Lorna Mitchell is back with another post in her "Building a RESTful PHP Server" series today with this new post showing how to work with output handlers (her focus is on JSON).

So far we've covered parsing requests to determine exactly what the user is asking for, and also looked at routing to a controller to obtain the data or perform the action required. This post gives examples of how to return the data to the client in a good way.

She advocates using output handlers instead of the usual views you'd think of in a typical MVCish sort of application. The difference here is that there's not a lot of extra overhead to produce the results - it's literally an output directly from a class extending the base view (including the correct headers). She also briefly mentions the inclusion of JSONP functionality, allowing you to specify a local callback to execute when the request is returned. A few other "nice to haves" are also mentioned like the number of results returned and pagination support.

Lorna Mitchell has posted a quick tutorial about a feature of the upcoming PHP 5.4 release, the built-in web server, and some tips on doing things like routing requests and changing the hostname.

One of the big features arriving with PHP 5.4 is the addition of a built-in basic webserver for use in development environments. Quite a few of the other scripting languages have something like this so I'm very pleased to see it in PHP. Using a server like this makes it easy to quickly try out some scripts without needing to configure apache or really do anything much! I had to look up a few things to get started, so I thought I'd write them down for posterity.

She includes instructions on how to get the server up and running from the command line, updating the location of the document root with a command line option and using a simple "routing.php" script to act as a front controller. Changing the hostname is as simple as changing "localhost" to something else when starting the server.

Lorna Mitchell is back with a second installment in her "Building a RESTful PHP Server" series with this new post about handling and routing the incoming requests. (You can find the first part about working with the request here)

This is the second part of a series, showing how you might write a RESTful API using PHP. This part covers the routing, autoloading, and controller code for the service, and follows on from the first installment which showed how to parse the incoming request to get all the information you need.

She shows how to grab the controller name from the incoming request (based on her previous code), create the object for it and execute the requested action name. Also included is a sample autoloader and a basic controller - a UsersController with "getAction" and "postAction" methods for responding to GET and POST requests.

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.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post looking at the security vulnerability that effected not only PHP but lots of other languages making them susceptible to attack from the outside.

In PHP and several other languages used to implement Web applications, arrays are used to store the values of request variables such as $_GET, $_POST, $COOKIE, etc.. IF you receive a request with a large number of request values, until recent versions PHP may run into trouble.

He goes on to explain why there's an issue with the array overloading and what PHP has done in recent releases to help correct the issue - the max_input_vars setting in the php.ini. He also points out that this is not a new issue - it was originally identified back in 2003 (with a video of the original presentation). He points out that the most recent releases of the PHP language have this fix in them and, if at all possible, you should upgrade to protect your applications.

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.

Phil Sturgeon has a new post to his blog about what he sees 2012 as being for the PHP community - the year of cloud hosting with all of the platform-as-a-service companies that have started up over the last year.

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as "cloud" is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace to be "cloud hosting". That is partially true, but this article covers how PHP is getting some serious attention in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field. This year you will almost certainly find yourself making the decision wether or not to move some of your applications and services across to the cloud, and this article can hopefully help you work out why and how.

He talks a bit about how the idea compares with Ruby's Heroku hosting service and some of the benefits that come with it:

• Speedy deployments
• Security
• Scaling

He also looks forward to the future, mentioning some of the major players in the PHP PaaS space like Orchestra.io and App Fog (as well as a brief suggestion of a possible PHP beta over at Heroku).