On PHPMaster.com there's a new article that looks at running PHP on a specific environment and some of the considerations the author had to make - using PHP on IBM i.

We've talked about a lot of weird things so far on PHPMaster (well, at least I think some of them are weird), but this may take the cake. In this series I want to talk to you about PHP - and the IBM I. That's right, the IBM i, formerly known as System i and before that as the AS/400. Let's start by dispelling the myth that the i is dinosaur; it's actually a very wonderful machine, and there are lot of opportunities for brave PHP programmers who venture into this realm.

He starts off with "the truth" about the IBM i and some of the features it brings to the table - total system integration, scalability, etc. He talks some about the current GUI the system uses, functionality RPG provides, and some concepts you'll need to think about before getting into PHP on the IBM I.

The Aura framework project has released a set of updates to several of their packages including the main Aura.Framework and Aura.Demo functionality.

Late last night we released version 1.0.0-beta4 of the full-stack system, which composes all the independent Aura packages into a coherent framework using the Aura.Framework package in a project skeleton. We have extracted the "hello world" portions into their own Aura.Demo package so that it can be removed or disabled when you begin your project. Download it and take it for a spin!

There's been a lot of talk recently about the Aura framework and its "less dependencies, more separate packages" approach to making the framework including these posts from Paul Jones and others.

New on Dzone.com today they've posted the third and final part of their series looking at lesser known databases systems you might want to use in your application. In this latest article they cover eXist DB and Hypertable.

Welcome to the third and final part of the series in which we look at five alternative databases you can use with PHP apps you might not have heard of. [...] In this final part of the series, we're going to finish up by looking at two outstanding, yet markedly different, databases: eXist DB and Hypertable. So let's get started.

As in the other two parts of the series, they include a brief overview of what each database is and some sample code showing it in use (and what you'll need to install to use it).

In this recent post Anthony Ferrara has a new post showing how he created a multi-version build system to make working with multiple PHP installs (different versions) simpler....with the help of Jenkins.

I've been using Jenkins to manage builds of my projects for a while now. This was fine for a while, but now that my projects need to support multiple versions of PHP, it left something to be desired. I wanted a system that could build against multiple versions of PHP. And more so, I wanted to be able to build against multiple compiles of the same version (different options, etc). This is how I built just such a system...

He gives an overview of the Jenkins system, the hardware and operating system that runs the server as well as examples of his "php-build" command to generate the different environments. He uses a modified version of the PHP template for Jenkins as a base.

Henrik Bjørnskov has a quick new post today showing how to combine two powerful technologies into a simple, configurable autoload system in a Symfony Travis-CI build with Composer.

To integrate your project with travis the only thing necesarry is to have a .travis.yml file and a working PHPUnit test setup like http://github.com/simplethings/SimpleThingsFormExtraBundle. Where the Tests/vendors.php script is executed before the tests are perfomed. But it would be way cooler to just have Composer handle the autoloading and dependencies.

A sample .travis.yml file is included in the post (also here) as well as instructions for grabbing dependencies and including the autoload process in your application's bootstrap.

Script-Tutorials.com has a new article posted today showing you how to combine PHP, some CSS, a dash of SQL and some HTML (oh, and jQuery) to create your own commenting system from scratch that could be used anywhere from a simple blog to a more complex social site.

Today I prepared new interesting article - I will tell how you can create own commenting system (AJAX) for your items (any units at your website) with PHP. For our demonstration - I prepared two SQL tables: first table will keep records of our items. It contain several fields: title, description, time of adding and comments count. Another table will keep records of comments. We will use jQuery too (for better interface behavior). One of features will spam protection (we can post no more than one comment every 10 minutes)!

The tutorial includes all of the code, markup and styling you'll need to make the system work. If you'd like to get right into the code you can download it as a package or you can try out their demo.

Sameer Borate has posted an alternative to "tail" that you can use to find the last X number of lines in a log file you'd like to follow without having the overhead of parsing the entire file.

Frequently one needs to get the last few lines of some log files, whether php error logs or Apache logs. Most of these file sizes run into megabytes, which makes it difficult and time consuming to remotely open them using ftp. [...] The [example] is a simple but useful 'tail' implementation in PHP. I've encapsulated the tail function in a 'LogRead' class, which can be further enlarged by adding other useful log functions.

His code opens a file pointer to the requested log, grabs the file size and uses the fseek function to move the pointer to the line/location you've requested. Obviously, if the requested lines of data is large, it will still have some overhead, but this is a much better way for keeping track of the latest additions to a log. You can then use the "tail" method on the "LogRead" class to grab just the lines you want.

Laura Thompson has a quick post to her blog explaining one simple fact that all developers (or really anyone even loosely related to computing systems) should remember - all systems suck.

I've been thinking a lot about this idea lately. I've spent a lot of years as an engineer and consultant fixing other people's systems that suck, writing my own systems that suck, and working on legacy systems, that, well, suck. Don't let anyone fool you. All systems suck, to a greater or lesser extent

She presents her "slightly jaded" points of view about legacy systems, current systems and ones yet to be built nothing that, no matter how impressive and well-planned out they are, they'll still suck (some maybe just a bit less than others).

Here's the punchline: sucking is like scaling. You just have to keep on top of it, keep fixing and refactoring and improving and rewriting as you go. Sometimes you can manage the suck in a linear fashion with bug fixes and refactoring, and sometimes you need a phase change where you re-do parts or all of the system to recover from suckiness.

In a recent post to his blog David Müller has taken a look at parallel processing in PHP using a few different methods - system calls, fork, and curl.

Since PHP does not offer native threads, we have to get creative to do parallel processing. I will introduce 3 fundamentally different concepts to emulate multithreading as good as possible.

For each of the technologies mentioned above, he provides a simple bit of sample code that does simple tasks like echoing out strings and writing to files. He also includes some benchmarks (take them with a grain of salt) of the three different methods showing how many iterations they could run through in ten seconds. He includes the benchmarking script if you'd like to try it out yourself.

There's a few well-known PHP-based content management systems out there that everyone seems to use. In this new post to the Webification site today, they want to help broaden that view with their list of twenty lesser known CMSes.

Anyone who needs to develop a dynamic web site has the esigence to use a Content Management System. Not all web designer have the ability to develop an owner CMS and, most importantly, this choice might be too expensive. If you want to start your own website and you don't want to spend too much to use a CMS, read on this article in which are collected 20 less known Open Source CMS-es.

There's a wide range of CMSes in their list including:

• Pixie
• Serendipity
• qEngine
• Habari
• TomatoCMS