In this new tutorial from the IBM developerWorks site, they take a look at the development of a webmail interface with the help of PHP.

You know how to get users to interact with a PHP application using a Web form, but sometimes e-mail is just more convenient. Maybe your users are using small devices like cell phones or interacting in a way that's not real time, such as subscribing to an e-mail list. Find out how to read and send e-mail by building a PHP Webmail application.

They cover connecting to the server, grabbing the information from a specific email inbox, pulling the data for a single message, deleting emails, getting a list of the current emails, and how to work with attachments and multipart MIME messages.

You'll need to log in to get to it, but it's a great example of how to work with email in PHP (more than just sending them with mail() or PEAR's mailer package).

Today was the first day of the eZ publish conference here in Skien, Norway, where the eZ systems headquarter is located. Before today we had 3 days of eZ crew activities, since the complete eZ systems team from over the world is currently in Norway.

But before I start with my little roundup, I'd like to announce some stuff that we (eZ) presented during this conference:

1. The eZ publish online editor (a WYSIWYG web interface) changed it's license. From now on, it is not commercial any more, but released under the GPL and will be shipped with the next eZ publish release.

2. We are starting to develop the "eZ platform", which is an enterprise level platform for PHP development and will be the basis for a future eZ publish release. eZ platform will consist of the eZ application server, which is based on the eZ components. eZ publish will be build on top of that.

But now, let's talk about some social stuff. ;)

On Monday (where we left Dortmund at 2:00 and I did not sleep before that), we arrived in Skien around 11:00, had lunch all together and I went to bed afterwards. That night we spent with pizza and beer at the "eZ bar" (the office).

On Tuesday morning we splitted up into task related groups (developers and management) and had some internal education talks, e.g. Derick about the usage of Xdebug. After lunch we went to a "wild-life"park, where we took some team-building activities. This was amazingly great and lasted from clay pigeon shooting over climbing to canu driving. Absolutly cool and much fun. After that, we went for some "wild-life" dinner (deer).

Wednesday was the eZ partner day, which already belonged to the eZ publish conference. The development teams seized the chance for a discussion phase. We (the eZ components team) planned the upcoming components release 2006.2 (formally known as 1.2), which will probably include a lot of cool new components and features. For example eZ Feed (for reading and writing Atom/RSS feeds), eZ Graph (for rendering charts) and many more.

Today was finally the first day of the official part of the eZ conference. After Derick gave an overview on the current status of our enterprise PHP library, the eZ components, I continued with a 2 hours entrance workshop. The number of attendees was really large and everyone seemed to be quite amazed. At least, that was what they told me. A nice quote I heard from someone was "this is the cleanest piece of PHP code I've ever seen", which does not really sound bad, does it? Later today we will have the eZ Awards dinner, which also sounds quite promising.

Finally, tomorrow, Kore and me will leave Skien again around 10:00 to catch our plane at 13:00 in Oslo Torp. I expect to be home around 19:00 then, where I'm pretty much looking forward to see my sweet girl friend Carmen again. Sadly only until Saturday morning, around 7:00, when we again leave direction Bonn, for the FrOSCon.

Anyway, another great evening here in Norway is waiting. Stay tuned.

Fresh from the eZ publish conference (1st day today): eZ systems announced the development of the eZ platform, which will ship with a PHP application server called “eZ application server”. Of course, eZ platform will be build on top of eZ components. More information in the news announcement: eZ systems announces eZ platform for PHP application development. php application server

Fresh from the eZ publish conference (1st day today):

eZ systems announced the development of the eZ platform, which will ship with a PHP application server called "eZ application server".

Of course, eZ platform will be build on top of eZ components.

More information in the news announcement: eZ systems announces eZ platform for PHP application development.

Recently, Pádraic Brady had to explain some of the design patterns, specifically the Factory and Abstract Factory patterns, to someone (or a group of someones) in his day to day business. To help make it easier for other people out there looking for the same information, he's posted what he said on his blog today.

First, he talks about the Factory pattern:

At some point in developing, developers will discover a need to support switching among various methods of performing an action. The example I used in a forum post earlier was Database Abstraction. Say for a moment you want to separate all the logic needed to create an Abstraction object (say using ADOdb Lite) into a central place for easier control. At this point the Factory Pattern starts rearing its head.

Of course, a bit of sample code is given to illustrate the point, creating the instance of an ADOdb object.

Next up is the Abstract Factory pattern - the difference being that these make it easy to switch between Factories using different resource (such as his example to switch between ADODB and PDO).

In these cases, we will have multiple Factories. However instead of one generically named Factory, we will have several specific Factories. This should (eventually) lead us to impose a parent class, which will allow duplicated code from each specific DatabaseAbstractionFactory to be moved up to the common parent class.

Just as before, they provide example code to illustrate the use of this slightly different pattern.

In a post from JellyandCustard.com, there's an inside look at regular expressions in PHP - how to use them and what they are.

Regular Expressions (regex for short) appear to a lot of people as the 'black art' of coding. Most languages, be it PHP, Java, C, .NET, VB etc have a way of using regular expressions - and they can certainly make your job easier. So lets start on our journey into regular expressions. I am by no means an expert, but hopefully I'll be able to clear the fog that surrounds regular expressions!

He mentions the functions to use and provides a simple example of matching a phone number (US format). They take the regular expression string and break it down into its pieces, explaining how each one works (and relates to the other parts of the expression). They also provide a brief "cheat sheet" of some of the other special characters (including common uses on some).

eZ publish 3.8.1 includes GPL Online Editor
eZ publish 3.8.1 has been released. It is the first release of eZ publish containing the eZ publish Online Editor licensed under the GPL. This release also includes various bug-fixes.

eZ publish 3.8.1 has been released. It is the first release of eZ publish containing the eZ publish Online Editor licensed under the GPL. This release also includes various bug-fixes.

Reporting in "live" from the eZ public conference, Sandro Groganz has this quick post about a new offering from eZ systems - the eZ platform.

eZ systems announced the development of the eZ platform, which will ship with a PHP application server called "eZ application server".

Of course, eZ platform will be build on top of eZ components.

You can get the complete details on the project from this official announcement on their site.

From Dhani's blog today, there's this new tutorial (part 1) showing you how to create a guest book for your site with PHP's help.

Proper development on any kind of project requires you to stop and evaluate the project before development begins (hopefully long before, but that's not always the case).

Having said that, let's figure out what we want the guestbook to do. What's the guestbook for? In this case, it's simply to let users view other visitor's comments and to add their own. The guestbook is not a stand alone application - well it is, but it exists in the context of the web site

There's a few considerations mentioned before the code comes along (broken up into the business and technical sections). With the plan in place, Dhani shows the database layout chosen, the reasoning behind it, and the actual SQL you'll need to create it.