Today I discovered a very powerful addition to the PHP world. Phar is an archive extension for PHP that allows an entire PHP application to be packaged into a single file. It’s basically PHP’s answer to Java’s .jar archive format. Don’t get excited yet, it gets better . . .

Today Max Horvath released the first public version of his new library PHPTypeSafe. It provides the ability to use PHPs Type Hinting feature for scalar values.

With websites becoming more and more dynamic and interactive, developers often look to frameworks to help build websites and web apps rapidly. While there are a number of great frameworks available, a custom framework gives you the ability to easily customize the framework as you need, and to build with it even quicker - as you would already know the ins and outs of it before working with it. In this series of tutorials, we are going to build our very own PHP5 Development Framework! Let's start

This quick tutorial will show you how to develop your own functional IM bot that works with Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live and all other popular instant messaging clients.

I recently had reason to write a REST server in PHP, which was very interesting. There aren't a whole lot of resources on this topic around so I thought I'd write an outline of what I did. There is quite a lot to it so I'm publishing in multiple sections - this is part 1, which covers the central functionality and handling the incoming request.

Creating a CodeIgniter application is easier than you might think. Take a guided tour through your first project: a simple Web page with a contact form. In under an hour, you will learn how to install CodeIgniter, configure it, and create a Web site consisting of a home page, a form that adds information to a database, and a thank-you page.

NetBeans 6.5 Beta was published almost 3 weeks ago. For me the beta is obsolete and if you try a recent build, you can notice that there was fixed many issues. In Issuezilla there are more then 1600 fixed issues during last three weeks. I would like to hihglight some improvements in PHP support:

I was never had a chance to speed up symfony project performance. I always knew there are a bunch of cache plugins but also always performance was enough good even without any type of caching. And now I had a chance to investigate this question.

There are literally thousands of content management systems available on the web. Many of them free, many of them not. Each boasting more compelling features than the next. In the disarray of all the competition I found a little content management system named simply FrogCMS. Features are great, interface is awesome, and simplicity is its middle name.

PHPulse is the FASTEST PHP based MVC framework in the world! It is built to be EXTREMELY lightweight and fast with a modular development environment allowing for quick plug-n-play functionality to be added merely by dropping in extra modules.

The PHPClasses site is launching an editor that allows designs to propose new site design themes. This is the initial beta version of the site design editor, but it already allows any designer to try different presentation designs.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where they believed the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks these dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then—for both developers and the application development managers who determine the corporate programming language strategy.

Here are some basic tips to optimize your website! Brought to you by Sticktacular Productions!

10 great online magazines for both developers and designers. These sites offer a ton of great information and resources to help a newbie and pro alike.

PHP 5.3.0 is only in its first alpha release. But, if you run PHP in Microsoft Windows, you should talk a look at…

You already know that Eclipse PDT provides autocompletion and hints for PHP's built in functions. In addition, commenting your code with PHPDoc adds autocompletion and hinting for your application's classes, methods, and variables. If you haven't already discovered, Eclipse PDT also provides autocompletion of PHP's control structures, class definitions, and methods through code templates.

Hey, I saw that the first part of this post (Basics of framework design) got a little bit attention I decided to continue that thought. Before you continue reading make sure you read the first part for easier understanding of this post. In order to use or even build a framework first we need to understand what type of architecture the framework was built upon. We need to understand the design behind it.

This is the fist time I have heard Rasmus Lerdorf speak and it was entertaining to say the least. Refreshing would another way to describe it, I enjoy hearing real opinions and not holding back — Rasmus doesn’t hold back.Just a short background, Rasmus Lerdorf is the creator of PHP and still continues as a core developer to the PHP project.

Read on to see how you can easily handle the DOM in PHP much like you can in JavaScript.

This is a review of the latest book from the author of Joomla about building content management systems.

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Interesting information about class loading performance

When testing code which uses the database, you would usually want to make sure the database stays pristine for each test - All tables should be empty, as any extra data could interfere with the tests. You could probably write an extended Testcase class which automatically does this before each test in setUp and afterwards in tearDown, but it may have some issues. For example, Zend Framework’s Zend_Test Testcase class also extends PHPUnit’s one, and you might need to extend the Zend_Test one as well… and so on. Luckily, PHPUnit has a way to add event listener that react to certain events.

Anyone who has worked with PHP knows that it is extremely permissive with variables and their types. There's no need to declare variables, not even at class level, and data types cannot really be enforced. This is one of the greatest strengths of weakly typed dynamic languages, but it can be easily used the wrong way.

I'll show you in this article how to setup the CMS Joomla on Glassfish. We won't need Apache for this one. There are few ways to do PHP on a J2EE server. I'll describe what I think the easiest way. First we will need to download and install PHP using PHP/JavaBridge.