The last two weeks have been very eventful, so it is time to catch up with eZ's weekly happenings. This week's newsletter includes information about new eZ publish security and bug fix releases, news about articles and an update on the current bug status.

On the SearchOpenSource.com site today, there's this new article combining two popular things together to make one powerful and productive tool using the Amazon web services and the Zend Framework.

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.

PHPBuilder.com has posted part six of their "Using XML" series today with a focus on validation techniques using both normal PHP abilities and the XSL functionality in PHP5 with the Schematron language.

This series has so far focused on XML technologies and how they can be utilised using PHP 5. A subject we have not touched upon yet, is XML validation. This article will explore the application independent XML validation standards of DTD's, the XML Schema Language and the XSLT-based Schematron language.

They point back to part one of the series for the XML library they'll use and waste no time getting right into the code. They demonstrate a simple validation first before moving on to the use of DTDs to ensure the correct content. Next up is more work with the XML schemas continuing on to the Schematron functionality (their use and validation).

For those that might of missed it, Zend put on a webcast/screencast yesterday on the topic of "Web Services with PHP". The good news is, though, that if you weren't able to make it, the fine folks over at the Zend Developer Zone have a recorded version of it.

Due to technical limitations with our streaming software, we could only allow the first 550 folks into the presentation. Because of the network load, this was a difficult presentation to pull off due to lag. Paging from slide-to-slide was very delayed, so showing the code-completion capabilities of Zend Studio was nearly impossible. Despite the technical difficulties, several good questions were asked and feedback was very positive.

In order for everyone to see the presentation, I re-recorded it this afternoon, and it's available for your viewing. This one is much smoother, and I expanded on some of the topics that I glanced over in the first one. So even if you viewed the first attempt, you'll probably get more out of the second.

The presentation can be viewed here and the Zend DevZone post also has the question/answer section as well.

The Cake Baker (Daniel Hofstetter) has a quick post about a little unofficial something that those working with the CakePHP framework might want to check out.

Something missed by a lot of people is now live: a forum for CakePHP. It is run by a CakePHP user named "kain". At the moment it is still empty and needs to be filled with activity.

The forum is already starting to fill up - not a lot, but it's a start. It uses the Vanilla software to run the site.

I remember mentioning that term in my blogs/talks/wherever, too. So, for all of you who still wonder, what the eZ platform will be, we published an article, explaining the architecture of eZ platform, how it is related to eZ components and eZ publish and what you can do with it.

Read "The road to eZ platform".

eZ publish 3.8.2 (and 3.6.9 and 3.7.7 for previous versions) has been released. These releases contain fixes for the security issues described below. You are strongly advised to upgrade to the new versions. In addition to fixing the security issues, these versions include various bug fixes.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Thorsten Rinne demonstrates how he (and others at GmbH/ThinkPHP) were able to integrate PHP with the Windows NT LAN Manager through a PHP script for authentication.

Sometimes you need to do strange things

The IBM developerWorks site brings us yet another fine PHP-related article with this new tutorial today, a look at five common design patterns (and how to use them).

It's difficult to demonstrate the value of patterns using small examples. They often look like overkill because they really come into play in large code bases.

This article can't show huge applications, so you need to think about ways to apply the principles of the example -- and not necessarily this exact code -- in your larger applications. That's not to say that you shouldn't use patterns in small applications. Most good applications start small and become big, so there is no reason not to start with solid coding practices like these.

The five patterns they cover are:

• the Factory pattern
• the Singleton pattern
• the Observer pattern
• the Chain-of-Command pattern
• the Strategy pattern