Michael Nitschinger has a new post for the Lithium framework users out there - a quick tutorial about encrypting your session information with the new built in "Encrypt" strategy feature.

If you check out the master branch, you can use the new Encrypt strategy to encrypt your session data automatically. This means that you can read and write session data in cleartext and they will be encrypted on the fly before getting stored (in a cookie, for example).

You'll need the mcrypt extension installed for it to work correctly, but it makes storing the encrypted version of your data more or less automatic. Just set up your Session configuration to use it as a strategy and any time you call a "read" or "write" the hard work is handled for you. For those more interests in what's "under the hood" he goes on to talk about how the strategy works, what cipher it uses by default, how to change it and the default string to use in hashing.

Kevin Schroeder is looking for suggestions. He wants to know what the PHP community wants to hear about in upcoming webinars from Zend.

Just wrapped up a call working on our webinar schedule for the year. We've got a bunch of ideas but we'd like to also get your input as well. Yes, I know y'all want ZF2 webinars. We have that down. I would also like to do an HTML5 and mobile webinar but I need an SME (Subject Matter Expert) for that. [...] I would also love to have webinars on how to use various API's, even if there is not native PHP support. So, what kinds of webinars do you want?

Leave your suggestions in his comments along with one already suggesting a "Why PHP?" checklist of sorts to help encourage companies/employers to go with the language.

On 7php.com there's a new interview posted with Enrico Zimual of Zend - "Everything is an Array in PHP".

In this edition, I talked with Enrico Zimuel a computer geek since he was 9yrs old. He has written a couple of books namely "Secrets, Spies and Cipher Codes" published by Apogeo in 1999 and the recent "How to use the digital sign" published by Tecniche Nuove in 2010. Enrico has a pretty impressive 'geek' path. He also speaks at many international conferences [...]. You can find his presentations on slideshare.

Questions in the interview include:

• How do you find PHP now as compared to when you first started?
• Based on your experience, what are the good and bad parts of PHP?
• To someone who wants to become a better PHP developer, what is your advice?
• What are some good PHP blog or resources you highly recommend?

Read the full interview here.

In this most recent post to PHPMaster.com Alex Stetsenko takes a look at the Zend Job Queue functionality, a part of the Zend Server installation. He talks about some basic usage to make HTTP requests and a more extended example showing report generation.

Web applications usually follow a synchronous communication model. However, non-interactive and long-running tasks (such as report generation) are better suited for asynchronous execution. One way to off-load tasks to run at a later time, or even on a different server, is use the Job Queue module available as a part of Zend Server 5 (though not as part of the Community Edition). Job Queue allows job scheduling based on time, priority, and even dependencies

In his two examples, he shows the code involved to create a new Queue object and define a HttpJob in it. The first just calls a "sample.php" script that's exposed as a part of your external-facing site and shows how you can get the current status of the job. The more advanced example shows a call to a "report.php" script with a set of options defining things like "type", "length" and "priority". He also points out some other options that can do similar things like Gearman, NodeJs and RabbitMQ.

In this new press release Zend has announced the posting of the results from their "Zend Developer Pluse" survey - a survey taken of developers world-wide about their habits, preferences and desires.

Zend Technologies addresses [the question of how a new demand for a new generation of apps] in Zend Developer Pulse, a new survey series that takes the pulse of a vibrant community of developers from around the world. The company's first developer survey conducted in late November 2011 offers insights on emerging technology and career trends captured from 3,335 respondents. The findings are summarized in a report now available at [http://www.zend.com/topics/zend-developer-pulse-survey-report-0112-EN.pdf].

The press release mentions some of the details from the survey including that 66% of developers will be working with mobile app development projcts, that next-generation UI deveopment scored high in skillsets, there was a strong interest in cloud development and that there's been a strong rise in the need for PHP development skills in the last year.

You can read the entire report here.

Kevin Schroeder has come back around and has posted a new tutorial to his blog showing how to connect PDT to the Zend Developer Cloud (the "PHP Development Tools" extension for the Eclipse IDE).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a series of blog posts on how to connect to the Zend Developer cloud with various IDEs. Except one that I missed... PDT. The deployment plugin is already installed in PDT 3 and so you already will have the ability to push to the DevCloud instance.

The process is pretty simple thanks to that plugin - just create the project (or use an existing one), set up a new target for deployment then launch and deploy the PHP application directly. You can find out more about the "PHP Development Tools" on its Eclipse project site.

In response to some of the comments being made about the hash table Denial of Service attack recently posted Freek Lijten has posted his thoughts about the real problem with the whole situation - how it was handled by the communities involved.

Interesting they may be, but I want to address what in my opinion is the real problem: The way the communication around it was handled by different projects and the fact that the exploit could still exist at all. [...] In the presentation Wälde and Klink talk about their disclosure process. The PHP project had them wait 3 weeks for a first response while this is obviously a serious matter.

He argues that things like a commit message mentioning a DoS prevention fix instead of just mentioning the fix have the potential to do more harm than good. He also points out that other communities were notified of the problem (like Python) and some still haven't responded to the issue.

This attack was the result of good research and it is important that it is disclosed. More importantly however is the fact that organisation got by with years of not noticing it and even worse, reacted very poor after being informed. I can't say I have a ready solution to avoid these kind of things in the future, perhaps that will prove to be an interesting discussion.

On the "Zend PHP Certification" blog (study notes), there's sort and natsort).

In all the countless hours I've spent with php, I've maybe used three or four of these sorting functions. I really had no idea that there is a total of eleven functions used for sorting arrays. Anyway, I'm betting that it may be useful to have these memorized before I take the Zend PHP Certification Exam so here is a brief overview of each one.

He talks about the various flags that can be used in the sorting (for regular, numeric, string and locale-based string handling) and the parameters to call for normal sorting, "natural" sorting, reverse key sorting and others. You can find specifics on these array sorting methods in the PHP manual.

On the php|architect site today Keith Casey has posted a recording of an interview with Boaz Ziniman of Zend about one of their latest offerings, phpcloud - a platform-as-a-service to provide easy, scalable PHP application hosting.

At the tail end of ZendCon 2011 in October, I managed to corner Boaz Ziniman to chat on the launch of their new product phpcloud. We covered features, limitations, design & implementation considerations, and how it's different than most of the other options out there.

If you'd like to listen, you can grab the mp3 here. It's about 15 minutes long. You can find out more about Zend's cloud offering on phpcloud.com.

Kevin Schroeder has a method in one of his latest posts for hooking your linux-based system into Zend's phpcloud platform, complete with an automatic upload (so you're not constantly sftp-ing).

Connecting with the Zend DevCloud in Linux is actually quite easy if you know how to use SFTP. [...] But, as I said in a previous post, I hate having to do command line stuff for each and every file or commit. I like things to work seamlessly. So what I did was write a PHP script that connects to the DevCloud (or any SSH-based endpoint for that matter) and then monitors all of the files and directories for changes, such as a creation, modification or deletion event.

His script (available on github) uses the PECL inotify package to work, but once its set up, you can have the PHP process running the script in the background, pointed at your web root, and have it upload automatically.