PHP

A colleague reminded me that it's been over 5 months since the last time I posted something on this blog. I never really have been a blog person, and most likely never will be. Writing a blog post is hard enough in itself, let alone writing it in your non-native language, and things are not that much better in my other blog which is actually in my native language.

What kept me from writing something recently is by no means a secret. I bet most of you have heard about Iran's tenth presidential election which was held in June, and its aftermath. It's not something you want to be part of, or even to observe. In my childhood, Iran was in a war with Iraq ... I barely remember anything from that time, but I could tell what happened in recent months here in Iran (and mostly in Tehran) was worse than the war. War with Iraq ... it was sad, but it was all about militaries, about foreigners, but not compatriots killing each other. Let me tell you, nothing is worse than seeing a 16 years old plainclothes boy (which is of course authorized by governor) hitting people with a baton.

And I'd like to thank everyone in the community which I'm proud to be part of, the PHP community (and PEAR folks in particular). Great guys like Daniel O'Connor, Christian Weiske, Chuck Burgress, Brett Bieber (which unsurprisingly are all elected again to be part of PEAR group for 2009 and 2010) and ... I just could say, Thanks for showing concern and suggesting ways to support.

Lately I've been playing alot with the PEAR CLI.  The one annoying thing I noticed the most was its lack of tab completion that I'm used to from the shell.  It turns out that this feature is very easy to add, in the bash at least.  Here (Update: Now it's in PEAR SVN repository) is a simple tab completion script for the bash.  In addition to completing the PEAR commands and their respective options, it can even autocomplete the names of installed packages and discovered PEAR channels.  Just source it, and enjoy

As the title suggests this book is about advanced PHP related topics, being divided into 5 parts and 21 chapters. The title enunciates the book will cover many different aspects, but you'll get disappointed as soon as you perceive it's only about 300 pages.

First part starts with "OOP and Patterns" and will end up with PHP 6's new features. The Patterns chapter is the first one which disappoints you - you'll wish it was a little more verbose, covering some more patterns and being more than only 7 pages.

The next Part is about "Testing and Documentation", covering PHPDoc and DocBook in it's first chapter. In the next one about "Reflection API" - which I think is one of the best chapters - Kevin goes deep into two complete real world examples. But unfortunately then book disappoints you again, trying to cover some topics like "Development Environment", "Unit Testing", "Deployment" and "Continuous Integration" in just about 20 pages. Kevin just skims through introductory concepts of tools like Subversion, PHPUnit, Phing, Xinc and Xdebug.

The third part is all devoted to SPL. Kevin describes SPL from fundamentals to some advanced topics like "Array Overloading" and "Observer Pattern" in a way you wished that all of the book was written this way.

Part 4 covers another Pattern, MVC this time. Describing what it is, why it's good, and talking about criteria you may consider when choosing an MVC framework. Then it helps you to roll your own MVC framework by recommending to choose from one of the publicly available frameworks. The book also covers Zend Framework as one of those "publicly available frameworks" which meets the most criteria in his opinion.

And the final Part, and with no surprise it's titled "Web 2.0". In my opinion the first chapter of this part is the book's truly weakest chapter, it's about Ajax and JSON and it barely covers anything more than what you'll find in any of the beginner Ajax tutorials. But the rest chapters compensates, "Web Services" and "Certificate Authentication".

All in all I found the book a good one, a good next step if you are already familiar with PHP and looking for a book to extend your knowledge, then this one is a recommended one. But I by one would like to see some practical solutions applied to enterprise level when buying a book titled Pro.

On behalf of the Jaws development team, I'm proud to announce another release of Jaws.
Jaws 0.7 (At my signal, unleash hell!) is a release with lot of Ajax and fancy stuff you will love, new gadgets and new code!
As usual it's provided through three tarballs:
Jaws Core: Include core and core gadgets (useful if you want to use Jaws as a framework).
Jaws Blog System: include same as jaws-core but also some gadgets like Banner, Blog, Chatbox, FileBrowser, etc..). Useful if you want to use Jaws as a blog system and a theme.
and Jaws Complete: include everything

For more information: official announce

I can't imagine it.
He was the first (and the last) leader (hey, please dont start FUDs here in my blog comments, he was the PEAR leader imo) which puts so much effort to help the new developers or users and keep working in other parts of the project, He's the meaning of PEAR in my mind because he introduced me with PEAR world and now he's leaving, and will leave us alone here with a lot of FUDs from the men that don't know differences between PEAR as a Package and all of PEAR as a Group.

As I posted earlier, I'm working on the PEAR package Services_Ebay. To update it to new eBay XML schema, I've done some of the Calls/Models/Examples and touched the request skeleton to be compatible with eBay's new schema and finally committed them to the PEAR CVS. But unfortunately I can't continue with this job as before. (hmm, US export restrictions and the fact that I'm an Iranian?)

I've just committed these changes to get attentions from other developers to help in the update process, this CVS version is just for this porpose and NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE.

If there's any interest on your part to help with this package, I've created a file named progress that indicates which parts of the package is updated and which one requires more efforts.