Continuing on with his webcast series looking at using the Slim microframework to create a RESTful web service with JSON Output, John Lebensold takes the code from the previous tutorials (part one, two, three) and adds handling for DELETE to remove values from the data.

This tutorial will show you how to add jQuery RESTful calls for using the DELETE verb when deleting items via a JSON REST interface.

You'll definitely need to check out either the previous tutorials in the series to follow along with the code or grab the current source to see how everything's structured.

Elizabeth Naramore, host of the "Future of PHP" webcast series for EngineYard has put out a call for PHP internals developers inviting ones that would like to chat a bit.

Consider this a call to the PHP Internals team. We've been doing a series of panel discussions over at Engine Yard about PHP-related frameworks and where they are going in the future, but one important piece that's missing is the discussion about the future of the PHP core. [...] If you're a core PHP contributor and you want to voice your opinion in a friendly panel discussion about where you'd like to see PHP in 5 years, then I'd love to chat with you and include you in the discussion.

So, if you've worked on the internals of the language and would like to be in on the discussion, let Elizabeth know by dropping her an email that you're interested!

php|architect has officially announced the speaker line up for what they call their "Cloud Summit", a day-long event happening at the end of November about cloud computing - what it is and how you and your PHP applications can take advantage of it.

Tired of hearing about the ever-so... nebulous "Cloud" and what vendors say it will do for humankind? Yeah, us too. So, why won't it just go away? We found some folks who have used the cloud successfully to strike it big and asked them to show us why it made such a big difference to them. We were surprised, and now we're going to share it with you.

The event is virtual, so you can attend no matter where you are. The cost is $50 USD for a single ticket, $24 USD for php|architect subscribers and $100 USD for an "office party". Speakers for the event include Sean Coates (of Gimmie Bar), Kirsten Jones & Jeremy Johnstone and Marcus Whitney. You can find out more information and register for your ticket on the php|architect site.

In a recent post to the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans points out some webinar recordings that have been made available by Zend as a part of their webcasts series.

There are a lot of webinars out there begging for developers to participate. Many contain quality content that is useful to developers; others, not so much. As a company who builds tools for developers, most assume Zend's webinars are nothing more than ads for their products; this is why we don't assume things. In reality, about 1/2 of their webcasts feature prominent members of the PHP community talking about open source tools that developers will find interesting. Here are a few of the recent ones.

Some of the topics that were presented include using PHP 5.3 namespaces, new SPL features in 5.3, unit testing in the Zend Framework and the powerful combination of the Zend Framework and Doctrine. You can find these recordings on Zend's Recorded Webinars page.

Cal also points out some other webinar recordings from php|architect as a part of their webcast series leading up to this year's php|tek conference.

On php|architect.com today they've posted the recording of one of their webcast series leading to up the tek11 conference from Chris Kite and Josh Butts about Phactory.

Phactory is an alternative to using database fixtures in your PHP unit tests. Instead of maintaining a separate XML file of data, you define a blueprint for each table and then create as many different objects as you need in your PHP code. By using a database factory instead of fixtures, your unit tests will be more clear and easier to write. You'll also be able to change the objects you create programmatically instead of being stuck with the same old fixtures.

You can watch the video (with slides for the presentation) either through the in-page player or by downloading the file itself.

As they've done in years before, the folks at php|architect have set up a series of webcasts leading up to this year's tek11 confernece. This new series includes talks from:

• Josh Butts on Phactory for Unit Testing
• Nate Abele on the Lithium Framework
• Aaron Brazell on Pluggable Authorization in WordPress
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney on Git Over it

There's registration links for each webcast off of this page so take a look at the descriptions and sign up for those that interest you!

In a new post o his blog Josh Holmes talks about a new series of webinars he'll be doing about combining Windows Azure and the Zend Framework.

My goal, as I'm writing the demos today after posting this, is to go through the Zend Guestbook quick start and then port that to run in Azure and leverage that platform. I'll be posting the full technical write-up here once I get done. [...] It's important to note that this is the first of a series so we're going to do an overview across the board this time and then we'll dive deep into things such as the data access layers or architecting for scaling horizontally across multiple instances in the future.

If you're interested and want to get in on the webinar, you can register on the Zend website. The event will be happening October 20th at 9am PDT.

On the php|architect blog there's a new post with the recording of the webcast from Ruslan Yakushev and Mark Brown of Microsoft talking about increasing PHP performance on IIS.

In this session Mark Brown and Ruslan Yakushev will talk about the work being done at Microsoft to increase the performance of PHP applications on Windows and IIS. This includes some recent advancements with the FastCGI module that enables PHP to run on Windows and IIS as well as soon to be released WinCache 1.1 that is going even further to provide PHP applications exceptional performance on the Windows and IIS platform.

You watch it right in the page or you can download the mp4 file and watch it whenever.

In case you weren't able to make it to the latest webcast from the php|architect TEK-X series - Kristina Chodorow on MongoDB - you can catch it all here in the recording of the event.

MongoDB is part of a new wave of persistent storage engines that make up the NoSQL movement. The most popular websites in the world are switching to or already use non-relational databases. Why? Scalability. This session will cover why, when, and how to use MongoDB: a fast, stable, easy-to-learn document database.

You can find out more about MongoDB from its website and more about the remaining TEK-X webcast series (only two left!) on the TEK-X webcast series page.

On the ZendCasts.com site there's a new screencast continuing their look at the Zend_Tool component by combining it with Zend_Log to do some easy reporting.

This video uses a collection of powerful PHP libraries in order to illustrate how easy it really is to build a command-line tool for reporting against XML files. We start off by logging visitor statistics in the controller into a log file with Zend_Log. Once data has been collected, we're then able to utilize SimpleXML, Zend_Date and the Zend_Tool component to build out a very simple reporting tool.

He suggests one possible use is to create a cron job that will regenerate the reports nightly. You can view the screencast in the post or download a copy of the project to get started right away.