Lately I've been playing alot with the PEAR CLI interface. The one annoying thing I noticed the most was its lack of tab completion that I'm used to from the shell. It turns out that this feature is very easy to add, in the bash at least. Here is a simple tab completion script for the bash. In addition to tab-completing the PEAR cummands, it can even autocomplete the names of installed packages and discovered PEAR channels. Just source it, and enjoy

Slides from my two talks at OSCON 2008 are now available:

• Integration Testing PHP Applications
• Supervisor as a Platform

Both talks were well attended had great audience participation. Thanks to everyone that attended and I hope you enjoyed them.

About seven people came up after the Integration Testing talk with good questions and feedback. I think that 45 minutes was enough to provide good starting points for the topics covered but it was clear that these users were engaged and ready to dig into it more. If I give this talk again, it is going to be in a tutorial format so we can get much deeper into the material and have some exercises.

After my Supervisor talk at the end of the day, I had the pleasure of going out to dinner with Roger Hoover and some other Supervisor users. ......

As a reminder to all of those wanting to submit papers to this year's php|works/PyWorks combo conference, today is your last day!

As with all our conferences, our main goal is to provide our attendees - mostly a highly technical crowd who is looking for specific, to-the-point information on relevant developer topics - with content that is as relevant as possible to their daily lives. [...] If you have a cool idea about a product or platform that somehow relates to PHP, we definitely want to hear from you!

Check out this page for some of the guidelines (and suggestions) about submitting your proposal. The Call for Papers will close at the end of the day, July 25th, 2008 and all talks must be submitted via email to proposals@phparch.com for considerat ......

Matthew Turland has posted about a topic that was the subject of a recent cover story in php|architect magazine - EAV modeling.

The mental image that came to me when reading about this approach to data modeling was taking the traditional relational table and turning it on its head. [...] EAV actually has to circumvent, work around, or reimplement features that most mainstream database servers today provide "for free" to the traditional relational counterparts of EAV in order to get equal functionality.

He talks about features the structure has (including row-level referential integrity and schema metadata) and points out some of ......

The NETTUTS.com website has a new tutorial posted that combines PHP and AJAX (using the the jQuery library specifically) to create a simple dynamic poll.

When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of jQuery you can produce some pretty cool results. In this tutorial we'll create a poll using PHP and XHTML, then make use of some jQuery Ajax effects to eliminate the need for a page refresh, and to give it a nice little bit of animation.

The PHP handles defining the question, answers and the functionality to load, submit and return the current results (number of votes) back to the javascript. The communication between the PHP and javascript is a JSON message made simple thanks to PHP's json_encode function.

You can 2008-07-26 00:40:07 | 全文 | 评论(0)

In a new blog post Christopher Jones mentions the feature freeze that's happened for the PHP 5.3 series including the Oracle support through the OCI8 extension.

The volume of commits has recently increased in anticipation of today's feature freeze deadline. I expect the Alpha release time frame will also see high activity. Eventually, increased tightening of criteria for patch acceptance will bring us to Beta and then Production releases.

Features included in this most recent extension version include an allowance for external authentication, a change to let Reflection correctly show function/method arguments, an increase on the oci8.default_prefetch setting and correctly defining the SQLT_BDOUBLE and SQLT_BFLOAT constants.

Keep an eye out for a release on PECL with these new updates soon.

OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention wraps up today but some of the PHPers out there have already made some blog posts and have shared their slides from the event. Here's the list so far:

• Luke Welling - SNAP - PHP Taint Tool
• Ed Finkler - Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecInfo
• Sebastian Bergmann - Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• Laura Thomson - Write Beautiful Code
• Wez Furlong - Hot Chocolate: You got cocoa in my PHP
• Theo Schlossnagle - 2008-07-26 00:40:07 | 全文 | 评论(0)

In a new blog post today Jonathan Snook shows how to create a contact form for your CakePHP application (version 1.2).

Most contact forms take a name and feedback from a user and mail it off to the administrator but don't store any information in the database. This tutorial will show how to use CakePHP's models, even when no table is being used.

He shows how to define the model class, set up the mapping of columns to named elements and the code to handle the submit. It just sends a basic email with the contents of the form with a few validation rules to ensure it's not abused. Simple stuff...

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

• Developer Tutorials Blog: Running background processes in PHP
  
• PHPImpact Blog: Static Factories vs Public Constructors
  
• Job Posting: Ganz Interactive Seeks PHP Developer (Toronto, ON)
  
• Ibuildings blog: Wow, this is so cool! (Guide to Enterprise PHP Development)
  
• Developer Tutorials Blog: Debugging PHP with Firebug and FirePHP
  
• Eran Galperin's Blog: Handling mail and mime in PHP using the Zend Framework
  
• CodeIgniter Blog: CodeIgniter Community Chieftain Michael Wales
  
• Daniel Cousineau's Blog: PHP 5.3 and Closures
  
• Vinu Thomas' Blog: mbstring Functions by default in PHP
  
• Sebastian Bergmann's Blog: PHPUnit Workshops in Australia
  

Thomas Weidner has posted about a method he's come up with to help protect you and your site when uploading files through the Zend_File_Transfer component from the Zend Framework.

The new Zend_File_Transfer component is growing day for day. As incredible new feature this component allows to use file validators. These are necessary to increase security and allow to define rules for file uploads (and also downloads in future).

He illustrates with a simple Zend_File_Transfer object that uses an addValidators call to limit the size of the upload to 50 KB. Other validation rules include count (the number of files to expect), extension, filessize and imagesize. Using these he makes a "more secure" upload object setting the size to 205KB, to expect five files that are all under 1MB and are of the types gif/jpg/png. ......

Robert Eisele has posted on an interesting topic recently - using a PHP interface to the OpenCV library (from Intel) to detect faces in images.

The headline does say facedetection - but what does this mean? Easy said, this article focus on how to find faces on images with PHP. Faces have a certain form and so it is possible to search for it. At the end of the search you will say how many human faces are on the image or better: Where are human faces on my image. This article is not intended to be mathematically.

The OpenCV library is a pattern-detection tool that can, based on the "experience" it has trained on with sample files, do its best to find similar structures in any given image. He's come up with a 2008-07-26 00:40:07 | 全文 | 评论(0)

My employers, Ibuildings, have been running a series of seminars where we invite a few people (and it is a few, they are generally small events), bring some of our developers along, and have some technical tutorials, demonstrations and general discussions, and some food. The previous events have all been well-received and sound very civilised (and there's food, which is always good!)

I'm happy to announce that Ibuildings is venturing north of the Watford Gap - and the next event will be in Leeds, on the 9th September, the full details are at http://www.ibuildings.com/events/leeds. The main tutorial session will cover source control with S ......

Here are the slides from my Cocoa talk:

Here are my slides for the memcached presentation I gave at OSCON this year. I experimented with a new slide template, which turned out for the worst, since the contrast of the type on the screen was very poor, making it difficult for attendees to read. I apologize for this. In addition, I was completely distracted during my entire talk by loud music coming from the room next door. Nevertheless, the majority of my audience was still around even after I ran 5-10 minutes over schedule, eating into their free beer time, so I suppose that says something and that they were learning.

Thanks to all who attended!

Give Your Site a Boost With Memcache

Today’s high-traffic websites must implement performance-boosting measures that reduce data processing and reduce load ......