In a new blog entry today, David Coallier has posted about two new offerings that are in the works for a web-based frontend to XDebug:

For quite a while in the PHP Community (And even myself) I have heard people asking about either an online tool to work on cachegrind output files or a cross platform tool that would have the ability to do what KCacheGrind does on Linux but for Windows and OSX.

He mentions the origin of the idea for a cachegrind app as a part of the Google Summer of Code (that did get accepted and will be worked on by Chung-Yang Lee). The other, Webgrind is an independent project from the other but looks equally as promising.

Check out Vinu Thomas' thoughts on the matter too.

Richard Thomas has ventured out into a new consulting venture that he's announced today:

As I mentioned in the prior post I am pretty much a "Jack of all Trades" when it comes to website development. [...] So with that I have revived my consulting company under the name PHPJack, my website is http://www.phpjack.com.

Plus, not only has the company been launched but he's already looking for other developers to hire on and help him with "a couple projects" that are already in the works. Send him a resume at richard [at] phpjack.com if you're interested (Seattle area only).

As Matthew Weir O'Phinney points out, David Hansson (of Rails fame) has posted a few comments on what he calls the "immediacy of PHP".

I love the fact that it's all just self-contained. That the language includes so many helpful functions in the box. [...] PHP scales down like no other package for the web and it deserves more credit for tackling that scope.

and to that, Matthew comments:

It's nice to see leaders of projects like Rails having this same attitude. It's a breath of fresh air in the competitive market of web development frameworks.

In a (very) quick note on his blog today Stoyan Stefanov points out that a presentation of his posted over on Slideshare made the front page Featured section (with over 2600 views too!).

Not bad. Especially having in mind that this is the second time around. [...] Slideshare is a great service nevertheless, just like on youtube, you can spend hours browsing people's presentation slides.

The presentation was originally given at the PHP Quebec conference this year (2008).

Matthew Turland has a few things to say about web scraping (and recent articles covering it) on his blog today as an author of a previous article published in php|architect covering the same topic:

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless pointed a post out to me on the PHP DZone web site recently. Noting that the article's content was misinformed at best and downright ignorant at worst, even when examining it sheerly from the author's knowledge of PHP as a language, this friend asked that I set the author straight.

He mentions his comments on the post correcting the author on some points as well as a more "clued in" post on the xml.lt website talking about using PHP's DOM functionality instead.

Michael Ross has written up (and gotten posted to Slashdot) a review of a book from APress "Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP":

Because learning and using most of these technologies can be rather challenging to a Web developer, perhaps the best way to get started doing so is by using all of them to create a single Web-based application, with no pretense at mastering any one of them. This is the approach taken in Quentin Zervaas's book, Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP."

The book (see its web page here) covers lots of different technologies and seeks to be pretty comprehensive and, at around 570 pages, crams as much between its covers as it can. He goes through some parts of the book specifically but glosses over some for the sake of the length of the review.

On the PHP in Action Blog, there's a this post that shares some tips for testing your web applications with some simple tests.

I just started listing the techniques I've learned when writing tests to exercise the web interface of a PHP application. This is from my experience and my personal preferences; it's not the final word or necessarily right for everyone.

He suggests:

• Use SimpleTest's Web tester if you can
• Test the web output using regular expressions
• Use element IDs or names to test links, forms and fields
• Log HTTP requests in the application