XAJAX replacement

If you are familiar with XAJAX you know it is an easy way to integrate PHP and AJAX, if you aren't familiar with it you should go check it out. When I started writing my own framework, I chose to integrate it as a first class citizen. Recently I have been preparing to hang my framework out for others to play with and and realized that XAJAX just wasn't fitting in anymore, a few of my concerns were:

• Not conceptually consistent with the rest of the framework.
• One of just two external dependencies (PHP), my goal being to eliminate all external PHP dependencies from the core of the framework.
• Not strict PHP 5, they still support PHP 4 with no plans to drop it.

Those were the main reasons for replacing XAJAX, another was that I really wanted to integrate the Javascript side with jQuery since it is the "supported" javascript library for the framework. None of the reasons I'm replacing XAJAX reflect on its capabilities it really does what it does very well. Anyways I estimated a week and have been at it for about 1 1/2 weeks a bit longer than I thought.

Vanilla

I've been kicking around an idea for a forum for PHP Bloggers to hang out on, I wanted something super simple ( to keep me from playing with it too much), and was pointed towards vanilla. It has a very clean interface and getting my template to work in it was fairly simple. Simplicity seems to be the overall theme so maybe it will keep me focused on just using it instead of playing with it!

Changing Jobs

I'm in the middle of changing jobs so no time to really do anything extra (fun) for probably another week. I haven't had time to read anything at all so no Weekly Readers.

Everybody is expecting lots of traffic. Thats the trend of last weeks posts anyway, there were at least 7 articles on the subject. It is one of my favorite topics, unfortunately I never have enough traffic to see any of them actually solve a problem for me.

• .htaccess - gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving
• Dealing with Traffic - Part 1: Media files
• Caching PHP pages
• Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs
• Benchmarking Applications with PHP
• Save your Site, Cache that Data!
• Introduction to web caching

Patterns

Patterns is another topic I really wished I saw more PHP articles for. Somebody put this on dzone maybe it will start a trend for next week? Patterns for PHP.

Zend

The weekly Zend Framework related articles. I am going to have to give in and actually do something with the ZF before its at version 2.0. There is a tutorial series in the list that walks you through building a blog application, I think I will try to follow it.

• An Example Zend Framework Blog Application - Part 1: Introductory Planning
• An Example Zend Framework Blog Application - Part 2: The MVC Application Architecture
• Subversion for the Example Zend Framework Blog Tutorial Series
• Integrating Zend Framework and Doctrine
  
• Translating Zend_Form error messages and more

Books and Reviews

• php|architect's Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide, 2nd Edition
• Drupal 6: The missing manual
• 6 books to master PHP
• Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5
• Programming PHP
• Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce

Miscellaneous Stuff

Every week I have a ton of links that don't really fit in any particular category. I usually try to fit them all in somewhere, but the last couple weeks have been all over the place so here goes a big list of misc. stuff.

• Testable API's
• SPL autoloading in PHP
• HTTP Status: 100 Continue
• HTTP Status: 201 Created vs. 202 Accepted
• Continuous Integration with phpUnderControl
• 5 PHP 5 features you can't afford to ignore

Future articles

The last couple articles I've written in this series have been short changed and I apologize for that, I started the series for several reasons one was to discipline myself to write on a regular basis, they definitely have helped serve that purpose. I received an email today as i wrote this one telling me how useless they are. I'm not very thin skinned believe me it doesn't offend me to not be found useful , maybe they are useful to others maybe they aren't, I wrote them because they are fun to do. However on looking back I have to agree that this blog has become a one trick pony, so starting next week I will be writing more articles that actually have original work produced by me. I will continue with this series and am asking for comments on what would be useful for others in the Weekly Review.

Oh and I have a fan who will punch you in the nose if you don't like what I write about, thats better than all the dzone votes in the world.

hurt to write this article

Respect

This seems to be a reoccurring theme lately — PHP and Respect. Its frustrating to read things that are not true written by people without real first hand knowledge and experience with the language. However, the reality is that good code is written by knowledgeable and skilled PHP developers and most impressively actually used on production sites the world over, To me you have earned respect when the code you write gets used by millions of users every day. Beautiful elegant solutions that never make it off of a development server and into the wild just don't matter. Fortunately I am entertained by mine is better than yours posts like this Why Ruby is better than Symfony just because they often get so many things wrong, and the response Response to Andy Jeffries why ruby is better than symfony.

How to

There were a lot of code snippets and how-to do its in my feed reader this last week. They aren't always the most authoritative or cutting edge examples but I am always surprised by the uses people can come up with for PHP and all the various web API's out there that are underused, and every once in a while you find a gem.

• Charts with PHP and Google Charts API — I love charts.
• XMPPHP A Jabber class for PHP — This looks like a lot of fun, and the one I have the least time to get caught up in playing with :(.
• Google RageRank in PHP — I can't think of anything I would use this for, but somebody somewhere is obsessing over their PR and needs this.
• Custom Digg Counter in Wordpress with PHP — Digg just gets on my nerves but that doesn't mean i won't need this someday for somebody.
• Map your users using the Google Maps API — Everybody likes to know where they are I guess.
• Caching PHP pages — If you need a quick introduction to html caching this article introduces a couple different existing solutions.
• SMTP legacy — Here is a tip that I know lots of code didn't take into consideration, especially the spammers that hit my mail box incessantly! At least spam me with something that works right.
• Widgetize This — If you use Wordpress this might be useful.

Phing

I use phing for automating my build process so I was very interested in these two articles. PHPUnit test and Code Coverage Statistics with phing and Simple Database migrations with phing and dbdeploy.

Zend Stuff

Compared to other frameworks there are way way more articles written on the Zend Framework, Since I don't use it I usually just skim over them. So for now I won't be writing much about Zend Framework specific articles. I will however post the links for those that do

• Zend Framework: Should Forms Save Themselves?
• Integrating Zend Framework and Doctrine
• Zend Framework Articles and Tutorials
• Front Controller Plugins in Zend Framework

Books

Davey Shafik announced a new book on php streams due out in Q3 2008. Thats a topic I never thought there might be a book for. Ivo Jansch has a review for those interested in php|a’s Guide to Programming with Zend Framework.

Oh and one more. I missed this one and had to stick it in here after I had finished the post for the week Review: PHP5: Your visual blueprint for creating open source, server-side content.

Neat Stuff

I haven't installed this yet but I'm going to later on today.. its a pretty neat idea Google Toolbar button for PHP Reference, it lets you highlight text on a web page and search for that text on php.net. Oh yeah and this, everybody has probably already seen the SEO Wrapper but I just had to watch it again. How do people find the time?

Congrats

Congratulations are due to phpdeveloper.org on reaching 10K posts. It as one of the first resources I discovered when first starting with PHP.

Brian Moon just realized that phorum turned 10 last week. What is that about a billion years in internet time?

All over the place

Articles this last week were all over the place, from this article on project-zero running a major php application on something other than the Zend platform to Drupal is Part of the Problem and PHP is Dead, both telling us how PHP is going to die if we don't do something now! I have an opinion on this but not the energy to argue it right now, so I'll keep it to myself for today.

LSB

If you are interested in Late Static Binding or LSB in future versions of PHP take a look at Late Static Binding (LSB) forward_static_call() I have been looking forward to LSB, it will eliminate some ugly hacks I have used to get around the lack of it, but I think this solution isn't the most elegant, unfortunately I am not able to articulate what I do want it to look like in any intelligent way except different, or in the authors words "It would be alot less awkward and imo closer to what the average oo programmer would expect.".

Google App Engine

I love this — Why not PHP for Google’s App Engine? and Google App Engine needs PHP support… well why not any number of languages. Seriously if you go read here you will see "Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App Engine, we look forward to supporting more languages in the future.", okay? I guess the better question is why not PHP first? Whatever the reason, Google is a public corporation and is under no obligation to support anyones favorite language on their new platform, they only have an obligation to make money, its not like they just overlooked PHP somehow, they made a conscious choice to support python first.

Books and Reviews

I am really glad that Cal Evens has an in with apress, the sample chapter he picked to share with us was the exact one I would have picked myself — go check it out at Sample Chapter From Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More. It covers the SPL, a topic thats really hard to find information on.

I used to do quite a bit of Joomla work and when 1.5 came out I toyed around a bit but things had changed enough that it wasn't all that easy to just jump in and go, I wish I'd had this book Mastering Joomla 1.5 at the time, the review sounds like it would have helped.

For all you Codeigniter fans Ken Guest has a review of Code Igniter for Rapid PHP Application Development, it sounds like the book was okay but not good enough to persuade him to use codeigniter.

Code and stuff

I really really need to gather up all the techniques and ideas I've learned about the SPL and write an article, it seems to be like a hidden easter egg as far as documentation and unexplored features go. PHP, PEAR. PHP 5.3: SPL stack, heap, queue, list covers some more undocumented data structures.

I don't know anything at all about this framework but I do think the link I found there to GRC Perfect Paper Passwords is interesting!

Yahoo! Pipes announced an option for PHP serialized output., if Google Apps won't give us PHP support at least Pipes will spit PHP.

I am often surprised when I find content tagged in ways I would have never in a million years related to it, until of course I saw the tag. The class in the article Open Calais Tags might be what I need, I'm sure it will make its way into Zend Framework by next week. Oh YAY it is what I need all wrapped up in WP Calais Auto Tagger plugin.

I've been reading along with this series Rolling Your Own MVC: The Page Load Scenario while most developers with a firm grasp of MVC will probably not find it all that interesting I like looking at other interpretations of what an MVC based framework should look like.

Five common PHP design patterns, okay I want to know something, I can search for and find these five common patterns covered in at least 10 different articles, some very well, why doesn't somebody write about Five uncommonly undocumented PHP design patterns That would be something interesting to read. That isn't to say the article wasn't okay, it was, it just covered more of the same old same old.

Advocacy

Lukas Smith has put up a mission statement and a call for discussion on emPHPower.org drop over there and find out how to join the discussion.

Done

I'm out of time, I know I miss articles every week, sometimes the signal to noise ratio is overwhelming, If it bugs you then comment on it, maybe I just never see them. Maybe they were just really bad and I didn't have anything to say (nice), but If you want to be SURE that I see your work and can let others know about it, you might want to let me know what I'm missing.

April fools came and went, I didn't get fooled. Thats sad, I love April fools day and this had to be the lamest year ever.

It was spring cleaning time this weekend so my computers were all unhooked and disassembled this weekend while everything was scrubbed clean. That spilled over into Monday which has now become Tuesday. That means everybody gets a break from my weekly reviews. Except this little tiny bit:

Subtle Digs

This caught my interest DHH on PHP. Maybe I'm just reading between the lines but "scales down" and "tackling that scope" isn't exactly praise. I really don't think that pointing to that blurb and saying “see, see.I told you PHP was good stuff.” is all that flattering to PHP. I wonder if anybody else thought it wasn't? Immediacy and frameworks points out some advantages that this immediacy gives. I think people are a little confused when they compare a language (PHP) with a framework ROR)

Shorted

I know this post got the short end of spring cleaning weekend. I promise next week will be uhhh… Better!

There are is fundamental concept that I see in this vision:
emPHPower is a mediator and catalyst that empowers members of the community to follow their own ideas

Professional Organizations Matter

I have been a member of a much smaller organization which adopted a similar mission. The reputation and livelihoods of this group had been damaged by years of infighting, bad legislation and no clear vision of of the future, not all of these are problems we face in the PHP community but the concepts behind organization are the same.

We paid dues, hired lobbyists, and as a group decided the direction we would like to go in. Within a year of going from individuals without a consensus and almost no voice to a professional organized group we had achieved things well beyond our wildest expectations, so I can speak from direct experience –this works.

Knowing where you are going!

When these types of initiatives begin the first hurdle is deciding what the mission is and bringing a multitude of conflicting ideas into something cohesive and meaningful.

That is where Lukas is asking that the community get involved:

So I would like to open up discussion to the general community. I want, and obviously need the community, to participate in working out this idea. That being said, I am sure that it will be impossible to please everyone. To me the key is to keep a clear vision instead of trying to do too much. Also as opinions will differ, in the end it will take the dedication of a small group of people to pull this thing through.

I have some ideas about where I would like to go with such an organization. I would like to see greater involvement by the PHP community itself in promoting and establishing guidelines for certification, best practices and a higher level of professionalism. Thats not mentioned in the scope of the original article, but thats my personal interest in such an organization among other things.

Do you have other ideas? I'm sure your vision is not the same as mine or Lukas or then again it may be, nobody will know unless you step up and join the discussion, until you begin to participate this vision Lukas has will go nowhere.

Go read the original article and join in the discussion.

Oh yeah, did I mention I hate the name? Just kidding I know its just a "code" name, I just keep imagining trying to pronounce it.

I have been doing some research on build tools this last week, and was hoping some new articles would crop up that were related so I could accomplish two things at once, write my weekly review and learn about new tools, unfortunately that didn't happen.

There were a few articles about tools I already use and Getting an overview of all targets accumulated in a Phing build file actually told me something I didn't know, the best part was the link it provided to this site — Build Doctor. There is a lot of good information on build doctor even if little of it is directly PHP related. Other than that the only tool related articles I found this week were for a new release of PHPUnit and phpUnderControl. There was also an announcement by Travis Swicegood that he will be writing a book on Git. I doubt I'll ever master SVN much less move on to something new any time soon but if I do I'll pick up a copy of this git book when it comes out.

Interview with Andi Gutmans

I'm not anti-Microsoft, I use their products and I like them, I am one of the few PHP developers I know who doesn't bash windows, I like a lot of things Microsoft produces but I can't put my finger on what made me uneasy about Microsoft and PHP in this interview with Andi Gutmans, just a gut feeling I guess. It seems people would learn that Microsoft is a public company and their only concern is profit and growth for their shareholders, feel good overtures to the open source community are only meaningful in the context of profit for Microsoft. Thinking it means open as in we want to work together for mutual good is a mistake.

PHP 5.3

I am really excited about this release, it means I get to play with my pet framework to implement some things that rely on features I've been waiting for, but the best news was this –PHP 5.3: Up to 30% performance win

Annoying site(s) of the week

Is it just me or is this an annoying pile of #@!@$^#? I keep seeing articles from this site pop up on dzone. It actually claims to be good for beginners. It may inspire me to actually build something useful as an alternative, it really bothers me that much. This site is a little better but still this article just doesn't do the topic justice, its no wonder PHP gets such a bad rep when so many “beginner” and “tutorial” sites pass off their advice as best practices.

Books

Has anybody read Mobile Web Development yet? I think I'm going to pick it up, I am working on a project that mobile support is a big part of so I can justify yet another book. I might pick up Jeff Atwoods recommendation Revisiting The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering while I'm at it.

GsoC

The Google Summer of Code application deadline is here. I wonder what project will get some love. I understand that Google has their own motivations for sponsoring these students, but I think a foundation offering grants to experience developers who aren't necessarily students would make so much more of an impact.

A Disappointing Week

This week was not really all that exciting as far as my feedreader goes, I don't think there was one article with code that I felt the need to pass along, thats sad. I think everybody has spring fever, I know I do.

Come on Bloggers give me something to read besides the above mentioned annoying sites of the week. I need some good articles on PHP tools, particularly build automation and testing.

Ahhhhh..this is what happens when you have too much time on your hands — Codetcha! And AsciiArt, I know its not PHP but its a cool take on an old school art.

Edit: Lukas pointed out that I maybe my feedreader had somehow missed his article emPHPower, actually I hadn't missed it and it should definitely be on everybodys reading list. I did forget to mention it because I had been thinking of adding my own two cents in another post.

Zend again

You really have to admire the way the ZF community keeps up the flow of information about the Zend Framework. Other open source PHP projects should learn from this, create some buzz! Zend Framework announced the release of Zend Framework 1.5 Go see the reaction of a true fan too cute if you like cute. There are even some tutorials available already.

Wiki vs. unWiki

PHP has a new wiki and Drupal explains why they won't have a wiki.

GSoC

A lot of buzz going on about the upcoming Google Summer of Code. I started to point to all the ideas and announcements but it seems they are all listed over on the PHP wiki, go look at it, it is an interesting list.

Code

Just like last week there wasn't very much code out there to play with but here is a bit to think about. Ruby-style mixins in PHP, … its not Ruby so why waste time trying go program in Ruby or use interfaces and delegation at least thats my opinion. This cracked me up go read the description. — “doesn't require any programming skills” okay now read the article, I guess in a way its true, no real programming skills were required. I cringed when I saw the title –Tips & Tricks of Learning Ternary Operators. This weeks sampling of code made me really appreciate this — Licence to release PHP code?

Oh and this might come in handy if you have a blog and use feedburner,. Making Your Own FeedBurner Chicklet (PHP).

Everybody has opinions

I guess its just time to dig up old arguments, like Template Engines vs. PHP, some opinionated views on what makes good and bad code in Another 7 deadly sins for PHP. And lets see if we can figure out Why do open source web apps suck? Well all of them don't suck but some do, I'm not quite sure that the title of the article really has anything to do with the content. It certainly was good link bait though and a few people bit with Open source web apps *do not* suck and To use Open Source or not.

Top Ten stuff

Do the people who write these top framework review type things ever do anything but the most trivial of research? All-Out Code Edit War: What's the best Web-developer's Code Editor out there?. What about tools? 10 tools for Modern PHP Development hit all the common ones but didn't really dig too deep. All in all I just don't get much out of the Top Ten type things.

Career advice

Coding horror article on Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism sheds some light on something a lot of programmers struggle with. The majority of us will not work in a startup and thats okay. repeat after me its okay. A Letter to an Aspiring PHP Programmer should have pointed out that you should do what you love, success and happiness will follow. Well in a perfect world it would anyway, but the language you learn today will probably not be the one you are using 10 years from now, being a solid well rounded programmer is the way to the big bucks. Oh oh oh! Does anybody enjoy being “openly mocked”? You might enjoy this article then The Wall of Fail. And last but not least here is some good advice The First Rule of Programming: It's Always Your Fault never forget it! It saves so much time and even more conflict.

Well thats all for this week. I wish I had more time, I left out a few things that deserved mention, maybe I will sneak them in next week.

I thought I'd share a bit of this research so every Sunday night you will find a bit of commentary and a lot of links to things I found interesting in the PHP world over the previous week. Personally I like articles with code so you might see a lot of how-to links, and I don't much care who is going to what unconference, conference, camp or meet-up so I won't be tracking anyones itinerary. If you think I missed something let me know, really I hate missing out on new articles.

As for all the really bad articles out there, yeah I probably read them, but I will try to remember the saying "If you can't say something good about something, don't say anything at all." Yeah Right.

Why can't they just say I'm Sorry?

CIO has a new article PHP's Enterprise Strengths and Weaknesses, Take 2 in which John Coggeshall responds to their earlier article on PHP. In the opening Editors Note I read this "Some readers disagreed with the points made in our previous article.". My opinion — "I'm sorry, I was wrong" works for me 90% of the time, geez.

Zend stuff

First off congratulations to Zend. They won a Jolt Productivity Award for the Zend Framework, Zend Studio for Eclipse was also nominated. Zend Studio for Eclipse was released in January and I'm starting to see reviews pop up. Sarah Hermann at ThinkPHP says "Overall I think Zend Studio for Eclipse is a great tool to develop PHP applications." and Michael J. Ross at PHPDevCenter concludes his review with "Zend Studio is strongly recommended to individuals and teams building PHP applications." pretty strong recommendations. I give PDT which Zend Studio for Eclipse is built on a try every couple months, my opinion is.. its okay. If they would just trickle down the code formatter to PDT I would give it a better than okay. Zend Studio for eclipse is probably in my future. Or maybe Sun is in my future. I know, I know I shouldn't help spread FUD but hey its fun sometimes.

Other Zend Framework stuff I read even though I don't use it

My favorite Zend Framework related article this week was Pear Vs. Zend Framework I don't agree with everything in th article but I do think the Zend Framework was misnamed it should have been Zend Repository. Actually I find some good in both , I just don't think inclusion in either is automatic commendation from the best practices gods. The comments on this article How Zend Framework is Losing the wrong war leaves me wondering even more is it a framework or not? It kinda sorta is but not.

Just to prove that I'm up to date and interested in the Zend Framework I read ZF Community/CMS Bugfixes is part of a series on ProDevTips I've been following.

Code!

It was a disappointing week for coding and design articles. I've been a big fan of the SPL, It is very under documented almost but not quite undocumented so this was a great find Introduction to SPL, I haven't read it all yet but hopefully it goes beyond the documentation.

I didn't agree with Dying with grace - PHP’s register_shutdown_function but it lead me to read this Re: Shutdown error handlers which makes me wonder why I click on links that lead to that particular blog.

PHP6, Unicode and TextIterator features I get intense headaches every time I think about the chain of things that can go wrong with i18n, at least it looks like we can hope to remove PHP as a weak link in that chain. Oh not to mention the wars that can start when you try to decide just who is the center of the i18n universe just go take a look at What's Wrong With Turkey?.

PHP Releases

I just noticed that wampserver has a PHP 6 Dev snapshot a little outdated but I think I'll play. I wonder why they don't have a PHP 5.3 package? After all I just read PHP 5.3 - A Heavy Hitter in Training

Best Practices

I wish I had thought of this URLs Can Be Beautiful while pretty URLs aren't a coding best practice the attention to detail and usability tells me something about the people who write the code behind them. Just too cool.

Paul Jones has a nice write up about Line Length, Volume, and Density and how it affects code readability and maintainability, along the same linesI found this article Sniffing refactoring needs. I wonder if PHP_CodeSniffer looks at length, volume and density.

Trends you better keep up with

You better keep up with this stuff because like it or not its where we are going. Semantic web is here: Yahoo! and microformats, Yahoo Tackles Semantic Web and The value of Web services for PHP

Some books I probably won't read

Even though I probably won't read them at least any time soon, I'm always happy to see PHP books being published, I knew Delphi was dying when the books dried up. There is a new book for CodeIgniter CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development read a review over at phpclasses.

Drupal seems to be popping up a lot in my reader, seems like version 6 is on fire. No new book yet but there is one in the works Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition due out umm sometime.

Useless slides

What in the world do I do with slides? They are not even as helpful as the back cover of a book. No less than 1, 2, 3, 4 things I looked at for no reason, yet another time waster I need to work on eliminating.

Okay 3 more things

Just kidding, I have to stop somewhere. Now that I'm at the end of and reading over it I realize just how easy it is to look at discrete bits of information and miss the big picture, I'm going to really enjoy writing these Weekly Readers. I hope you enjoy them too.

Nobody pointed out that I had the wrong month in the title!

When is Testability not important?

The answer to that question is obvious isn't it? Testability is always important. I spent a couple days implementing my new architecture, then about a week figuring out how to test some of the more complex features. I was discouraged to say the least so I headed out to scour the net for some insight into where and what I had done wrong and how I could make my testing life easier. I found plenty of advice and in another day I had come up with much more testable design, in other words pretty much my framework before the changes. I had a dilemma, testing or my beautiful simple elegant design.

After a lot of thinking, I realized that what I was doing wasn't too clever, it wasn't bad design, it was a combination of a mental block on my part that has been pounded into my head by dozens of articles and books expounding the virtues of low coupling, a lot of naive unit testing examples for PHP and a desire to play with the cool kids who only do TDD.

I went back to my original design and worked harder at the test cases with a new perspective on coupling, why was I trying to decouple classes that would never be used outside my framework, my framework is the runtime environment they will always live in, and suddenly my tests became much easier to write. I would never have been able to accomplish this with my old perspective on testing.

Finally the reason I wrote this post, It seems like the TDD buzz is getting ever louder in the PHP world. I am not knocking TDD, but I wonder if certain viable maintainable designs could ever evolve using TDD? Don't let the current favored methodology of the programming community stop you from thinking for yourself, there is no one true way. I think I'll stick with test early and sometimes just sometimes try being too clever.