting things.
Lorna Mitchell has started a three part series on her blog detailing the process she went through to develop a REST server in PHP.
I recently had reason to write a REST server in PHP, which was very interesting. There aren't a whole lot of resources on this topic around so I thought I'd write an outline of what I did. There is quite a lot to it so I'm publishing in multiple sections - this is part 1, which covers the central functionality and handling the incoming request.
In this first part she talks about the wrapper class she developed and includes some sample code that does the initial handling of the request (reading from php://input and passing it off to a handle() method to the taken care of).
Harun Yaylimentions some updates to his memcache.php project (providing statistics on the optimization your site is gaining from using the memcached extension).
Your good comments from all over the world about memcache.php is amazing. Thank you all! I've recently received a contribution from Michael Gauthier. I took the liberty to tweak a bit and now memcache.php can flush individual server (no flush all servers yet).
The latest version of the file can be downloaded here and some sample output can be seen here.
