PHP5 Magazine

DooPHP 1.1 Released, More Mature Features Inside

2009-08-24T22:38:19Z

DooPHP 1.1 have just been released with a more complete and mature list of features, in addition to performance improvements, again ! The benchmark comparison of v1.0 and v1.1 show a slightly high number of Requests Per Second (RPS) supported by v1.1 compared to 1.0, In addition to a new benchmark showing the new frontend cache mechanism performance with a database connection.

Noticeable New Features in v1.1 :

Access Control List(ACL) as built-in authentication support.
Data caching which supports APC, Memcache, XCache, EAccelerator & file based cache.
Sophisticated Frontend cache mechanism where both full page(single/recurvise) & partial page cache are supported.
Database replication (master-slave) support in the ORM tools
Better conventional modular directory structure support.
Auto loading of the framework classes.
IF statement and Cache tag support for template engine.
Enhanced model class generator. PostgreSQL supported.
Image manipulation helper for resize, crop, watermark, upload, etc.
Pager component for item list pagination.
Text helper class for string manipulation.
Url builder class to generates URLs based on route ID or controller & method names
Log/Profile viewer tool.
Sitemap Generator tool to generate routes and controller files.

Download latest DooPHP. New demos and tools are added in to help you get started with the Framework. There are already some mentions of DooPHP in our PHP Frameworks Trends, so if you are on twitter you can voice your opinion or share your experience with DooPHP.

P4A, PHP for Applications Framework

2009-08-19T08:15:13Z

P4A, PHP for Applications, is an interesting PHP5 RAD and object oriented PHP framework to build event-driven stateful web applications. P4A is based on Zend Framework 1.5 and using jQuery, jQuery UI, and FCKEditor to provides developers with a complete RAD solution that features tableless HTML, multiple databases, accesskey support, auto data type recognition, transparent AJAX, UTF-8, i18n/l10n.

P4A project started since February 2003 and was finalist in the SourceForge 2006 Community Choice Awards. The project is 100% written in PHP5 and is compatible with PHP 5.2.x, Apache 1.3.x/2.0.x and Microsoft IIS 6.0 web servers on Linux/Unix/Windows operating systems. One of the most useful feature is its widget system which is like the visual components found on desktop development tool such as, Delphi, Visual C, Netbeans, etc. Many widgets are available including single line or multiple lines text fields with advanced rich WYSIWYG text editing support, checkboxes, single/multiple selection fields, tables, buttons, tree navigators, toolbars, fieldsets etc...

P4A includes a nice and clean graphical theme that you can easily customize with color schemes, icons packs, additional CSS. If you use, like or suggest P4A Framework be sure to mention it (as p4a) in our PHP Frameworks Trends.

Tekuna, MVC Microframework for PHP

2009-08-15T07:26:37Z

We announced last month Limonade PHP microframework. Today here come Tekuna, an MVC Microframework for PHP. Tekuna is small, just 3000 source lines of code, it improves reusability with a component-oriented definition of the application and intuitive routing. Its small footprint will not pollute your codebase with unnecessary stuff.

Below a more detailed features list for Tekuna :

Component-oriented Definition of the Application
Intuitive Routing of Actions to Controllers
Friendly URLs (RESTful API)
MVC Architecture
PHP Error handling with Exceptions (and thus catchable)
Separate Request and Response Objects
Strict Input Filtering
Full UTF-8 Support
Support for multiple Template Engines
Simple Multilanguage Support
Fully Unit-tested
100% E_STRICT Compliant
Combinable with many other frameworks (Templating, ORM, Unit-testing...)
Geared to java programming and naming style
Open Source under an MIT License

Current Tekuna version os 0.1.189 requires PHP 5.2.1 with mod_rewrite enabled on your Apache webserver. A quick start is available to understand Tekuna principles, architecture and features. The project is at its early stage and not ready for production, but you might check the project's roadmap to have a better idea about what's coming next.

PHP Depend 0.9.6 Released

2009-08-03T06:07:10Z

Manuel Pichler announced today the availability of PHP Depend 0.9.6, the software metrics for PHP. The new release provides many bug fixes and improvements. Manuel started migrating PHP_Depend's internal system from plain Token object to an Abstract Syntax Tree and that's the main feature behind this release.

Charts Generated by PHP_Depend

PHP Depend is software analyzer and metric tool which aims to provide many useful information about a specified PHP project. The software rely on @package and @subpackage annotation in the code to generate a summary xml file, in addition to two SVG charts : a JDepend like chart and a pyramid visualization of the summary xml file. Based on these information you can measure the quality of a software project and identify parts of the code that should be refactored.

You can get the latest PHP_Depend version from its PEAR channel: pear.pdepend.org

$pear channel-discover pear.pdepend.org
$pear install pdepend/PHP_Depend-beta

DooPHP, the Fastest MVC based PHP Framework

2009-07-27T07:28:54Z

Here is a very new project that claims to be the fastest PHP Framework available. DooPHP is a rapid development framework for PHP using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM, reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

The project provides the essential to build robust web 2.0 application with a focus on seven major points : MVC, REST, URI routing, ORM, Template engine, ease of use and performance. To get highest performance DooPHP uses the lazy loading technique extensively and avoid slow PHP functions & methods. It has a small memory footprint as well. With DooPHP, you're good to go with your 10-million-hits-per-month web apps.

With DooPHP, nothing is loaded except what is needed to build the page; no extra function calls, no extra class includes and no extra overhead. Which makes it the fastest framework in existence. But don't take our word for it, benchmark DooPHP on your own to find out the truth.

According to their benchmarks and stress tests, DooPHP seems to perform better than CakePHP, QeePHP, CodeIgniter and Yii for making a simple echo. Tests have been done with and without caching, and of course you will get the highest performance with caching solutions such as APC, E-Accelerator, Zend Optimizer or XCache.

PHP CLI Framework, Create Robust Shell Scripts

2009-07-19T21:14:50Z

Who said that shell scripts doesn't need a framework ? PHP CLI Framework is a lightweight Framework that allows you to create extremely robust shell scripts within minutes. The framework written by Tj Holowaychuk of vision media, provides simple PHP5 interface for shell scripting. Unfortunately there is no documentation or sample code provided with the framework, the only program reportedly implementing the PHP CLI Framework is a tool called DRAN, which is the Drupal Analysis Tool and can be found at http://drupal.org/project/dran.

PHP CLI Framework Features include :

Debugging
Unified help documentation / option creation
STDIN and STDERR using CLI::prompt() and CLI::error()
List theme including bullet, numeric, and alpha list types
Table theme which calculates dimensions

vfsStream 0.4.0 released

2009-07-14T09:13:28Z

Frank Kleine released yesterday version 0.4.0 of vfsStream with new support for file modes, owners and groups; in addition to a bugfix for vfsStreamDirectory::addChild(). vfsStream is a stream wrapper for a virtual file system that may be helpful in unit tests to mock the real file system. It can be used with any unit test framework, like PHPUnit or SimpleTest. Frank pointed also to some issues related to vfsStream :

Major problem is that the PHP functions chmod(), chown() and chgrp() do not work with vfsStream URLs due to limitations imposed by PHP (or possibly by underlying C, not sure). The stream wrapper API has no support to enable setting file modes, owner or group of a userland stream implementation. This means the usage of file mode support is limited and can not be applied to create tests for classes using one of the three functions.

You can find examples for testing file modes here. To install vfsStream add pear.php-tools.net to your pear channels (pear channel-discover pear.php-tools.net) then you can install using pear install pat/vfsStream-alpha. More information available here.

Limonade, the PHP micro-framework

2009-07-11T18:02:20Z

Sometimes, maybe you notice it, some small projects are really big ! For example you can include only 19KB of jQuery in your webpage and get tons of extra functionnalities. Here is a very tiny project especially if you like a Lemon Juice, it's called Limonade and it's a PHP micro-Framework. The framework code is less than 70KB, and it is inspired by frameworks like Sinatra or Camping in Ruby, or Orbit in Lua. It aims to be simple, lightweight and extremly flexible.

Limonade usage is as simple as :

API Documentation is available here, you can find more sample usage on the project's website. Limonade inclue also a tiny debug tool in addition to a full tests package. Source code download available at github.

Build a secure login with Zend Framework

2009-07-04T09:17:24Z

Enrico Zimuel, Zend consultant in Italy, wrote an interesting article on how to create a secure login with Zend Framework. The sample application uses Zend_Form, Zend_Auth_Adapter_DbTable, Zend_Session, Zend_Config and Zend_Db_Table. The securiy aspect of this application are:

MD5 of the passwords stored into the database;
pseudo-random token generated into the form to prevent CSRF attacks;
timeout of the token validity to improve the security of the login system;
regeneration of the session ID to mitigate the possibility of session fixation attacks;
redirect to a 403 Forbidden page in presence of a CSRF attack;
filter of the user input with the Zend_Form to prevent SQL Injection attacks;

One of the unsecure point of this application is that the username and the password are submitted in plain text. Any attacker that is able to sniff the HTTP communication between client and server can capture these information. In order to build a real secure system i suggest to use the Secure Sockets Layer protocol (SSL), this is the only way to encrypt the communication between client and server.

Read Build a secure login with Zend Framework's article, source code available for download.

PHP 5.3.0 Released

2009-06-30T13:32:45Z

The PHP development team have just announced the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes. For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.0.

The key features of PHP 5.3.0 include:

Support for namespaces
Late static binding
Lambda Functions and Closures
Syntax additions: NOWDOC, ternary short cut "?:" and jump label (limited goto), __callStatic()
Under the hood performance improvements
Optional garbage collection for cyclic references
Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql
Improved Windows support including VC9 and experimental X64 binaries as well as portability to other supported platforms
More consistent float rounding
Deprecation notices are now handled via E_DEPRECATED (part of E_ALL) instead of the E_STRICT error level
Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)
New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant
Over 140 bug fixes and improvements to PHP, in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

This release also drops several extensions and unifies the usage of internal APIs. Users should be aware of the following known backwards compatibility breaks:

Parameter parsing API unification will cause some functions to behave more or less strict when it comes to type juggling
Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ext/msql, ext/pspell (see ext/enchant), ext/sybase (see ext/sybase_ct)
Moved the following extensions to PECL: ext/ming, ext/fbsql, ext/ncurses, ext/fdf
Removed zend.ze1_compatibility_mode

New SPL Features in PHP 5.3 Webcast Slides

2009-06-29T17:32:13Z

For those who missed the first CodeWorks 2009 webcast, like myself, Matthew Turland posted slides and source code of his presentation titled "New SPL Features in PHP 5.3". Matthew talked about containers and how SPL can help with scalability in your application, with very interesting benchmarks comparing Arrays to SPL methods.

You can read more about SPL here and here. There are more webcasts coming this summer to celebrate the CodeWorks 09 Conference, so be sure to not miss next ones !

Zend Framework 1.8.4 Maintenance Release

2009-06-24T08:51:15Z

The Zend Framework team have just released 1.8.4, the fourth maintenance release in the 1.8 series with over 50 bugfixes. There is also a new page now on the website about the framework roadmap and the upcoming 1.9.0 release.

Right now, we are only detailing the upcoming 1.9.0 release, but expect to see more listings in the future. Currently we are not setting dates for the releases as this is often difficult to predict due to the fact that the releases are largely dependent on contributor schedules -- and most contributors are, in the end, volunteering their time. We are, however, targetting 1.9.0 for late July of this year.

The roadmap include actually 11 new feature, but not final, new proposals might be accepted prior to the final release. Features planned so far :

Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Rest
Zend_Db_Table plugin support
Zend_Dojo: Build layer support
Zend_Feed_Reader
Zend_Form multipage action helper
Zend_Ldap
Zend_Log factory
Zend_Log_Writer_Syslog
Zend_Queue
Zend_Test_PHPUnit database support
Zend_View_Helper_BaseUrl

Download latest version from Zend Framework website. Released under New BSD License.

PHP 5.2.10 Released

2009-06-20T11:27:35Z

The PHP development team have just announced the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.10. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, one of which is security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.10:

* Fixed bug #48378 (exif_read_data() segfaults on certain corrupted .jpeg files). (Pierre)

Further details about the PHP 5.2.10 release can be found in the release announcement, and the full list of changes are available in the ChangeLog.

PHP 5.2.10RC2 and PHP 5.3.0RC3 Released

2009-06-14T12:30:07Z

The PHP Team have just announced the availability of two releases candidate PHP 5.2.10RC2 and PHP 5.3.0RC3.

These RCs focuses on bug fixes and stability improvements, and we hope only minimal changes are required for the next candidate or final stable releases.

PHP 5.2.10 is a pure maintenance release for providing bugfixes and stability updates. PHP 5.3.0 is a newly developed version of PHP featuring long-awaited features like namespaces, late static binding, closures, the famous GOTO and much more.

Please download and test these release candidates, and report any issues found. Downloads and further information is available at qa.php.net. See also the work in progress 5.3 upgrade guide.

Flourish, A Developer-Friendly PHP5 Library

2009-01-21T06:51:42Z

Flourish is an object-oriented PHP 5 library designed to reduce code and improve security. It�s not an MVC framework and it doesn�t try to solve every problem. Instead, it focuses on being small, portable, well documented and easy to use.

Flourish provides classes to simplify many common and repetitive tasks in PHP with class APIs that are simple and intuitive. It helps produce code that is easy to write, and more importantly, easy to read and maintain.

The project is very well documented, and to get started you need PHP 5.1+, it include an ORM for supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server, in addition for being built with internationalization and localization in mind. Flourish is available under the MIT license.