German PHP 5 Cookbook

Book published by O’Reilly – written by David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg, Stephan Schmidt, Ulrich Speidel, Carsten Lucke and Matthias Brusdeylins

The German PHP 5 cookbook in a new and completely revised 3rd edition with information on the new PHP 5.3. Collected knowledge of American and German PHP experts. It contains hundreds of well-approved “recipes” including explanations of the new PHP features.

Matthias Brusdeylins and I wrote the 3rd edition of the German PHP 5 Cookbook. This is a completely revised version of the 2nd edition written by Stephan Schmidt and Ulrich Speidel. We updated all contents in regard to the new PHP version (5.3) and added several interesting and helpful recipes utilizing the new features of PHP 5.3.

Description. The PHP 5 Cookbook provides solutions to a lot of tricky problems which often allow an easier solution to a problem than you had imagined. This new version addresses the changes and features addresses in the new PHP 5.3 like the introduction of namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures, the PHAR extension and the updated Standard PHP Library (SPL) to name only a few. The whole book provides more than 350 recipes on topics like:

• basic datatypes like strings, numbers, dates and arrays
• variables, functions, classes and objects
• iterators, streams, wrapper, filter and exceptions
• web-programming including forms and database access
• XML and webservices
• regular expressions, encryption and security, graphics, internationalization and localization
• files and directories
• PEAR and PHAR

Language. German

Pages. 879

Links:

• Official O’Reilly book website
• Personal website of Matthias Brusdeylins
• Link to Amazon.de

German PHP Magazine - issue 6.08

Published in PHP Magazin 6.08 by Carsten Lucke

The adoption of caching techniques allows to increase an applications performance significantly. Especially complex and time consuming operations can benefit from using a cache.

Description. My latest article titled “Daten auf Vorrat” has been published in the 6.08 issue of the German PHP Magazine. It gives an introduction to the caching library Zend_Cache that comes with the Zend Framework. Topics covered are:

• Basic knowledge about caching
• Introduction the Zend_Cache components basic API
• Introduction to Zend_Cache backends and frontend, what these are and which are available

Language. German

Characters. 22743

Links:

• German PHP Magazin website
• Zend Framework website
• Read the online version of this article

German PHP Magazine - Issue 5.08

Published in PHP Magazin 5.08 by Carsten Lucke

Programming desktop applications in PHP? Yes, that’s possible. Usually the PHP-GTK extension to accomplish this task. GTK is available for a lot of operating systems and thus quite portable. However, GTK applications often have a different look that distinguishes them from native applications. For Mac OS X the PHP/Objective-C bridge allows the creating of applications in the usual OS X look and feel. This article explains how to use the bridge.

Description. My new article with the title “Brückenschlag” has been published in issue 5.08 of the German PHP Magazine. It provides an introduction to the new PHP/Objective-C bridge extension developed by Wez Furlong. The bridge enables you to write Mac OS X applications using PHP as programming language.

Language. German

Characters. 21443

Links:

• German PHP Magazin website
• Blog entry by Wez Furlong introducing the PHP/Objective-C bridge

PHP Solutions Magazine - May 2008 issue

Published in PHP Solutions magazine by Matthias Brusdeylins and Carsten Lucke

After an extensive beta-test Zend went public early this year with the final version of Zend Studio for Eclipse (ZSfE). The most important functions – besides the IDE being based on the Eclipse platform – are code generation abilities, refactoring, debugging and profiling and unit-testing support. Zend calls it the most powerful PHP IDE available on the market. This article discovers the new IDE and evaluated the pros and cons.

Description. This article gives an experience report about the new Zend Studio IDE. It presents an overview about the new features. The most important topics covered are:

• The brilliant Integration of the PHP debugger into the ZSfE
• The profiling abilities
• PHP-Unit-Testing
• The new PHP code formatting and generation features

Language. German

Characters. 31377

Links:

• phpsolutions magazine website
• Zend Studio website

T3N Magazine #11 - Cover Photo

Published in T3N Magazin #11 by Carsten Lucke

Zend describes themselves as “The PHP company”. For a while now, they offer the Zend Framework – a PHP application framework – and call it “the leading open-source PHP framework”. The hype around this framework has increased significantly since it was published for the first time. This article gives an introduction to the framework and its basic principles.

Description. I wrote an introductory article on the Zend Framework for the german t3n-Magazin. It is published in issue #11 and covers all the stuff you should know, to get started with the Zend Framework:

• Basic knowledge about the request processing lifecycle
• Basic knowledge about the Controller/Action pattern applied in the Zend Framework
• Introduction the the MVC-Conponents
• Introduction to renderers, helpers, etc.

Language. German

Characters. 21500

Links:

• T3N Magazin website
• Zend Framework website
• Online version of the article

Building went well as usual but when I tried to integrate the extension inside php.ini it was all weird. When loading it with

zend_extension=xdebug.so

the error log told me:

Failed loading xdebug.so: xdebug.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

The extension_dir has been properly configured in php.ini and I also have the xdebug.so file in the right place. When loading Xdebug as a normal extension everything went entirely well:

extension=xdebug.so

But I need to enable it as Zend extension. Whatever. I finally used the full path to xdebug.so to load it:

zend_extension=/path/to/extension_dir/xdebug.so

That worked. But do I have to give a full path here?

Approx. one year ago I tried to get a remote-debugging environment using PHPEclipse together with DBG. That was a PITA to set up and once it worked it was just awfully unstable. I figured out that the PHPEclipse people were developing a plugin to use XDebug but there didn’t seem to be much progress. So I stopped my efforts on free remote-debugging. Some weeks ago XDebug2 was released and I decided to give the remote-debugging thing one more shot. I tried PDT + XDebug2 and guess what – it worked out fine!

First of all you need a PHP installation with XDebug2. If you don’t have it installed yet (shame on you ), you can find instructions here. Your next step should be getting PDT. I tried the latest integration build. Additionally you need some plugins for XDebug-support that are only available from the PDT bugzilla:

• Prebuilt Binary of XDebug Support for V0.2.3 for PDT 1.0 I20070712
• Example Mapper V0.0.2 for XDebug 0.2.3

Once you have all that installed you can create a PHP-project in your PDT-eclipse and configure the environment (XDebug2 and PDT) for debugging. Daniel Holmström published a really good guide on how to install and set up everything in detail. If you follow his instructions you should have everything up and running within half an hour. After that you will be able to enjoy local- and remote-debugging of your PHP-scripts.

The new release contains a bugfix for bug #10220. The Date_Holidays::factory method called the setlocale() function in a way that very possibly may have broken the localization of applications using the package.

Additionally there were three new drivers/filters added for calculation of holidays for:

• Austria (driver provided by Klemens Ullmann <klemens -at- ull -dot- at>),
• England/Wales (driver provided by Tim Dodge <timmy -at- invisibles -dot- org>) and
• Ireland (driver and filter for calculation of official holidays provided by Ken Guest <ken -at- linux -dot- ie>).

Thanks to all contributors and bug reporters! If you experience any problems with this release do not hesitate to contact me or to submit a bug-report.

In the quickstart-section the ZF manual suggests the following configuration for Apache’smod_rewrite.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css)$ index.php

This rewrite-rule is pretty simple. You forward every non-resource request (everything but scripts, stylesheets, etc.) to the ZF front-controller. If you wanted to prevent requests to for instance PDF files from being routed to the front-controller script you could add the “pdf” extension to the list. The more exceptions from the rule the more tedious this is. Therefore I suggested another configuration for the rewrite-rules in my talk (see the image):

Zend Framework directory layout

The configuration shown in the image activates the rewrite-engine for the root-directory of the project and forwards every request to the front-controller (index.php). Directories containing libraries or application sources are defined to be inaccessible by the browser (deny from all). Only for the public-directory that contains resources (images, stylesheets, etc.) the rewrite-engine is disabled to allow access by the browser.

Both recommendations have one major drawback: All requests are routed to the front-controller script. It is not easily possible to put a directory (containing php-files or whatever) into the root-directory and allow access from the browser. You would always have to disable the rewrite-engine first. One attendee of my Zend Framework talk gave me a hint that mod_rewrite allows to test whether a file or directory exists. Thus it would be possible to route only requests for non-existent files/directories to the front-controller. A possible rewrite-configuration could look like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php

A little too late I noticed that the ZF manual even describes that kind of configuration in the RewriteRouter section. IMHO they hid that one really good. I think it would have been more helpful if they had already mentioned it in the quickstart section. I suggest you use the preceding configuration for the root-directory of your ZF project and deny access for all other directories no web-browser must see (application source-files, libraries, etc.). You won’t need .htaccess files for public directories as they aren’t affected by the rewrite-rule for the front-controller any longer.

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5. PRADO stands for PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented. (pradosoft.com)

Abstract. PRADO support a event-driven, component-based paradigm to develop PHP web-applications. Do you still read request data “by hand” or do you already use advanced data- and action-binding mechanisms? Who takes care tracking application state in your web-applications? The PRADO framework supports you in developing highly reusable web-applications and allows you to stay on top of things even in complex situations.

Links:

• Download slides as PDF
• Internation PHP Conference 2007 – Spring Edition website
• PRADO Framework website

Abstract. The Zend Framework is quite the new star in the arena of PHP application frameworks. Is it a framework after all? Or is it more of a code component library? Does it even matter? Probably not, because what’s important is, how it supports a software developer in his every day work. This talk, I gave at the International PHP Conference 2007 Spring Edition in Ludwigsburg, Germany gave an introduction to the framework and its components.

Links:

• Download slides as PDF
• Internation PHP Conference 2007 – Spring Edition website
• Zend Framework website

PHP-Magazin 4.07 - PHP und TextMate

It’s been a while since my last article but finally I had some time and managed to write for the german PHP-Magazin, again. To my surprise my article was even chosen as cover-topic. Yippieh! I wrote about PHP- and web-development on Mac OS X using TextMate.

Published in PHP Magazin 4.07 by Carsten Lucke

TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike. (macromates.com)

Description. TextMate is a very popular editor these days and not without reason! I used the first part of the article to introduce the reader to the command-line abilities and the main editing features. The second part covers the bundle-concept. Here I introduced the PHP-bundle and explained how to use TextMate as a powerful PHP-editor.

If you are a subscriber of the PHP-Magazin go out and look at your mailbox! My issue arrived today. If you aren’t you will have to wait until May 16th, till the magazin hits the shelves.

Language. German

Characters. 25734

Links:

• German PHP Magazine website
• Official TextMate website

• I’m not a student anymore but have a full-time job, so I do a lot less private or freelance projects, where I used to utilize these classes/libraries
• spare-time is rare and I mostly use it to write articles, poke around with interesting new stuff and sometimes also to relax

From now on I will use this blog to write about my projects and my personal website to keep track of them.

If anyone of you frequently uses one of the mentioned projects and wants to maintain it in the future, please get in contact with me.

PHP Programming with PEAR

Packt Publishings PEAR book (PHP Programming with PEAR) has finally been published.

PEAR is the PHP Extension and Application Repository, and is a framework and distribution system for reusable, high-quality PHP components, available in the form of “packages”.

I co-authored this book together with my very good friend Stephan Schmidt, and Stoyan Stefanov and Aaron Wormus.

In this book, you will learn how to use a number of the most powerful PEAR packages available to boost your PHP development productivity. By focusing on these packages for key development activities, this book is an in-depth guide to getting the most from these powerful coding resources.

You will become a master of various PEAR packages that help you with the essential tasks of PHP development such as:

• Accessing databases with MDB2
• Displaying data in a range of formats (HTML, Excel spreadsheet, PDF)
• Creating and parsing XML documents
• Serializing PHP objects into XML, and unserializing XML documents to PHP objects
• Consuming and offering web services
• Accessing Web APIs including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Technorati

Links:

• Book website at Packt Publishing

German PHP Magazine - Issue 1.06

Published in PHP Magazin 1.06 by Carsten Lucke

PHP is fast! But can you make it faster? How? This article-series tries to answer this questions and shows you how to develop your own PHP extensions written in the language C.

Description. This is the fourth and final article in the series “PHP extensions im Eigenbau”. The main part introduces the reader into developing PHP extensions using Visual Studio under Microsoft Windows. It shows how to compile PHP from the sources and gives alternatives to “configure” and “make” that make building PHP so easy with Linux.

Language. German

Characters. 16000

Links:

• German PHP Magazine website
• Part 3 of this article series
• Part 2 of this article series
• Part 1 of this article series

German PHP Magazine - Issue 6.05

Published in PHP Magazin 6.05 by Carsten Lucke

PHP is fast! But can you make it faster? How? This article-series tries to answer this questions and shows you how to develop your own PHP extensions written in the language C.

Description. This third article in the “PHP erweitert” series covers how to use resources and gives the reader an introduction into devolping object oriented PHP5 extensions.

Language. German

Characters. >25000

Links:

• German PHP Magazine website
• Part 2 of this article series
• Part 1 of this article series

German PHP Magazine - Issue 5.05

Published in PHP Magazin 5.05 by Carsten Lucke

PHP is fast! But can you make it faster? How? This article-series tries to answer this questions and shows you how to develop your own PHP extensions written in the language C.

Description. This is the second article in the “PHP erweitert” series. It covers the common techniques every extension developer should be familiar with. Thus you get information about useful macros and functions, more complex PHP data types, constants, globals as well as the streams API.

Language. German

Characters. >25000

Links:

• German PHP Magazine website
• Part 1 of this article series

German PHP Magazine - Issue 4.05

Published in PHP Magazin 4.05 by Carsten Lucke and Stephan Schmidt

PHP is fast! But can you make it faster? How? This article-series tries to answer this questions and shows you how to develop your own PHP extensions written in the language C.

Description. PHP is fast! But can you make it faster? How? This article-series tries to answer this questions. The first part briefly introduces the reader to the internals of PHP and the basics of php-extension programming.

Language. German

Characters. >25000

Links:

• German PHP Magazine website

International PHP Magazine - Issue 3.05

Published in International PHP Magazine 3.05 by Carsten Lucke

Holidays or other special days are an important part of almost every calendar. Some of those days are easy to calculate but if the recurrence-rules are more complex and based on advanced algorithms the whole thing can get quite complicated very fast. The article covers the Date_Holidays package that is available in PEAR and shows you how to make the programmer’s life much easier.

Language. English

Characters. 19931

Description. This article introduces the secrets of PEAR::Date_Holidays, and shows how to use the package to calculate holidays, and search for them by date. The article will also set you on the path writing your own holiday calculation routines and providing multi-language support for them.

Links:

• International PHP Magazine website

German PHP Magazine - Issue 2.05

Published in PHP Magazin 2.05 by Carsten Lucke and Stephan Schmidt

Online music-stores like Musicload are currently pretty much of public interest. To show information about songs in MP3-format not even any kind of database is needed but all necessary information is stored inside the file itself. This article shows how to get access to this data using PHP. Go, start your own music catalog…

Language. German

Characters. 16614

Description. The article introduces the basic principles of id3-tags commonly used in MP3-files. At the time of press there are two alternatives available that allow reading and manipulating id3-tags using PHP. The reader gets adopted into both, PEAR::MP3_Id and ext/id3. Several examples show all the things that are possible and explain when to use which class/extension.

Links:

• German PHP Magazine website
• Online version of this article

German PHP Magazine cover photo - issue 6.04

Published in PHP Magazin 6.04 by Carsten Lucke

The new PHP5 comes with some interesting changes concerning the command-line interface (CLI). It allows the user to process input-data from the standard input stream (stdin) line by line. In many cases this allows fast and efficient processing of data that comes from files or program outputs.

Language. German

Characters. 11585

Description. This article discusses which new features of the command-line interface come with PHP5 and how they can be used. Additionally some interesting classes for CLI-programming within the PHP Extension and Application Repository are introduced to thr reader.

Links:

• German PHP Magazine website