T4VN.NET

The Call for Papers for the International PHP Conference 2006, 5th to 8th November 2009 at Frankfurt/Main Germany, has been started. The Conference features two days full with six hours PowerWorkshops and two days main conference with sessions. The main focus of the conference will be Security through an own security track. Like last year, we'll provide a Management Day for businesses utilizing PHP or evaluating PHP. The Call for Papers will end at April, 30th.

PHP Vikinger

[2006-04-28 04:08:14]

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway from June 24th to 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, the people who attend get to choose and present the sessions at the event. The event is meant to be affordable: registration is 20 Euros, and simple food and a place to sleep are provided for both days of the event. The major expense for most attendees will be the cost of traveling to Norway. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors. General registration for the event opens on May 1st.

Zend: Roll Your Own Search Engine with Zend_Search_Lucene

[2006-04-06 23:09:22]

With the Zend Framework making such a splash in the PHP community, people can't seem to get enough tutorials and information surrounding it. So, in an effort to feed that need, Zend has published this new tutorial covering the Zend_Search_Lucene package. [i]One of the features that sets the Zend Framework apart from the others is the inclusion of a decent search module. Zend_Search_Lucene is a php port of the Apache Lucene project, a full-text search engine framework. Zend_Search_Lucene promises a simple way to add search functionality to an application without requiring additional php extensions or even a database. Zend_Search_Lucene overcomes the usual limitations of relational databases with features such as fast indexing, ranked result sets, a powerful but simple query syntax, and the ability to index multiple fields. Better still, a Zend_Search_Lucene index can live happily alongside your relational database to provide fast searching but without duplicating the effort of storing all of your data twice. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use Zend_Search_Lucene to index and search some RSS feeds.[/i] Mostly due to the simplicity of Zend's Framework setup, the tutorial isn't too long. It looks at the creation of the index (with a sample of fetching RSS feeds) and how to use this index to search their contents. There's even an outline of what kind of data can be associated with what kinds of fields.

DevShed: Building a PHP5 Form Processor - Coding the Form Validator Module

[2006-01-24 23:18:53]

DevShed has the second part of their "Building a PHP5 Form Processor" series posted today - Coding the Form Validator Module. It looks at how to construct a set of functions that will check the data inputted to ensure it exists and correct/valid. In this second part of a three-part series, we take up the topic of server-side validation. By the time you finish this article, you'll have the general guidelines for how to build a form validating class. You'll use some PHP built-in introspection functions, along with regular expressions, to assist you in building this class. They create several functions, including validateEmpty, validateInteger, validateNumber, validateRange, and validateEmail. Each one (obviously) serves their own purpose, and some are more complex that others (validating an integer versus a valid email address), but they walk you through each, showing you plenty of code and explainations along the way...(

Stuart Herbert's Blog: PHP 5 Stabilisation Re-visited

[2006-01-03 14:54:22]

On Stuart Herbert's blog, there's a new post with his look at the PHP implementation with in the structure of the Gentoo linux distribution. We're three months after our original planned date of the 8th October 2005 for stabilising PHP 5 on Gentoo. Until we do stabilise, the PHP Herd encourages everyone to use the unstable dev-lang/php packages, either from Portage, or the very latest packages from the Gentoo PHP Overlay. The PHP Herd already considers the old-style PHP packages (dev-php/php et al) obsolete - and the sooner we can finally get rid of them the happier we will be. I can't give you a timetable for when this will be done, as it's not the PHP Herd that does the stabilising [...] the PHP Herd hasalready stopped supporting the dev-php/php style packages (we all use dev-lang/php). January 2006 is a great month to start switching to dev-lang/php, if you haven't done so already! It's mainly a message to developers out ther eworking on the project, but it's still wonderful to see the progress that's being made to keep one of the more popular linux distributions up-to-date in the realm of PHP..

Jim Plush's Blog: AJAX, PHP and Javascript Errors - How to get more data

[2006-01-03 14:51:54]

Via our sister site, AjaxDeveloper.org today, there's a pointer to this post on Jim Plush's blog - "AJAX, PHP and Javascript Errors - How to get more data". Javascript is a powerful tool in the web programmers toolbox however, it's also one of our greatest headaches. Dealing with browser inconsistencies is always a source of great pain. You test on multiple platforms, find everyone you know with a mac running safari and think you have your code locked down however it rarely always works out this way. Being able to detect javascript errors in the wild can be a great resource for you to really see how your code is performing on a day to day basis. The key to it is that it uses a global function that IE and Mozilla both have to create a global-level error handler for the page - "onerror". He shows you how, with a few simple lines, you can create the function (with an alert inside) and, together with a little bit of Ajax and PHP magic, write it out to an error logging script for review...

Site News: A (Lengthly) Look Back at PHP in 2005

[2006-01-01 10:15:35]

In an effort to know where the PHP community has been (and where it will be going), I've posted this lengthy summary over on our blog today with a look back at what made up 2005 for all of the PHPers out there. Well, here it is, the end of another year and it's times like thes ethat it's always fun to take a look back to where we've come from and how far we've made it on various projects. The PHP community has come so far from those early days of January, and I thought I'd take my own look back via some of the news posts that I've made over on PHPDeveloper.org in the past year (almost 2000 of em) and see which ones stuck out. So, bear with me on this - I know I'll miss a few of the biggies, but I'm going to try to highlight things in each month that really effected the community as a whole. So, enjoy the read - most of the highlights are there (as well as a few of the problems that happened along the way). Hope you enjoy - and have a happy new year

Andi Gutmans' Blog: Fluent Interfaces

[2005-12-31 16:06:59]

With so many talking about fluent interfaces today, Andi Gutmans has tossed his hat into the ring with this new blog post with some of his thoughts. I'd like to add to Paul's and Mike's posts regarding fluent interfaces. I very much agree with them that this kind of method chaining allows to create very readable and intuitive interfaces. The million dollar question is when to actually use this kind of programming style. Of course there are no definitive answers but I suggest to consider the following points: Use your intuition, If you don't have all of the data - reconsider using them, It really has to read well in your language (e.g. English), preferably as a complete sentence, and make sure that the base error handling it forces you to use is enough for your purposes. And, of course, he's open to suggestions/comments on the subject, as well as any proposals for guidelines that might need to be set out there... Readmore...