The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a new tutorial covering how to scan ports and checking a remote service's status with PHP.

Having access to the current status of public servers can empower your applications to make decisions and respond to problems automatically. Acknowledging a service is offline can also save endless support emails. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to keep track of your server status by scanning ports on your server with PHP.

They show how to check a remote instance (a socket open with a timeout) and how to run through a list of ports, looping from one to one-thousand and running an fsockopen on each. They make a sample script to show these two combined - a simple page that loops through the common protocols (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc) and checks to see if the remote machine is running something on that port.

Gregory Szorc writes today about a fact that's only recently come true in PHP's handling of errors - it seems that it now returns proper HTTP status codes when a problem comes up.

If it encounters a serious error, like a parse error, it just stops and there is nothing you can do about it. If this happens on a hosted web site, you get a blank page served with the HTTP status code of 200. Completely useless to remote connections.

This fix will be included in the next version of PHP - the upcoming 5.2.4 release.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted an update of the status of the PHPUnit project to his blog today including feature additions to PHPUnit 3.1 and ones being added to other branches.

The last weeks have been busy, but now I want to take the time to finally give you an update on the status of PHPUnit. The development of PHPUnit 3.1 is progressing nicely, about the only thing missing is finishing the documentation for all the new features

Among these new features are things like:

• improvements in mock objects
• the ability for PHPUnit to write code coverage information to a test database
• some fun new template methods
• and mutation testing that's being built on the separate branch

On Dotvoid.com, there's a new post that reminds us of two of the more "ajaxified" features of the new releases of PHP 5 (like 5.2) - the JSON extension and the functionality to track file uploads.

These features aren't competing for the heavy weight title in the release notes. Still, having these implemented in PHP makes it a lot easier to develop modern, more responsive, web based applications.

You can get more info on the JSON extension here and an example of the file upload monitor in this entry on the Bitflux blog.

Along with a few personal comments, Lukas Smith has posted some thoughts about the state of everything PEAR following his stepping down from working as an active developer on the project.

I guess with me and Pierre leaving it did spawn a lot of energy about how to organize PEAR in the future. I am still participating in this discussion to some extent, mainly functioning as the historian who can explain why things are the way they are etc in order to prevent people from making rash decisions or even worse repeating old mistakes.

He also comments on the state of package submissions to PEAR, noting that some of them are just unrealistic and that it might be better to start a "PEAR2" side to allow for some of these more expanded ideas to flourish.

Instead I think each of the categories should manage itself more. So packages approval would be handled within the category. The same for QA'ing etc. This way new developers would not be facing this gigantic community. I think this is simply overwhelming. Even for old developers it becomes impossible to feel "at home" in a project of the size of PEAR.

Continuing in his series of interviews from this year's OSCON, Cal Evans has posted this new interview he did with Andrei Zmievski.

This is another entry in the series of interviews I did at OSCON 2006. This time, I was privileged to sit down with Andrei Zmievski and talk about Unicode, Yahoo and other PHP topics. Andrei is a native of Uzbekistan and came to the US to study when he was 16 years old. He now works at Yahoo on their Infrastructure team and is pursuing a Master's degree in Linguistics.

They talk about Unicode for PHP6 (Andrei's big push), the status and some specifics of the project, his work wth Yahoo!, a look towards the future of PHP, and some of Andrei's personal background - including how he came to the PHP community.

Jared White provides us with an update on his two main projects right now - xajax and Willowgarden - including some highlights surrounding the Willowgarden framework.

I know I promised to post something last week, but I was just feeling too crummy. However, I'm much better this week and getting back into the swing of things. Man, I feel like most of June just completely disappeared on me.

Anyway, I want to give you all a status update on the two big PHP projects I've been working on, xajax and Willowgarden. First off, however, I want to thank my day-job employer, Commandtext, for allowing me to spend some time working on these projects during business hours.

The main update to the xajax project is a shift in the API to move towards version 0.5 (a large shift that will break backwards compatibility). They have suggested, though, a "legacy layer" that would make this transition easier.

On the Willowgarden front, they're working more and more towards a new release - Developer Release 2. This new version will include things like a Data Access layer, configuration classes using XML, framework-wide access to logging/sessions, and "smart archetypes" to make the flow of the code easier.

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).

In the Ajax Magazine site today, there's an interview with the project lead for a popular PHP and Ajax development framework, XAJAX - Jared White.

The interviewer starts off just getting to know Jared, including the large amount of other projects he's associated with (both technology and not-tech related). From there, they move into the Web 2.0 discussion, asking him what he finds interesting about the movement and what he doesn't like about it all.

The remainder of the interview is talk about the XAJAX framework - what functionality it currently has, who's working on it currently, and a few hints on what's coming up in the next versions.

There's also a quick mention of Willowgarden, a rapid application development platform for PHP. Developer Preview 1 has been released for those that are interested.

In this brief entry on the ThinkPHP blog (by bjoern), it seems that there's more than just talk about the Zend/Oracle deal.

While reading the tecosystems blog, I stumbled over Steven's entry "The Oracle M&A Q&A: JBoss, Sleepycat and Zend". It seems that at least Oracle's interest in Zend is true: "[...] and in one panel yesterday Zend's Doron Gerstel did little to deny the Oracle interest". Also, it seems that JBoss has been acquired for $485 Mio. by Oracle.

the Q&A mentions that Zend would fit in with their plans as an "in" to the PHP community and a way of increasing their growth in the database markets.