Ben Selby's Blog: DocBlox Plugin For Sublime Text 2

Ben Selby has released a Sublime Text 2 plugin for the popular PHP-based documentation generation project DocBlox.

It seems that the editor of the moment is Sublime Text 2 and sadly I have to tip my hat to Gary Rockett for showing it off to me one day.. Since that day, I've been a 100% convert. [...] So, I decided to peak into the PHPUnit [plugin from Stuart Herbert] to see if I could create a DocBlox Plugin. It turns out you have to write Plugins in Python, which is interesting, since I know very little python. There seemed to be enough code there to get me going, so I now have a working DocBlox Plugin.

The result is a plugin that, once installed gives you a new context menu option to "Generate documentation" for the selected file. The console shows the progress of the build. You can get the plugin from Package Control or by grabbing it from github directly.

PHPClasses.org: Another Serious Security Bug on PHP 5.3.9

On the PHPClasses.org blog there's a new post detailing an issue that came up in the PHP 5.3.9 release that caused a large security issue (PHP 5.3.10 has, however, already been released to correct the issue).

PHP 5.3.9 release was mostly meant to fix a security bug, but it introduced a new more serious bug. PHP 5.3.10 was just released to fix this issue. [...] This time it is a bug that allows arbitrary remote code execution. This means that it allows to run arbitrary code on the server, injected by an eventual attacker, so it can be used to cause many types of damage inside a server.

The upgrade to PHP 5.3.10 is highly recommended to prevent this issue from effecting your applications. The post also mentions the dropping of Suhosin support (a security plugin for PHP) on the Debian linux distribution's default installation and how the PHP community has reacted to the decision.

PHPMaster.com: Tracking Upload Progress with PHP and JavaScript

In a new tutorial today from PHPMaster.com, they show you how to combine Javascript and a PHP feature to track the progress of an upload to your web application.

A problem that has plagued web developers for years is how to add real-time information to their applications, such as a progress bar for file uploads. [...] JavaScript can access a file's name, type, and even the width and height of a local image, but it wasn't until HTML5 that it could access a file's size. [...] In this article I'll show you how [the session.upload_progress] feature can be used to create a simple upload progress bar without any external libraries or browser dependencies.

The tutorial provides all the steps you'll need to get it working - defining the form with the extra required field, styling it and plugging the Javascript in to call a small script to get the progress of the upload. It returns the difference between the content-length of the file and the current size (as a percentage of 100).

/Dev/Hell Podcast: Episode 5 - The Hammer That Is PHP

The /dev/hell podcast has released their latest episode with special guest Brian Moon (of dealnews).

In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon, ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. [...] In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some major changes and approaches they used in the code base for the site.

Other technologies discussed include Gearman, Node.js, Squid and Varnish. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

Mayflower Blog: Zend Framework Application.ini Cheat Sheet

On the Mayflower blog today there's a new post sharing a Zend Framework application.ini "cheat sheet" with links to pages in the ZF manual explaining the details about each of the front controller options.

All this is long gone in the past since the introduction of Zend_Application and the bootstrapping resource adapters. Zend introduced a standard bootstrapping mechanism into their framework. Many of the options from different framework components can now be configured in the applications configuration file application.ini. One problem persists although: the documentation. All the parameters for components like View, Session, Database etc. are documented either with the bootstrap resource, the component itself or both.

They've posted it to github complete with sections detailing:

• CacheManager
• Db
• FrontController
• Layout
• Navigation
• Router
• Translate

...and quite a few more. This is a great reference for anyone using the Zend Framework, no matter your experience level.

Stuart Herbert's Blog: PHPUnit Plugin For Sublime Text 2

Stuart Herbert has officially released a plugin for the popular text editor Sublime Text 2 to integrate PHPUnit support directly into the editing environment.

Sublime Text 2 is a new cross-platform text editor that I've recently switched to. It's still in public beta, but already offers better performance (and battery life!) and a better look (fonts that render properly!) than Java-based IDEs such as Netbeans. One thing it didn't have was support for PHPUnit, so I've made a plugin. It's available to install via Package Control.

The plugin allows you to directly create tests for a class using a context menu's "Test This Class" option. You can also run the tests directly from the editor and use either the menu or direct text commands to control it. He's also gathering some other well-used PHP snippets into another related plugin, the Additional PHP Snippets plugin.

Joshua Thijssen's Blog: Setting up a development environment

In a new post to his blog Joshua Thijssen gives a guide to how he usually sets up his development environments when working in PHP. It includes working with virtual machines, configuring DNS and setting up his tools to work with it all.

Doing development on multiple projects can be a burden from time to time. One project would be running on PHP 5.3, while another still needs 5.1. Sometimes you need a MySQL server, while on other occasions, you need a NoSQL solution like couchDB or MongoDB together with all kind of gearman functionality. This article shows you how I've setup such a development platform that allows you to quickly create new projects, and still maintain flexibility when you need it.

He uses VirtualBox with either a Debian or CentOS installation as a base platform. He uses Vagrant to set up and configure the machines to make setup almost automatic. He still has to go in and configure a few things like the VirtualHost and DNS settings for the site/application he's working on. Next up is setting up the tools he uses, specifically XDebug and setting up his editor of choice (PHPStorm) for remote debugging.

7php.com: PHP Interview With Ivo Jansch Founder & CEO of Mobile Technology Egeniq

7php.com has posted a new interview with a PHP community member today - this time it's Ivo Jansch (formerly of Ibuildings) now CEO at Eginiq, a mobile development company.

In this edition I talked with Ivo Jansch (@ijansch) ex-CTO of Ibuildings which is one of the biggest PHP service companies in Europe. Ivo is known for his involvement in evangelising the use of PHP technology in enterprise environments. He is also the PHP 5.x Certification Advisory Board Member at Zend Technologies. You can read more about Jansch on his blog.

The questions asked include the usual with a few extras thrown in:

• How did you start with PHP?
• To someone who wants to become a better PHP developer, what is your advice?
• How do you debug your PHP code, do you use something like xdebug or krumo..etc?
• In the next 5 years, how do you foresee the PHP ecosystem
• If you had to go back in time, would you still choose PHP?

Community News: Latest PEAR Releases for 02.06.2012

Latest PEAR Releases:

• Services_Mailman 0.1.0

Etsy Code as Craft: Rasmus Lerdorf - PHP in 2012

In case you weren't able to make it (or missed the live stream) Rasmus Lerdorf gave a presentation last night at Etsy as a part of their "Code as Craft" series. They recorded the session and you can watch it here.

He talks about a few things:

• the history of the PHP language
• the state of PHP currently
• what's coming up in 2012
• and touches some on the upcoming PHP 5.4 features.

You can find more about their "Code as Craft" series (and other videos) on the Etsy page.