PHP Frameworks are really starting to come into their own, and the leaders of the pack are starting to emerge. One of these go-getters is the CakePHP Framework, an MVC-based approach to developing web applications. In this new article on SitePoint.com today, they take a look at this framework and help you take that impotant first bite.

At the same time, at least one person gave up on the idea of totally cloning Rails in PHP, but instead, decided to borrow its structure and basic concepts to make PHP more organized. This is what makes CakePHP not only different, but one of the most popular frameworks for PHP: its modest, yet important goal is to provide an appropriate structure for PHP applications.

They go on to introduce the MVC architecture CakePHP uses, including how those parts fit into the framework's overall directory structure. They step you through the installation process and even help you create a sample application - a "note manager" to create/add/edit/delete notes stored in a database.

Finally, they have a few FAQs about some of the other handy features that CakePHP natively supports (such as the Sanitize class, using the debugging mode, and the default helpers).

From the Phish Tank, there's this new tutorial covering a quick and easy installation of Apache, PHP, the Zend Framework, and Oracle XE on your Windows machine.

Let's say you want to install Apache+PHP+ZendFramework+OracleDbXe (Oracle Database Express Edition) and play around with the spanky new Zend Framework made available by the folks over at Zend Corporation. It's actually quite easy and painless.

Set up your development environment with Zend Framework in minutes!

The tutorial is just what you'd expect - a few steps (with some sub-steps under each) to accomplish a successful install. Since Windows installations are a bit simpler than even Linux installs, there's only three main steps to the process - download, configure, test. See? Nice and easy!

The Zend Developer Zone has a new book review today - a look at the Oracle Technology Network offering "The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual" .

Released last month by Oracle and trumpeted from Chris Jones' blog, The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual is an excellent guide for anyone looking to work with these two technologies.

I'm not a fanboy for Oracle but this review will read like one. It's hard to find anything to criticize in this book. It's an easy read and it's not burdened with unnecessary technical jargon. This is a book I will recommend to my friends who know Oracle and want to know more about PHP or visa-versa.

In his long version, Cal talks about the climate for PHP books these days, noting how much the author's skill has to do with its success. Thankfully, this book is doing just fine. He talks about the contents of the different chapters, brief summaries of what to expect.

His only complaint? That he'd like it in a book (dead tree) editon too...

The IBM developerWorks site has posted part two in their look at the popular offering from Zend - the Zend Framework - and how ot understand it. In part one they went over the basics - install/setup and a walkthrough of the components. In part two they move to the next level and start builing a simple application, Chomp, an online feed reader.

In Part 1 of this "Understanding the Zend Framework" series, we discuss the goals behind the Zend Framework, including easy-to-use components and an architecture based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. Now we start to actually put that to use.

They start off by helping you to install WAMP (a Windows "all in one" installert for Apache/MySQL/PHP), complete with screenshots. With the platform installed, they go over a few ground rules on what MVC really means and demonstrate a creation and development of each. The application allows a user to register with a username and password as well as manage their information. They also introduce the Zend_Registry component to help with database connections.

There's been a lot of fuss about the new object model in PHP5 lately, but what's a developer to do when he's stuck back in PHP4 and has no control over when things are updated? Do you just miss out on some of those cool features? Well, you may not have access to what PHP5-ers do, but PHP4 still has some cool tricks up its sleeve. One of which is property overloading, and it's covered in this new article from DevShed.

In these articles, I'll explain the basics of class overloading, starting with the application of the "overload()" function in PHP 4, in conjunction with using the "_set()", "__get()" and "__call()" methods, accompanied of several practical examples, so you'll have a clear idea of how to overload your classes. Also, I'll cover class overloading in PHP 5, which offers native support for overloading methods and properties through the built-in methods that I mentioned before.

This first part of the series lays down the groundwork of overloading, touching briefly on its uses before moving onto some of the functionality - the __set method, overload function, and __get method - to make a simple "cookie saver" application.

Via Codewalkers.com today, we learn about two new articles from the APress "Inside Open Source" site - one dealing with interfacing the Google API with the PEAR SOAP extension and the other dealing with the date/time functionality of PHP. Both are excerpts from two of APress' books.

The first article, Using the Google API from PEAR, demonstrates how to install the Services_Google PEAR package and use it in your code. They give three examples of its flexibility with three different kinds of requests to the API - a spelling check, grabbing the URL for Google's cached page of a site, and of course, searching through Google's resource to locate matching websites.

Article number two, Displaying Times and Dates in Other Languages with PHP, looks generally at the functionality of PHP to work with and display dates and times in multiple formats. There's a few code examples and a long list of the arguments you can pass in to format the output string just how you'd like it.

The Zend Developer Zone has gone IBM crazy with three different posts concerning the blending of the PHP language with the i5/OS platform - specifically the use of DB2, a free book that's been published, and a real code example to get you started.

First off, the book - "Developing PHP Applications for IBM Data Servers". Cal talks about its contents, including a brief description and a listing of te chapters. Topics covered include the installation and configuration, wokring with DB2/Informix, and an introduction to Service Data Objects for PHP.

Next up is Cal's announcement of the official melding of DB2 and PHP on the i5/OS platform. He points to a tutorial ("Use PHP scripts to access DB2 UDB for iSeries data with Zend Core for i5/OS") for an example of these connections.

Finally, Cal wraps it all up with another example from the Zend site that "illustrates features and functions using the db2 extensions in the Zend Core for i5/OS PHP engine".

On his blog, Markus Wolff has posted this handy tip for users of the Zend Framework, detailing how to extend the Zend_Controller_action.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to talk about beefing up the most central component of the Zend_Frameworks MVC package: Zend_Action_Controller. The Controller basically is a class wherein you define one method for each individual action you want the controller to perform. Which controller and action is being called is deduced from the URL you've typed into your browser.

He notes that this default functionality is good, but it can be enhanced with a simple process, easily to implement for any Framework user. He details the process for his readers, explaining the parts that will need to be in place. He also includes the source for the parts he creates, making it simple to understand.

The php|architect A/R/T article repository has a new tutorial today, covering stored procedure programming for MySQL (by Ligaya Turmelle).

With the release of MySQL5 a bold new world opens up to the PHP developer... the world of a database programmer. In this world the interaction with the data can be done right where the data is located - not in a script that is far far away in a distant server. In this article we will be taking you on a journey that will introduce you to MySQL's stored procedures.

They cover some of the background of transactions and some of the basic concepts behind them. All of the examples provided are done from the command line in this part of the series, but PHP relevant examples should be coming up shortly.

DevShed has posted part three of their popular "using mysqli in PHP5" series today, this time, they focus on increasing the functionality of the code they started last time with other mysqli methods.

I must say that the "mysqli" extension offers an impressive set of features, which can be implemented right from the very beginning. However, and speaking of its cool features, in the next few lines, I'm going to show you a few more. Over the course of this last tutorial, I'll be covering some other methods and properties, mainly aimed at finding the IDs after inserting new rows, and obtaining information about specific table fields.

They touch on the fetch_array, data_seek, fetch_assoc, fetch_field, and fetch_seek functions, giving examples and other assicated properties along the way.