In an effort to have a definitive resource to point to when people ask about PHP scaling, Sebastian Bergmann is asking for suggestions and information on the topic in his latest blog entry.

In "The J2EE guy still doesn't get PHP", Harry Fuecks suggests that PHP really needs [someone] to get together and write a detailed paper on how it works and why PHP scales so we can all live happily ever after.

I could not agree more.

Sebastian even notes that just recently, such a document would have come in very handy in a discussion. Unfortunately, he hasn't had the experience needed to make such a paper himself, so he's asking the community to help on the project and give suggestions/comments/offers of help in the comments of this blog posting.

From Hasin Hayder's blog, there's a new tutorial demonstrating how to use the newly released WebThumb API from Joshua Eichorn to create thumbnails of websites dynamically.

Using WebThumb API, you can generate a thumbnail in three steps. First you have to place a request containing the URL. As soon as your request is successful, WebThumb store your request in queue. That means you are not getting the thumbnail instantly (well, there are other factors also. to fetch an url requires time, so it is not possible to generate the thumbnail in real time).

In second step you have to check whether your thumbnail has been generated or it is still in the queue. If you get a green signal, you will proceed to the third step where you have to request a download URL of your thumbnails.

He shows how to make a request to the API, check how your request is doing (status), and grabbing the thumbnail it's generated. Then, it's on to the code, and a complete PHP script (using cURL) to make the complete request to the API, including waiting for the image to be finished to grab it.

A friend asked "How do I calculate start (monday) and end (sunday) dates from a given week number for a specified year?" Instead of having to come up with your own algorithm you can simply do the following in PHP 5.1 and higher:

<?php
echo date(datetime::ISO8601, strtotime("2006W37")); // Monday
echo date(datetime::ISO8601, strtotime("2006W377")); // Sunday
?>

The format is " year 'W' weeknr ( daynr )?" where the default daynr is 1 being the Monday of that week. The daynr can be in the range 0 to 7. The weeknr is the ISO week number. Please note that the " year '-W' weeknr ( '-' daynr )?" format is only supported in PHP 5.2 and higher.

The releases of eZ publish 3.8.4, 3.7.9, 3.6.11 fix security issues of high severity.

In general, site owners who cannot trust their editors should upgrade immediately. All users of the shop functionality of eZ publish are urged to upgrade to the latest versions.

Avant de débuter le développement de mes premiers sites web avec eZ publish dans la société où je travaille actuellement , il y a presque un an, j'ai cherché à avoir quelques informations sur l'outil que j'allais utiliser. Comme je cherchais plutôt des avis, des sentiments que des informations purement techniques, je me suis éloigné du site de la société eZ systems , éditrice du CMS, et j'ai naturellement tapé ezpublish dans Google. Et là j'ai eu comme une surprise, tout juste 500 000 résultats ? c'est peu pour un CMS que ses créateurs appellent the leading Open Source Enterprise Content Management System ! En fait, il y a un espace entre eZ et publish (accessoirement, le Z est en majucule et publish est tout en minuscule mais ça ne change rien pour les recherches) et là du coup presque 7 millions de résultats, c'est plus logique, même si ça reste assez faible, mais j'y reviendrais...

Plus tard, j'ai découvert le service Google Trends qui permet d'évaluer graphiquement (mais sans ordre de grandeur) le nombre de recherches effectuées sur un terme plutôt qu'un autre et visiblement, je ne suis pas le seul à me tromper puisque les deux recherches sont quasiment aussi tapées l'une que l'autre avec un léger avantage pour la mauvaise orthographe.

Les résultats des recherches sont intéressants aussi. Dans les 10 premiers avec la requête ezpublish, on trouve 4 sociétés de services/web agency autour d'eZ publish (eZ systems compris) alors qu'avec la bonne orthographe, il n'y a qu'eZ systems en première page et le reste de la page est constitué d'articles sur des blogs ou des sites communautaires. Il y a par contre plus de publicités sur le bon terme que sur les mauvais.

Enfin dernier point amusant, il semble que proportionnellement ce soit en France ou du moins dans le monde francophone où on se trompe le plus avec quasiment deux fois plus de mauvaises recherches que de bonnes alors que la Pologne et la Norvège sont les meilleurs élèves.

eZ systems has a points program where partners can get points for various contributions (answering questions on the forum, attending training sessions, submitting sites to the references section, fixing bugs, writing documentation, etc.). Points reduce the cost of services that eZ systems sells: training, support, monitoring, etc. It seems like a pretty good system but I don’t know how it is working in practice. Perhaps someone from eZ can chime in here.

Zend Framework users, listen up (well, really anyone even looking into the Zend Framework too). There's a new post on the Zend Developer Zone today about working with XML inside of the Zend Framework, courtesy of IBM.

One of the incubator projects in the Zend Framework is Zend_Db_Xml. Zend_Db_Xml, also known as the XML Content Store (XCS), allows web applications that use XML data to easily update, save, and otherwise manage this data. In this article I will introduce the XCS persistence API and discuss an implementation using IBM's DB2 9 database with its pureXML technology. Finally, I'll discuss a sample social networking application to show how easy and fun it is to develop XML-centric applications using the XCS.

They first discuss the XML Content Store and what it offers before getting into the actual code to control it. They go with the DB3 database to store the data and the Zend_Db_Xml_XmlUtil component to manage the connections. Finally, they get to the code and XML examples, creating a simple method for storing and retrieving a user's information.

PHPit.net takes its readers "back to basics" with it's latest series of tutorials, starting with part one, a look at what PHP5 has to offer and introducing you to what's new since PHP4.

In this first part of a new article series on PHP5 classes and objects you will be introduced to the basic concepts of using classes, the constructor and destructor methods and class inheritance.

They start with some of the basics of class building and object oriented programming to get the ball rolling. Next is a look at the constructor/deconstructor and inheritance in classes (extending one with another).

Though it contains no code, this new article on PHPBuilder provides a good perspective for those looking to get into PHP and what to expect to find.

A couple of months ago, I knew almost nothing about PHP, only that is was a programming language that I needed to learn. Today, my whole site relies upon PHP and I have gained the confidence that almost anything is possible using PHP. I accomplished this achievement using methods that I will describe in this article.

The author talks about the methods followed to get into the language, including making smaller goals at first, just to get used to things. The manual is also suggested as a "best friend" for a developer and looking at other people's code can provide insight into your problems.