On DZone.com there's a recent article posted by Kasia Gogolek that walks you through the deployment of a web application with the Webistrano tool, a web UI for working with Capistrano. This follows the first article where they talk about the Webistrano installation.

Most of the applications I write, are PHP based, so all of my examples will be based on that assumption, but you can re-use the ideas mentioned for software written in any other programming language. The setup [in the example] discusses just the deployment to the test project. Deployment to the production will be similar, and by the end of the article, you should understand what differences it will require.

She walks you through the creation of a new project, an example of the contents of the "base.rb" configuration file and how to create the stages (environments) to deploy to. Next up is the "recipes" themselves - the configuration steps for the deployment process. In their examples they show how to set permissions, update a database, manage asset files and a bit more to get Plesk installed on a server.

Michael Kimsal has a new post to his site with some recommendations for web developers as to the things they should know to do their job well.

The original question from was a 16 year old who's been doing some basic CRUD apps, but is getting bored and wanted to move on to 'real' development. There were some good replies, but few went in to the depth of detail that I think beginners are even aware of. Granted, this might scare off some, but for others it might give them some ideas about what's possible and what's involved in professional web development. I know I'm going to leave off some topics, so feel free to add on!

He touches on topics ranging from version control to performance and even a mention of mobile development. Each section includes a brief summary of the topic and some have specific topics to check out to help narrow things down to the important parts.

If you're a git user and have thought about bringing things a bit more "in-house" than GitHub but still want some of the perks of the web-based interface, this quick tutorial from PHPMaster about installing Gitlist might interest you.

aking your repositories available in a local intranet is pretty easy, but having a nice interface to interact with those repositories, making collaboration between teams easier, is not that simple. [...] There are other solutions available, but some are too hard to install or, again, hard on the eyes. I recently discovered GitList, a free and open source Git repository viewer. It's interface resembles GitHub a lot but aims to keep everything simple and clear.

He includes the basic installation steps you'll need to get it up and running - setting up the environment, downloading and configuring Gitlist to look at your repositories and pointing out that, since the LESS source is included in the download, you can customize it how you see fit.

Seth Davis has put together a github repository with some benchmarking for some of the most common web frameworks - both PHP and not. His statistic is "requests per second" in a few scenarios: a "hello world" string test, a test with a database connection and one with a templated response.

It should also be noted that my goal here was not necessarily to figure out how fast each framework could perform at its most optimized configuration (although built-in caching and other performance tweaks were usually enabled if the default configuration permitted it), but rather to see what a minimal "out-of-the-box" experience would look like.

Current results (as summed up in the current README) are for frameworks that include:

• Pyramid (Python)
• Django (Python)
• Sinatra (Ruby)
• CodeIgniter (PHP)
• Yii (PHP)
• Symfony (PHP)

NetTuts.com has posted their list of what they think should be New Year's resolutions for every developer:

In less than a week, we'll be in 2012. I know it's a cliché, but where has the year gone? Naturally, we're now at the time of year when folks set goals for the new year. While you might have some goals for your "real" life, how about a few resolutions for your developer life?

Suggestions include:

• Get Better At What You Know
• Engage the Community
• Take Better Care Of Yourself
• Use Better Programming Practices
• Take a Break

On DZone.com today there's a new post written up by Mike Bernat about making web test cases for CakePHP applications with SimpleTest.

Most of the applications I work on have very straight-forward components and not a lot of complex functions/methods. I would only be testing whether or not they worked at all, rather than if they worked in a wide-array of situations. [...] For example, unit-testing a simple news list and detail page is probably overkill. Sure, you can test your classes by simple instantiating them but that only goes so far. My new method involves using SimpleTest's Scriptable Browser to actually crawl webpages and ensure that the proper data is being displayed.

He includes a few snippets of code to show how to implement SimpleTest's web test functionality - one that just checks a HTTP response values, another that checks for text on the page, one testing for a login on an admin page and a test for add/edit pages to ensure valid loading based on URLs/links.

In a recent post to his blog Rob Diana has posted a summary he's created of Indeed.com and SimplyHired.

August is one of the months that I devote to job trends. Last week I focused on the Python, PHP, JavaScript, Flex and Groovy.

According to the results on Indeed Javascript is in huge demand right now, completely overshadowing the others on the list. PHP came in second here. The results from SimplyHired show a similar story, but the gap between Javascript and second place - Flex - is a bit smaller. PHP came in third here.

On his blog Martin Sikora shares a solution that many a Symfony developer out there might find handy for running their application in a shared hosting environment:

Some time ago (actually when I was making this blog) I posted on stackoveflow.com a question on how to configure Symfony to run on shared webservers where you can't change your website's document root. I solved it but forgot that I was asking and left it without any answer.

The main problem is that the DOCUMENT_ROOT for the hosting service can't be changed by the users of the shared host. To solve this he modified his routing rules (sfPatternRouting class) and changed his .htaccess file to rewrite things over from just "/page" to "/web/page" instead. A simple solution, but it might be evasive if you've never configured it before.

On the Techie Talks blog today there's a post from Idrish Laxmidhar with a few simple reminders of things you can do to help with the basic security of your PHP applications, mostly surrounding filtering and escaping.

The list includes some of the basics like:

• Avoiding $_REQUEST when possible because of the ambiguity of where the information could come from
• Keep register_globals off (thankfully a default!)
• Checking values for specific data types before using them
• Filtering user input
• Disabling the error output (turning down the reporting levels) on a production environment

For some more good recommendations on good security practices in PHP applications, check out this list or some of the recommendations from the PHP manual itself.

In this new post to his blog Robert Basic has a review of a book from php|architect (by Matthew Turland), "Guide to Web Scraping with PHP".

It took me a while to grab myself a copy of Matthew Turland's "Guide to Web Scraping with PHP", but a few weeks ago a copy finally arrived and I had the pleasure of reading it. [...] My overall impression of the book is that it was worth the time and I'm really glad that I bought it. Matthew did a great job explaining all the tools we have at our disposal for writing web scrapers and how to use them.

He talks about the content of a few specific chapters (the HTTP protocol, client libraries you can use and how to prepare documents for parsing) and notes that there's not much bad he can think of about the book:

It is a guide, clear and straight-to-the-point, explaining what tools are there, which one to use and how for writing scrapers and that's exactly what I wanted to know.