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On the Zend Developer Zone today Ralph Schindler has posted the results of the latest Zend Framework Bug Hunt Days (for July 2010).

Zend Framework has recently wrapped up it's July 2010 Bug Hunt with some fantastic results. Collectively, we closed 50 issues in 3 days. That's nearly twice what we have seen in recent months- a trend we hope continues into the coming months!

Top bug hunters this month were Dolf Schimmel and Ramon Henrique Ornelas tying with 14 bugs each with Michelangelo van Dam coming in third.

The fixes in this bug hunt that have been merged into the 1.10 release branch will see the light of day in our next scheduled mini release 1.10.7 during the week of July 26th.

In a new post to his blog John Hamelink lists top CodeIgniter libraries he couldn't live without in his framework development.

CodeIgniter is a great framework. I use it exclusively because of it's flexibility and relative 'lightness' but what use is a framework without libraries to extend its usefulness? (well, not much use, naturally.) Here is my personal list of CodeIgniter libraries I would struggle to live without.

His list includes:

• QuickAuth
• R&OS PDF Class
• Curl library
• Paypal Lib

On the I Am Learning PHP blog today there's a new post asking if web scripting languages really need object-oriented functionality or not:

The object-oriented revolution has not been without controversy. [...] Still, there's no doubt that the revolution has largely succeeded. Most of the popular programming languages in use today are either fully object-oriented or have object-oriented extensions. [...] We feel that the benefits of OOP for 'major' (that is, compiled) programming languages like Java and C++ are clear. On the other hand, we feel that the benefits of OOP for scripting languages (like Perl and PHP) are less obvious and are most debatable in the case of Web-scripting (PHP).

They go one to explain some of their reasoning including the differences between scripting languages and others and how OOP has been implemented on the scripting side. They point out some good things about OOP in PHP but still think it's "tradeoffy" for some of the problems with it.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today they've released the latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast - .

On this episode of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert comment on the launch of the PHP for Android project and the consequences for the PHP market. They also talk about the cancellation of PHP 6 and the inclusion of features planned for PHP 6 in PHP 5.4, like the integration of the APC cache extension in the main PHP distribution bundle.

You can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get the latest.

In a new post to his blog Sebastian Bergmann talks about some updates to PHPUnit that are coming in the 3.5 release.

When you look at the list of changes for PHPUnit 3.5, you will see that many of them deal with refactoring to components. Here is an overview of these new components.

Components that were refactored to work even better include:

• PHP_CodeCoverage
• DbUnit
• PHPUnit_Selenium
• PUPUnit_MockObject

If you're going to be in the New York area tomorrow (July 27th) and want to get in on the latest in PHP 5.3, the New York PHP User Group is having their monthly meeting for July featuring Hans Zaunere and Nate Abele talking about all that PHP 5.3 has to offer.

What do you get when you mix namespaces, late static binding and closures? PHP 5.3 and NYPHP's July meeting, of course. Lithium co-founder Nate Abele and NYPHP Managing Member Hans Zaunere will start by giving an overview of these key concepts, followed by a review of how they're being utilized in the real-world, and finishing with an open Q&A discussion of these new hotter-than-July language features.

The meeting will start at 6:30pm tomorrow (July 27th) at the IBM offices on Madison Ave. You'll need to RSVP if you're going to attend. The meeting will be followed by a post-meeting event at TGI Fridays at Lexington and 5th. For full details on the meeting, check out http://www.nyphp.org/PHP-Presentations/175_PHP-53-Feature-Review-Discussion">this page on the NYPHP site.

Rob Allen has a new post to his blog today about the update he's made to his Zend_Auth tutorial, introducing the authentication component of the Zend Framework.

After too many months of neglect, I have completely rewritten my Zend_Auth tutorial so that it is compatible with Zend Framework 1.10! As an experiment, I have written it directly in HTML, rather than PDF as before and cover the login form along with the login controller code required to authenticate a user using a database table. For good measure, I've included logging out and a view helper to show how to access the logged in user's details.

The tutorial walks you through the creation of a users table, an auth controller/form and the code needed to validate the user against in information in the table (as well as how to log them out). You can also download the code as a zip file.

In a quick new post to his blog today Kevin Schroeder shows you how to debug an RPC call in your Zend Framework application.

Just a quickie. Do you ever want to debug an RPC call to XML-RPC or Soap or something like that using Zend Studio/PDT and the Zend Debugger? What I mean is debug the RPC call, not the request making the RPC call. Doing that is actually quite simple. I have some code here to share that I recently (as in 5 minutes ago, used).

His code snippet shows an "if" conditional that sets values on a set of cookies that the Zend Debugger will pick up on and start the debugging process (with settings like start_debug, debug_coverage and debug_start_session. He also explains the four you really need to know about in a bit more detail.

Latest PEAR Releases:

• HTTP_OAuth 0.1.18
• Net_Whois 1.0.4

Job postings for the past week:

• Job Posting: HypedSound Seeks Co-Founder/Lead Developer (Virtual, NYC)

On JoomlaBlogger.net there's a recent post that wants to help you understand the Joomla templating system in "five easy steps".

There are very few tutorials on how to build templates. There are two books and a handful of other resources scattered around the web. So, we set out to build the very best template class we could. Here are first five sessions of the class: Joomla templates are not rocket science. You can learn how to build and modify them. We can show you how. Interested?

They break it up into the basic parts:

• Template setup and templateDetails.xml
• Index.php
• CSS/Cascading Style Sheets
• Images
• Security

On his blog today Brian Swan talks about the Azure command line tools for PHP that are now a part of the Windows Platform Installer (WebPI).

The Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP are now available in the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI). This announcement was made on the Interoperability Team blog as part of a post that outlines interoperability elements of a cloud platform. The entire post deserves a close read, but I'm initially most excited about this small piece of the announcement.

This small piece talks about this latest tool release that can be installed directly from the WebPI installer under the Developer Tools section of the interface. You'll still need the Azure SDK to use the tools, but if you don't have it the WebPI installer will download and set it up for you. You can find more info about them here.

In a recent post to his blog Paul Reinheimer talks about a service (from WonderProxy) called Where's it Up? - a tool that can be used to see where in the world a site is up. He also outlines the technology behind it all.

The tool accepts a URL, and allows you to select global locations. It then attempts to connect to the given server and issue a HEAD request from the global locations you selected, and reports the results. [...] Building a reasonably robust application was trivial, thanks to being able to leverage the great technology built by others.

Tools that make up the application's stack include a Gearman server, curl, PHP with the pecl_http extension, memcached and supervisord. He details how they all fit together and why they built it in the first place.

On NETTUTS.com today there's a tutorial (a screencast) that'll show you how to create excerpts for the posts in your blog. Their method could be applied to just about any PHP-based blog software out there since it uses base PHP functions and MySQL features.

Ever visited a blog, and noticed that each posting's overview only contained a hundred characters or so, which is then followed by '

The main PHP.net site has the release announcement for the two latest versions of the language - PHP 5.3.3 and PHP 5.2.14.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.3. This release focuses on improving the stability and security of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. [...] The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.14. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

The announcements list some of the major security enhancements and fixes in both new versions as well as a few new features like updates to the PCRE libraries and more.

Note: this PHP 5.2.14 release marks the end of active support for the PHP 5.2.x branch. It is encouraged that you upgrade to PHP 5.3 by following the steps in this migration guide.

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

• Security Musings: PHP: Please Hack Pal.
• CatsWhoCode.com: 10 life-saving PHP snippets
• Andrew Nacin's Blog: On PHP
• Stefan Koopmanschap's Blog: My privates are not public, they are protected
• Marco Tabini's Blog: WordPress, the GPL and cherries on top
• Jfoobar Blog: Profilers, profiles and profiling
• Ivo Jansch's Blog: Good use of public, private and protected in OO class design
• PHPBuilder.com: 10 Easy Examples for Deciphering PHP Regular Expressions
• ZendCasts.com: Working with ZendX_JQuery
• PHPSnippets.info: Convert currencies using PHP, Google and cURL

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new post about the PHP track at this year's Dallas TechFest (happening July 30th).

On July 30th in DFW, take part in the Dallas TechFest! It is a one day technical conference and we're happy to say that we have a good PHP track. Let's blow out the attendance. It's on a Friday so you won't be getting anything done anyway.

You can find the full list of speakers (cross-language and platform talks!) on the TechFest site. PHP-related topics include using the Zend Framework, scalable applications and application deployment.

On the Symfony blog today there's a quick case study posted by Stefan Koopmanschap about a role that the Symfony framework is playing in a health education company.

Enovation was engaged by one of his long term clients in the Health education sector to aid and enable them in designing a solution for the management of curricular activities. The college had an immediate requirement to replace an existing expensive, commercial online database, with a bespoke system which could better manage their curriculum and student rotations within training hospitals. The project was quite large, and the clock was ticking; it was time to learn a new framework, and fast! The post talks about what the needs of the project were fast development, the ability to perform the usual CRUD on multiple tables and an app that would be secure. The Admin Generator made most of these requests simple - as easy as running a few commands.

On the php|architect blog today there's a new post about a tool that helps you create Word documents directly from your PHP application - PHPDOCX.

PHPDOCX is a PHP library that allows its client code to generate Microsoft Word documents in the .docx format from PHP scripts. PHP is increasingly being used for disparate goals and has to deal with data that comes from strange sources and has to be produced in stranger formats. [...] Starting with the 1.5 version, which has been released on July 12th, PHPDOCX is now compatible with PHP 5.3. The adoption of PHP 5.3 from operating systems is growing and it will at last replace the previous versions of PHP also in the servers of hosting providers.

He mentions some of the features it includes (like the library and automatic insertion of things like headers and footers) as well as two requirements for the tool to work - the zip and xsl extensions.

Brian Swan has a quick new post today about using the pagination feature in the latest version of the SQL Server driver for PHP.

So, with the final release of the 2.0 version of the driver coming soon, I thought it was high time I posted something about using the functionality that was added in the v1.1 driver (better late then never!). While I'm at it, I'll include code that shows how to do paging with the PDO driver. (Complete scripts attached to this post.)

He gives a basic example of paginated data that lets you move back and forth with simple text links on the page. The key is in the row_number function that lets you specify the block of records to return. Code is included for this and a few other modifications including numeric links to jump to certain pages in the results. All scripts are included as a download.