Devshed has posted part two in their series of "handling sockets in PHP", this time, with a focus on the creation of a TCP server.

The tutorial walks you through the simple process, looking back at the simple version they made before, looking forward at expaning it to handle multiple client requests, and creating a "socket server" class to automatically handle the creation of the socket.

Normal internet applications are great for letting users talk to servers (or other users for that matter), but not so good when one of your scripts wants to ask a remote site for some data. Enter web services - a handy interface to remote data stores that can be queried to narrow down to just what you need. PHP has several ways to go about using (and creating) these, but one of the most popular, moreso for PHP4 users, is NuSOAP. Using it can be a little tricky, though, so thankfully there's tutorials like this on DevBuilder to get you started.

They provide a great overview of what web services are/how they're used/benefits before even getting into the technical side of things. From there, it's all examples and screenshots of their example to grab information from a remote service - GeoCash from serviceobjects.net.

In This quick post from Paperbagcoder, he gives basic example of what a Model-View-Controller kind of architecture is all about along with some code as an example.

In his perspective, PHP isn't neccessarily evil - it just allows people to "be evil" and write bad code way too easily. He does note, though, that it is possible to write good PHP code without much effort, especially if you use a correct MVC mentatlity. His example selects car data from the database and makes a call to update the information before spitting it out to the template to be rendered.

On php|architect's ART (article repository) today, there's two new articles posted - one dealing with a popular PHP framework (that just reached the version 1.0 milestone recently) and another covering a second look at building applications with Flex.

• The first article gives a general overview of the CakePHP framework - what it is, what it has to offer, and even some simple examples of how it's all structured.
• The second article is part two of the "Rich Internet Applications with PHP and Flex" series that was started here. This time, they focus on passing data back and forth between the PHP application and the Flex side of things without the use of XML (which has to be parsed and interpreted on both sides to do anything useful.

Christopher Jones has a note on his blog today about the presentation he'll be making at the upcoming New York PHP User Conference.

He also mentions the book that he (and Alison Holloway) have been working on, the "Underground PHP and Oracle Manual", and it's preliminary release. Attendees for the installfest have already recieved early drafts.

If you haven't gotten your tickets for the event yet, you can still head over to the main conference site and grab your tickets today! The conference is June 14th-16th at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, NY and tickets start at $395 USD.

We just released the first release for eZ components 1.1. In this release you will find updated packages for many of the packages. The main changes are they way how options are handled for components. The Mail and Template package are the ones with the other major changes.