The ThinkPHP blog has information posted today about a new workshop offered by IBM that talks about the combination of PHP5 and IBM's DB2 software.

The Workshop will prepare you for developing web applications with PHP5 and the DB2 software. The workshop will focus on PDO and ibm_db2, and will present new ideas on how to fully utilize the ibm_db2 extension. The workshop is finished off with the construction of a real-life PHP apllication where ibm_db2 is used.

The event will be at the end of May (the 30th and 31st) and will be happening in Dusseldorf. The cost starts at 950 EUR and you can sign up on the IBM Training site.

Handling date and time information in PHP can sometimes get a little tricky. Toss MySQL into the mix and any beginning programmer out there might get a bit lost. Well, that's why there's tutorials, and if this is your situation, PHPit.net has posted just what you need.

Whenever you create a PHP script, there's a big chance it'll involve handling dates and times, when for example you need to create a content management system or an event tracker. Handling dates and times in your scripts doesn't sound so hard, after all, it's just a few numbers to track, but in reality this is actually much harder than you think. In fact, using dates and times can be one of the most challenging tasks to do, especially if you want to do it properly.

That's why in this article I'm going to take you through the necessary steps to properly handle dates and times. First we'll have a look at the problem, and after that we'll go through the steps necessary to solve it.

They walk you through a sample of using a GMT timestamp, how to store the timestamps in the MySQL database, and a wrap-up that includes a class with the date/time handling code they've built up in the course of the article.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted a tutorial covering the generation of 3D Images inside PHP - with the help of the Image_3D PEAR package, of course.

PHP, a language originally intended for Web development, has been used for years to manage dynamic Web sites and database applications. Extensions to the language available through the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) have allowed developers to take the language in new and interesting directions.

PEAR's Image_3D package is an object-oriented interface for creating three-dimensional (3-D) graphics in a variety of formats, including PNG and SVG, two image formats with increasing support by modern Web browsers. Find out how to use the Image_3D package, learn the limitations of using dynamic 3-D images, and investigate solutions and practical applications of 3-D graphics.

You'll have to log in to get at the actual tutorial, but it's full of good info and code to get you started. You'll need a bit of knowledge of object-oriented programming to really get a handle on it, and a shell prompt (Windows or Linux) will be needed to run some of the examples.

Wez Furlong, a popular speaker at PHP conferences on the topic of PDO, has posted some information about two upcoming conferences he'll be speaking at.

I'll be giving my "usual" PDO talk at both MySQL Users Conference 2006 and OSCON 2006 (the MySQLUC version of the talk will have a MySQL focus).

If you're interested in PDO and haven't had the opportunity to see me give this talk yet, please consider trying to get to one of these conferences. My talk covers the design decisions behind PDO, suggests some best practices for using it, highlights portability concerns (particularly because PHP programmers have been "dummied down" by the older mysql client library API) and more.

Wez is a very active member of the PHP community and has has been a large promoter (and coder) for the PDO project.

There's always lots of happenings each week in the PHP community, and sometimes a weekly summary is a good way to keep up with them all. Wolfgang Drews has put together such a summary for last week with plenty of details and links.

Thinking about what might be of interest to you readers out there, I came up with the idea to summarize what happend last week in phpworld. it's quite interesting that there were some summaries of most relevant mailingslists around at Zend - and that there is a new weekly summary for the Zend framework, but no one ever made a weekly digest of what was relevant in phpworld "the last week". So, all you readers out there, tell me if you like it, then there will be some continuation...

Some of the items mentioned include the release of PHP 5.1.3RC2, Thomas Boutell's move away from developing the GD library for PHP, and several new tutorials.

Some short ideas of what should go into EOR 2.0: template based selection of relation. Right now, it's kinda hard to select things like images with only the name in many cases so there should be an option to provide object specific layouts to chose from (think node_view_gui view=eor), with the default likely be something like text_linked or just an alias to line AJAX based key word searches: Something along the lines of how the current xeditor image insertion keyword search works wouldn't be very hard. Or possibly without AJAX, just JS based filtering? AJAX browse: This is something that should be integrated into ez anyway. I'm sure there are other things that you'd like to see, so feel free to comment ;)

The biggest news this week is the release of the eZ publish 3.8 Beta1. Also, read about a new tutorial that shows how to parse mail with the eZ component's Mail library.

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He is a slow hand when it comes to guitar playing and a fast hand when it comes to photo shooting: Bård Farstad got a Weblog, named Papelipe. He is one of the co-founders of eZ systems and a true LAMP addict. You wonder what the blog name means? He writes: The name Papelipe was invented by [...]

He is a slow hand when it comes to guitar playing and a fast hand when it comes to photo shooting: Bård Farstad got a Weblog, named Papelipe. He is one of the co-founders of eZ systems and a true LAMP addict. You wonder what the blog name means? He writes: The name Papelipe was invented by [...]