The Zend Developer Zone has a new post today that "dips their toe" into the world of Rapid Application Development in the land of PHP.

As Andi Gutmans presented at his php|tek keynote, and reinforced by IBM in their showing of QEDWiki, there is indeed a place in PHP for the Rapid Application Development. As part of Andi's keynote, he spoke about component architectures and showed a quick demo of what that might look like in the future. He did so with a proof of concept called phpBlox. Now, don't get too excited, it looks nice and worked for the demo, but we are still only at the beginning of the Road to RAD.

They talk about:

• component architectures,
• the rich design experience that a framework needs to have,
• the inclusion of being able to drop "back to the code",
• the proper seperatin of model and view
• and the ease of multiple-developer development

There's also a mention of IBM's QEDWiki and the proof of concept that Andi (and crew) presented at the php|tek conference during a keynote (check out this this screencast example for their presentation).

phpRiot.com has posted this new tutorial today that looks at a method to seperate out the application logic and the templates for your site. Their weapon of choice is the Smarty Template Engine.

What this is basically saying is that anything relating to the final output should be determined in the template, while any data handling or processing should be done in your PHP files and classes. There's a little more to it than though, which we'll soon see.

They introduce the reader to what the two sides are (application and template logic) and an example of the "bad way" to do things - application logic in your presentation layer. To counter this, they give examples of proper structure with examples like checking strings, alternating background colors, showing a counter, and the inclusion of another template.

A few other suggestions are made as to the good and the bad of templating your site, including two cases showing both sides.

DevShed has posted their latest tutorial today, a look at some of the basics of recursion and working with it in PHP.

Iteration is a straightforward concept. Recursion is a bit more complicated; it can be defined as a regular function that calls itself. PHP supports recursive functions. This article, the first of three parts, will explain recursive functions and help you see why they are useful.

Considering the important role that recursion plays in most programming languages, and specifically in PHP, over this series I'll be demonstrating how to define and use recursive functions with numerous code samples, thus you can learn quickly how to include them in your own PHP scripts.

If you've never used recursion, you're in luck - they start from the very beginning, explaining it with a simple example of pushing the entire contents of an array (with subarrays) out to a file. They use this exmaple as a base to improve the function, adding the function to write the data out. They finish it off with two handy recursive functions for everyday use - one to escape the entire contents of an array and one that does the same, but checks to see if magic quotes is on.

Some people reported absolutely abysmal speed in IE6 and with big (as in: >50KB) docs even in Firefox. Turns out the CountChars plugin was solely responsible for this: http://xinha.python-hosting.com/ticket/655 I disabled it and now I can edit and scroll in huge documents (as in 100K HTML) in Firefox just fine. And even IE6 now works quite acceptably. So in case you were wondering about the performance, grab the latest SVN! Or test here if you're skeptical of such extreme claims.

We released the first beta version of the Template component. This is the first version that implements most of the functionality to use templating in your application. The language is fully complete and the system also creates compiled templates.

Christopher Jones has posted his howto over on his Oracle blog today - a look at a common problem when using IIS, PHP, and Oracle due to incorrect permissions.

Your Windows machine has IIS, PHP and Oracle. You create a PHP script using the oci8 extension and it calls PHP5 functions like oci_connect(), oci_parse(), or PHP4 functions like OCILogon() and OCIParse(). You invoke the script and get errors like:

"Warning: ocilogon() [function.ocilogon]: OCIEnvInit() failed." or "Unable to load dynamic library php_oci8.dll - Access is denied"

The cause is the unauthorized anonymous login the IIS server is trying to use. His solution is simple: "give it to them" (the permissions, that is). In four easy steps (including the client install and rebooting IIS) you should be bug free and running smooth.

On the O'Reilly Network's PHP blog today, there's a new post bk jones that looks at the other side of application design, from the data's perspective.

If you have a sourceforge account, and are on your way to becoming the best thing to happen to the web since Yahoo or Google, then I beg of you to put a call out for people who understand database design fundamentals.

Here's the story: If you're a PHP developer, I don't really want you to learn how to design a database. No, really. I don't. I want you to write PHP. There are few people who do both things extremely well, because both take a good bit of time. If you're a PHP developer, I want you to write code that'll make my head spin. However, the path to greatness is to be conscious of your own ignorance - so just acknowledge that you've never done or studied database design, and go find someone who has!

He mentions three misconceptions to consider and avoid when developing a PHP application:

• The interface determines database design
• "I only need a small, simple database"
• "More tables makes for harder coding"

Currently I’m writing an eZ publish module to retrieve audio CD data from CDDB servers. The module uses the new PEAR NET_CDDB package, which is still in alpha state but already behaves quite well, except for one little bug I’ve found. I will use this extension to create an online database of my personal audio CD [...]

Trevor Lowing, an attendee of the php|architect php|tek conference for this year has compiled a list of the things he learned and the people he met while at the conference, including links to various resources on each topic.

Got back today from thephp|tek Live 2006 conference sponsored by php|architect Magazine this week in Orlando and decided to compile a list of PHP tips to share. Many of the lectures are now available online.

The list is broken up into five different sections - Security, Preformance, Tools, New Technologies/Techniques, and the Speakers/Site/Blogs/Lecturers from the conference. Most of the items are just random bits from several of the talks that he attended, but still provide a great deal of information not only about the conference, but about the current state of PHP in general.

According to this press release (as linked to by php|architect) notes the resignation of Doron Gerstel as President and CEO of Zend to move to Syneron Medical.

There has been no news of this happening publicly from Zend at the time of this article, which is two days after the press release. Few people question the important role that Doron played in raising Zend's visibility in the enterprise software sector and helping the company to obtain significant investment capital in it's formative years. One can only wonder how the management hierarchy at Zend will shuffle as a result of this surprising development.