Recently on his blog Sameer has posted a "first look" at the recently released nWire extension for Eclipse-based IDEs.

Due to various complex PHP applications being developed - like Magento, Joomla and a wide variety of frameworks, developers finds it hard to understand the underlying architecture and relationships between various components within the application. nWire lets you bring order to that complexity.

He looks at the features the tool offers - the visualizer, navigator and searching abilities - and details each of them with a few screenshots showing these features in action.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new post promoting an extension for the Zend Studio/Eclipse IDEs called nWire that allows you to get a better overall view of the structure of your PHP applications.

nWire was designed for developers who get lost in large and complex applications. It dramatically shortens the time it takes to read and understand the code and reduces the learning curve for new developers. [...] nWire was developed with support from Zend Technologies and works with the new Zend Studio 7.0 and Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) with PHP Development Tools (PDT).

The tool includes a visualizer to graphically browse the parts of your application, a navigator to see associations in the code and a quick search that makes it simpler to search the entire project. You can find out more about the project including downloads and a 4 minute intro video on the nWire website.

DevShed has posted the fifth part of their series looking at CodeIgniter and its use to make a simple blogging application. The focus this time is on the output, working with the views to "pretty up" the resulting pages.

Although in its current state, the blogger works well, its visual presentation looks pretty primitive. Therefore, in this fifth part of the series I'll be adding some CSS styles to the view files that comprise this blog application to improve its look and feel.

They start with a review of the code so far - a simple blogging app with the ability to let users comment on each entry. The HTML and CSS you'll need to add to the views to make the output look more like this.

New on the SitePoint "Web Tech" blog today is a post by Craig Anderson about friendlier passwords.

One aspect of web applications which is almost always overlooked when it comes to accessibility is how easy any randomly generated string might be to read. If you're lucky enough to have near perfect vision and have no learning or cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia, you mightn't suffer from any problems reading randomly generated strings, but for many users distinguishing between zero and upper-case Os, ones and lower-case Ls, and even the letters b and d can be difficult.

He includes a simple little PHP script that pulls letters and numbers from a pre-defined "friendly" array that can be read more easily by those with some sort of visual issue. Obviously, the results would be less secure than some other methods (only so many to go around) but its still a wide enough range for most common uses (around 17 million passwords).

Richard Heyes has pointed out an interesting little app that Lucas Baltes created to visually show the timeline of PHP releases from now back.

The timeline stretches all the way from the current PHP 5 release (bye bye PHP 4) back to some of the initial releases Rasmus made as the "PHP Tools version 1.0" back in 1995. Each entry is timestamped with when it was released and some of the more recent ones have "tails" showing how long their life lasted.

Lucas also links to the museum on the PHP.net website where all of these versions can be downloaded.

CodeGear (from Borland) has officially announced the release of Delphi for PHP, a new rapid application development environment for a more visual approach to PHP development.

Many web developers today use PHP to develop portal frameworks, forums, and web applications because PHP allows them to create dynamic web applications with solid database connectivity. However, PHP web development has been stymied by the lack of a powerful RAD visual development environment. The existence of an active and vital open source PHP ecosystem with myriad of open source components and options makes the need for an integrated RAD development environment even more critical.

You can check out this new software and all of its features on the CodeGear website.

Edin Kadribasic has posted some benchmarks he's created from the Zend bench.php tool on the latest build he's created with the new version of Visual Studio from Microsoft.

Here is the comparison of running Zend/bench.php from the PHP source using VC++ 8.0 (Visual Studio 2005) and VC++ 6.0. The test was done on my Lenovo laptop with Celron M 1.6 GHz processor and 1.5 GB ram.

Overall, the differences are pretty minimal, but there are a few places that stand out and have more of a variance than the others (like the 12% difference in the "simplecall" test). Check out the post for the full list of the benchmark results.

The PHP-GTK Community site is back again today with another quick tutorial showing how to build a submenu with the help of the GtkMenubar widget.

It's broken us into the key sections - details, a visual tree of the structure, the logic tree and relationships, and, finally the source code. It's a pretty simple process of creating the menu and appending the elements onto it, much like a normal drop down menu. The key is in the set_submenu function, creating a new object for the code to append the submenu elements to. The rest is just simple appends.

They've also included a screenshot to illustrate the end result.

In php|architect's ART respository today, there's a new article from Marco Tabini himself about the creation of an Ajax rating system for your site.

He explains the concept behind the system before ever getting into any code - a visual representation of the rating users are giving a particular article/posting. With that out of the way, he gets into the HTML first, explaining how the table is laid out before giving the code to pull together the images and form one seamless one representing the correct rating. He also demonstrates the use of a "secret hash" to protect the script against abuse.

Next up, he creates the PHP/SQL backend to handle the Ajax requests coming back in from the page, and setting a cookie to protect (somewhat) against more than one vote. Finally, he gives the Javascript you'll need to create the Ajax connection and relay the JSON message back to the server on the rating the user chose.

Of course, the code is available for download as well.