I will present two sessions at the Conférence PHP Québec 2009:Of Lambda Functions, Closures and TraitsLambda Functions and Closures allow the quick definition of throw-away functions (for use with array_map(), for instance) that are not used elsewhere. Traits reduce some limitations of single inheritance by enabling the reuse method sets freely in several independent classes. This session introduces the audience to the implementation of lambda functions and closures (which are new in PHP 5.3) as well as traits (which will be added in PHP 6).PHP Code Review (together with Stefan Priebsch)Attendees of this lab will learn how experts look at code, what good code and bad code looks like, and how to avoid the most common gotchas. They are invited to bring their own code for an anonymous code review for an increased benefit from the lab.See you in Montréal next March!

Last night the CNMA awards were held here in Toronto, and I turned out to go home with an award! Although I still feel I didn't really deserve such a prize, I feel honored and proud of the team. Thanks guys! Its been an amazing ride so far, and also thanks to the CNMA organization and judges.

The PHP Object Oriented method of programming brings many exciting possiblities to application code. Many of the theories surrounding PHP Object Oriented code comes from some simple concepts. To the new comer, some of these concepts seem a little abstract, and with good reason. Abstraction is a key concept on Object Oriented code, but to the un-initiated, may seem rather vague. This tutorial attempts to bring to light, the concept of abstration, class hierachies, and polymorphism. But rather than boggle the mind with pages of theory, lets look at how it works.

I admit I don't follow Zend Framework very closely, since I haven't been using it for any serious work. But I did write a piece about testing a Zend Framework action controller with View Helpers. This might need updating, since the testing capabilities of the Zend Framework have grown substantially since then. In particular, there is now a component called Zend_Test. I haven't had time to study it closely yet, but I hope to do so soon.

Surprising that this is still cropping up. It's quite simple really, PHP references are not pointers. You don't need to take my word for it though, the manual puts it just as succinctly: http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/language.references.arent.php I quote: "As said before, references aren't pointers." I'll reiterate: PHP4 passed objects around by value. This was fun. (?) PHP5 corrected this and passes things around by reference, which (I think) is more intuitive, and saves a lot of puzzlers. In PHP4 you could use this: =& to get things passed by reference, which in some cases, in particular with objects, was necessary. But with PHP5 you don't have to use this operator so much. Which is nice, since you don't have to think as much, which is always a boon.

Maemo.org, the community site for Nokia's mobile Linux environment has this week been upgraded to 8.09.2 Ragnaroek, the much faster and long-term supported version of the Midgard framework. Thanks to Niels and Piotras for working with me on this! in October, I spent quite a bit of time optimizing this release, shaving off an estimated 60-70% of queries through some smart caching and removed redundancies. In addition, a new database server is now in place. Together, these should get us quite far in the "Fast Server" agenda. We're however still not done, and now we will do more optimizations that will be part of 8.09.3, due next week, and will move static files (images and javascript) to a separate lighttpd instance to remove that load from the normal Apache. When all this is done, the Maemo community should have infrastructure that will be able to serve it for a long time. In addition to optimization, we've been working on some other features related to the website:

• Many new activities, such as Internet Tablet talk and Maemo Wiki now count towards karma, with more karma refinements on the way
• Issues with weird email formatting in Maemo forums has been fixed and will be part of 8.09.3
• Per-module karma listings are now showing correctly, making it possible to see the top contributors to different aspects of the community

Midgard is a big and complex piece of software. If you notice any issues related to this upgrade, please let us know. And if you have any ideas on improving the website, be sure to file those too! Technorati Tags: lighttpd, maemo, midcom, midgard, ragnaroek

NetBeans 6.5 is soon to be released. After 10 years of NetBeans that's the first version of Sun's OpenSource IDE featuring PHP support. While 6.5 is waiting to be packaged the development didn't stop and the first features for the successor, NetBeans.next, are already being developed. David Van Couvering just showed a preview of a cool new feature: SQL completion in PHP strings, if it does what the screenshot promises that's a damn great addition in my opinion....

This blog posting is in German as the events it relates to is German-only. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are working towards an English edition of the PHP Code Camp, though. Die Zeiten, in denen man es sich leisten konnte, den Benutzer testen zu lassen, sind vorbei. Heute gilt in vielen Projekten gar die Regel, dass ein nicht getestetes Feature als nicht vorhanden gilt. Lernen Sie, wie man automatische Unit Tests schreibt, wie testgetriebene Entwicklung funktioniert und welche Vorteile Sie davon in Ihrem Projekt haben. Auch genügt es nicht, nur Teile der Anwendung isoliert zu testen. Eine Anwendung muss auch im Zusammenspiel aller beteiligten Komponenten getestet werden. Dazu gehört gerade für AJAX-lastige Anwendungen auch der Browser. Erfahren Sie, wie Sie eine Webanwendung als Ganzes automatisch im Browser testen können, welche Vorteile kontinuierliche Integration für Sie haben kann und wie Sie die Qualität Ihres Codes durch Codemetriken beurteilen können. Sebastian Bergmann ist nicht nur während der Workshops für Sie da: Nach den intensiven Trainingseinheiten des Tages haben wir für Sie Abendevents vorbereitet, bei denen Sie den Trainer und die anderen Teilnehmer in entspannter Runde kennen lernen und sich fachlich austauschen können. Machen Sie sich fit für Ihre PHP-Projekte und lassen Sie sich die Chance für Ihre Teilnahme an diesem besonderen Event nicht entgehen! Die erste Ausgabe der PHP Code Camp Series: Quality findet das erste Mal vom 28. bis 30. Januar 2009 in München statt. PHP-Entwickler aufgepasst: Fernab von Arbeits- und Projektstress unter der Woche lädt die Entwickler Akademie vom 16. bis 18. Januar 2009 zur ersten Weekend Edition des PHP Code Camps. Ein Wochenende lang in die Tiefen von PHP eintauchen und von Experten lernen. Buchen Sie Ihren PHP-Urlaub noch heute, das Laptop einpacken und nach Bad Ems starten, um den Rest kümmert sich die Entwickler Akademie -- vom Transfer vom Flughafen, über ein Get Together am Freitag bis zur virtuellen Linux-Maschine mit allen benötigten Tools für die Wochenendschulung. Wenn das Jahr so beginnt, ist eines klar: 2009 wird das Jahr für PHP-Entwickler! Das innovative und neuartige Trainingskonzept des Camps enthält die Essenz aus den Praxiserfahrungen und den Spezialgebieten von drei der bekanntesten deutschsprachigen PHP-Profis. Das bietet Ihnen den Vorteil, dass Sie tiefgehendes Know-how von den führenden Experten jedes Themengebiets vermittelt bekommen. Sie werden stets von allen dreien Trainern gleichzeitig betreut -- ideal für praktische Übungen und für die intensive Wissensvermittlung.

Equinox: (Latin: Equal night) This example came about after a previous example to get the season for a given date. In the southern hemisphere, seasons are calculated simply by date. Summer down here begins on December first, Autumn on March first, Winter on June first, and Spring on September first. This works well, and the seasons can be adjusted simply to transpose them into values that correspond to the nothern hemisphere. But these dates do not truely reflect the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere, or autumn in the southern hemisphere. Historically, in the northern hemisphere, the beginning of spring is marked by the spring, or Vernal, Equinox. The Vernal Equinox marks the point in time when the Sun crosses the celestial equator from south to north. Calculation of the true Vernal Equinox is regarded by some as the true beginning of spring, while some churches relate to it in a totally different way.

Property Lists (plist) is a format used on OS X as a way to store settings and other configuration data, as part of my SQLite talk I show how to extract SQLite databases from the backups generated for the iPhone when it syncs to your computer.Simply, its an XML format that stores a data structure consisting of boolean, integer, real, string and blob values. I've provided the parser I use to extract data from the PList file, it doesn't work with binary plists at the moment. But may do so in the future, you can convert a binary PList to an XML PList using the plutil binary on OS X.Instantiate the PlistParser class and then call the parse method with the filename as a parameter. This will then return an array of the PList elements.If you have any problems add a comment and I'll look into it.

I wonder if the concept of amazon whishlists work. Or have you ever got something from your whishlist, because you did something in/for PHP?

Zend Framework 1.7.0 has been released and is now available from the Zend Framework download site

I’m happy to announce that the Zend Framework team, together with the ever-growing and always generous Zend Framework community, has delivered Zend Framework 1.7. Just in time for Adobe MAX!As I’ve mentioned previously, Adobe and Zend have been working together to make Flex and AIR application development much easier for PHP developers. This announcement marks a significant milestone in those efforts with the production release of the Zend_Amf component in ZF 1.7. Now PHP 5 developers can use the open, binary AMF3 protocol (think of it as ActionScript’s native tongue) as easily as any other server-client protocol in Zend Framework. To maximize compatibility, AMF0 is also supported. With the Dojo Toolkit integration introduced in our last release and the new Zend_Amf component, Zend Framework has become an indispensable tool for RIA development in PHP 5.Zend_Amf is really just the tip of the iceberg; Zend Framework 1.7 is packed with additional features to make PHP applications richer, easier to develop, and faster. Shipped in our new Extras Library, ZendX_JQuery provides integration with the popular JQuery JavaScript toolkit. The Extras Library has itself been introduced to ship components with the same high quality that you’ve come to expect of Zend Framework components in the Standard Library, but that are not eligible for paid Zend support. The ZF team has focused on two areas for its contributions in 1.7: performance enhancements and support for i5/OS. We have identified and improved bottlenecks in Zend_Loader, Zend_Controller, the server components, and Zend_Search_Lucene. In addition, we have added i5 support to our DB2 adapter while running all ZF unit tests in an i5 environment to make Zend Framework the best PHP framework available for i5, hands down.There are simply too many new features to list. The following are just highlights - see the README.txt for a full list of new features:• Dojo Toolkit 1.2.1 Support• Support for dijit editor in Dojo Toolkit as a form element• Google Book Search API in Zend_Gdata• Support for indexing Office Open XML documents in Zend_Search_Lucene, including MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel• Numerous i18n enhancements• Zend_Config_Writer for writing Zend_Config objects out to any streamFirst and foremost, I’d like to thank the Zend Framework community for making this release happen. In particular, I’d like to thank our ZF team (Wil Sinclair, Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Alexander Veremyev, and Ralph Schindler). I also like to thank Wade Arnold, the developer of Zend_Amf, and everyone at Adobe who contributed their time to educate developers on this componentWe’ve also had more community contributions in this release than ever before, so thanks to the dedicated souls who made sure their contribution made it in to 1.7. There are a lot of people to thank, so you can be sure that I’ve missed someone. I hope to catch you next release.One last thing, this release comes almost exactly 2 ½ months after the 1.6 release. Not too shabby!Oh and one last thing. If you're using another PHP framework or have something homegrown we have also packaged the Zend_Amf component separately for your convenience.

When it comes to working with different file formats, PHP is like a Swiss Army knife: it has a tool to handle almost anything you can throw at it. JPEG images, XML files, Word documents, ZIP archives…you name it, and there’s a PHP extension to handle it! This incredible versatility also applies to the topic of today’s article: the PDF, or Portable Document Format. Not content with just one, PHP actually comes with two different extensions that allow developers to dynamically generate PDF documents: the PDFlib extension, and the libHaru extension. Over the next few pages, I’m going to take a quick look at the Haru extension, providing you with a brief overview of its functions and demonstrating how you can use it in your PHP development. So come on it, and let’s get going!

Today, we released Zend Framework 1.7.0. This release features AMF support, JQuery support, and Twitter support, among numerous other offerings. For this particular release, we tried very hard to leverage the community. The majority of new features present in 1.7.0 are from community proposals, or were primarily driven by community contributors. For me, this represents a milestone: ZF is now at a stage where fewer and fewer core components are necessary, and the community is able to build off it and add extra value to the project. Continue reading "Zend Framework 1.7.0 Released"

So, my wife told me that my site design was boring.  Yeah, she was right.  I am no designer.  I just don't have that gene.  But, during my work on Wordcraft, I came across some cool places to find designs that are relased under Open Source licenses.

• Open Designs - This is arguably the the prettiest of the three. The search, however, is painfully slow because all results return on one page.  I guess if you can wait, this is a plus as browsing is easier.  Also, you can pick multiple colors and choose by license.  They only list Xhtml templates (at least as search options).  That could be a turn off if you like html 4 like me.
• Open Web Design - The site itself could use a design overhaul.  But, the content is good.  The search lets you choose primary and secondary color, a unique feature among these sites.  Thumbnails are a bit small though.
• Open Source Web Design - Their search is not as powerful as the others, but it does return very fast.  The thumbnails are a nice size.

You will find the same content on all three sometimes.  But, it comes down to browsing and searching.I found my new design at one of those.  Not sure which, I looked at a lot of them.  I did not use the template's html exactly as I like html 4.0 and wanted a different sidebar than the original author.  But, the design is the hard part.  So, thanks for Deep Red.

MAYFLOWER officially opens today a new office in Hamburg which has the 3rd largest port in Europe and a total of 320 berths - so enough space for the MAYFLOWER. The office itself will be located at the Roedingsmarkt, at the heart of Hamburg. The third location has become necessary as more and more requests have reached us in the past months. With this step we wanted to ensure both a high service level and a close contact with our customers. In charge of the new office will be Markus Wolff who is a frequent speaker at PHP conferences and member of the organizing team of the PHP Unconference in Hamburg. We are really happy that Markus has joined the MAYFLOWER crew and hope that we can also establish there MAYFLOWER as leading LAMP specialist.

MONyog 1.5 helps you eliminate security holes and verify your MySQL security model. MONyog does this by performing rights analysis across your MySQL servers. In addition to rights analysis, MONyog...

Evert Pot writes about a library he's creating to integrate WebDAV support with PHP and make things simpler for those needing to access the shares. "I intend to make this library as easy as possible to...

In a new post on his blog, Kore Nordmann has posted benchmarks of some of the more popular PHP image creation libraries testing their output times and results for generating the same image...