For university I currently have to analyse XML schema quite in depth and
there are some interesting / funny things inside the specification I wasn't
before. First: The default elementForm value: unqualified. Let me try to
explain what this is and why it is kind of strange...

The Zend Framework has now attracted a small community of developers and more and more new comers are attracted to it. The Zend Documentation is plentiful, yet vague. Without any real guidance or specific examples to get a site up and running.

This example site hopes to introduce the newcomers to Zend Framework in a friendly way, by providing a simple modular site layout and can have the newcomer up and running in minutes, rather than the long hard yard of sifting through docs which might as well be hieroglyphics to the those new to the framework.

This is release 0.0.1 of the example site, with new additions in the planning and user feedback and requests welcomed.

Chuck Burgess has posted a discovery he made while working with Eclipse PDT and a command line script that he needed to debug:

This week, I found a need to do this same kind of remote debugging, but for a command-line PHP script. This seems to be something that Eclipse is not already designed to do, as there is no "perpetual listener" available for its debug client. Instructions for remote CLI debugging are available, which showed me that environment variables might be the missing link to getting it working with Eclipse. It turned out to be one of two missing links. The other link was tricking Eclipse into keeping a debug session open (and therefore "listening").

He found that by loading up the PHP file in a shell script with the XDEBUG_CONFIG and XDEBUG_SESSION variables defined, it allows the Eclipse ......

Evert Pot has a quick post showing how you can make your code fork MySQL connections for better performance.

For some of our long-running processes we use PHP. It makes total sense from our perspective, because we can re-use all our existing business logic from our main PHP web application. To make things more efficient, I recently started some work on using forks and have a couple of worker processes around.

His sample script makes use of the pcntl_fork and pcntl_wait functions in PHP to spawn off processes that will be closed off when no longer needed.

Last week I was invited along to speak at the Make IT Scale conference. It covered a wide range of scaling issues mainly very technical. I come from a Games Industry background and I wanted to get across how performance is critical and that everything should be done to get speed before you think about replication.

Below is a video of my presentation - and below that the slides that I was presenting from.

On DevShed today, there's a new tutorial posted looking at two things that can cause headaches for PHP developers (especially when evaluating and comparing values) - nulls and empty strings.

Anyone who has programmed for any length of time has encountered the concepts of null and empty strings. They are not the same, and confusing the two can cause some serious problems. This article deals with these concepts in the context of PHP and MySQL.

They start with a bit of a quiz before getting into how to handle them correctly - making null "safe" and working with it correctly in a MySQL context. SQL statements and table structures are included for their examples.

Smashing Magazine has a few helpful RSS tips and tricks for WordPress users out there:

Let's take a look at 10 useful, yet rather unknown RSS-tricks for WordPress. Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing.

Here's their list:

• Control When Your Posts are Available via RSS
• Redirecting WordPress Feeds to FeedBurner Feeds
• Insert Ads (or Anything Else) in Your RSS Feed
• Format Your Images for Feed Readers
• Provide Your Readers with a Feed for Each Post
• Exclude Categories from Your RSS Feed
• Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog
• Use Category-Specific RSS Feeds
• List RSS Feeds by Category
• Get Rid of RSS Feeds the Clean Way < ......

In this new post to his blog Padraic Brady takes a quick look at a book by Julien Pauli and Guillaume Poncon - "Zend Framework: Bien developper en PHP".

Weighing in at around 450 pages, the contents table is replete with all the topics one would expect including chapters on MVC in the Zend Framework, all the typical components, and appendices (a lot of appendices!) on topics like MVC Theory, Subversion, Databases, Object Oriented Programming, Testing with PHPUnit, etc. It's a very complete book that should be suitable even for absolute beginners to PHP web application frameworks, or anyone visiting from Ruby/Python/Java.

You can find the book at a local (French) bookseller or it can be ordered online from someplace like 2008-12-04 00:40:03 | 全文 | 评论(0)