Benjamin Eberlei has a new post to his blog today pointing you to some PHP & Hudson CI integration resources that can help you get this powerful combination up and running for your deployment process.

Although phpUnderControl is the most wide-spread, but from I heard complex to setup/maintain, solution supposedly a hack and Arbit just in an early Alpha I decided to give Hudson a shoot. Another reason for this decision, I heard it has a simple plugin architecture and is easy to install and use.

He moved away from his own bash script-based CI setup towards something a bit more technical, something that would give him a bit more control over running unit tests, create code coverage, etc. He lists three sites that helped him get his Hudson install up and running and another is mentioned in the comments.

In a new post to the CatsWhoCode.com blog Jean-Babtiste Jung walks you through the creation of a simple monitoring script written using just PHP that can tell you if your web site is up and responsive.

In order to make sure that your website is always available to the public, you have to monitor it. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can easily create a monitoring script that will check your website availability and send an email or sms alert to you if it isn't.

They have a snippet of code (about 15 lines long) with a function you can call to check a remote host's connection and check the returned data for a certain string. This can not only ensure that your site is responsive but also that it's not responding incorrectly. You could even use this to hit a certain monitoring page of your site to check for certain things (like database connection problems).

On the Xebee blog there's a recent post looking at test-driven development with the Zend Framework and PHPUnit. They show how they work well together and make it simpler to use TTD to create and test your applications.

Over the past few days I was going through the Zend Framework reference docs and I found myself pleasantly surprised with all that the latest version of this web application framework provides. [...] Out of the many new features, what stood out for me was the ease with which Zend Framework and PHPUnit complement and work with each other.

He talks about some of the features of PHPUnit (including dependencies, testing for exceptions and errors) and how it fits into a good deployment strategy. He shows how you can use the Zend_Test component of the framework, along with the Zend_Test_PHPUnit features, to make a sample test case. There's also an example of using the Zend_Test_PHPUnit_Db component to test database information and your backend data stores to compare them to a formatted XML document.

New on the Blue Parabola blog today, there's an article from Keith Casey trying to set the record straight on some recent benchmarks put together by Zend and Acquia showing the performance of Drupal.

While I have not attempted to duplicate or validate any of their individual numbers or conclusion as a whole, I have been a Drupal user for well over five years and have launched 30+ sites on it.

With this experience to back him up, he points out a few things about the report that either needed work or were misleading in their results. This includes a limitation on the web server configurations they covered, the statistics on Windows performance (might turn people off to using it on this platform) and the emphasis being put in some of the wrong places - optimizing PHP versus Drupal.

He recommends that, like all studies and whitepapers like this, you take the results as only guidelines and examples, not as absolute facts. There's always going to be differences in hardware, software and configuration so what gave the big numbers and results for them might not work for you.

As Developer.com mentions in a new article, there's a new video tutorial posted over on Internet.com about using PHP and JSON to pass around data in your applications.

Got seven minutes to learn how you can harness the power of PHP, JavaScript and JSON in a powerful AJAX-driven web application? This Internet.com Video tutorial shows you all you need to know to pass data between the client and server using JSON data format.

The video explains a bit about JSON+PHP and shows you how to send a simple message (book-related data) to the server and how to handle the response with a little help from jQuery's Ajax functions.

Abhinav Singh has a new post to his blog that looks at using a powerful tool, memcached, with PHP to create a simple queue system that could be reused just about anywhere.

Memcached is a scalable caching solution developed by Danga interactive. One can do a lot of cool things using memcached including spam control, online-offline detection of users, building scalable web services. In this post, I will demonstrate and explain how to implement fast scalable queues in PHP.

He starts with an overview of what the queue will let you do - save data into the queue with a unique identifier and pull it back out based on the key requested (and is removed from the queue). The code sets up the connection to the memcached server and gives you methods to check if the queue is empty and to push and pull records in and out. A bit of sample code illustrates how to put it to use.

In another of his "Solar Shorts" Richard Thomas talks about the road to Solar 1.0 as broken down into three points that will lead up to the framework's 1.0 release.

If you haven't taken a look at the Solar Framework in the past now is the time to do so as the three biggest complaints about Solar are on the road to be resolved.

Some of the things that might have made you skip over the framework in the past are being worked on right now:

• Solar has been in perpetual alpha/beta forever..
• Documentation, all the cool Frameworks have cool docs.
• Examples, sometimes the easiest way to learn is to study a working application

For more information about the Solar framework, head over to SolarPHP.com and grab the latest copy.

• PEAR_PackageFileManager_Plugins 1.0.1
• PEAR_PackageFileManager2 1.0.1
• VersionControl_Git 0.4.2
• Auth_SASL 1.0.4

As mentioned in this new post by Alexander Veremyev to the Zend Developer Zone, the first Russian Zend Framework conference has been announced - ZFConf 2010.

I am happy to announce the 1st Russian Zend Framework Conference (ZFConf 2010) which will take place in Saint-Petersburg, Russia at the end of March. An initial list of topics has been decided and the conference is open for registration. I am glad to participate in the event along with other speakers, some of which are acknowledged specialists and have a wide experience in using Zend Framework. The official language of the conference is Russian.

Topics include Zend_Search_Lucene, message queues, internationalization and a look at what Zend Framework 2.0 has to offer.

You can get more details on the conference from their main website or find out more of the specifics of registering. (Note: as of the time of this post, most of their site hasn't been translated to English, save the topics list.)