Hello to all our subscribers, old and new. The sun's still shining, we're winning the Ashes and our subscriber list is edging ever closer to 6000. Lots to be happy about ;0)



We have some interesting interviews this week with PHP lovers and haters, as well as the latest 'Lately In PHP' Podcast.



Also, several job vacancies advertised here this week, plus the announcement of the PHP UK London Conference 2014.



Enjoy the sunshine, see you next week!



Katie

Articles Rasmus Lerdorf at PHP London

July's PHP London had a particularly notable speaker – Rasmus Lerdorf himself presenting what's new in PHP. So many people wanted to attend that, with limited venue capacity, a live (and recorded) video stream was used for the first time. You can skip straight to seeing the slides and video of the session if you like, or keep reading for my impressions of the evening.



Neither Developers nor The Language Are What's Wrong With PHP

JPStacey recently wrote about how pointless and repetitive anti-PHP rants are, and here he expands on that theme.



How-To User Group

Interview with James Titcumb & organisers of PHP Hampshire.



Multithreading in PHP with Pthreads

Many people are beginning to notice pthreads. Unfortunately the people writing about pthreads and concurrency in PHP are not well equipped to provide advice.To tackle this, krakjoe has decided to reddit about some misconceptions he has come across ...



I Hate PHP - By Borfast

Even though it's the programming language I use the most to earn my keep, I can no longer keep this inside me. For years I've been trying to play nice and see the good side of it but lately PHP has been making me waste countless hours, even days, to do things that should be doable in just a few minutes or a couple of hours. I just can't take it any longer. If my friends and colleagues don't agree with me, I'm sorry and I hope you understand that I have nothing against you. I'd love to talk with you about this but before we do that, please read on.

Tutorials and Talks

Nothing is Untestable: AspectMock in Action

We already announced AspectMock, the mocking framework that may dramatically change the way you do testing in PHP. In this video this Jeffrey Way shows how AspectMock is different from others. In this post we will demonstrate its powers too, and we will try to break some stereotypes about PHP testing.



Create an SMS-Based Stock Quote Service with Twilio

With the advent of cloud-based telephony services such as Twilio, writing an application that works with SMS messages and telephone calls has never been easier. In addition to allowing you to send SMS messages via their simple API, Twilio also allows you to process incoming messages which opens up a whole world of possible applications. In this article, I’ll show you how you can use Twilio to build a simple SMS-based stock quote service which handles both incoming SMS messages and sending responses. The application will allow the user to request a stock price for a given company via SMS and receive it a few moments later via the same method.



Simple Anti-Robot Captcha with PHP

Geoffrey Liu writes - On my website, I decided to implement my own anti-robot captcha system for two reasons: 1) I wanted to keep the website code vanilla and 2) I disliked the CAPTCHAs provided by other services that either made you type in Chinese or that didn’t visually integrate well with the website.



Sending Android Push Notifications from PHP to Phonegap Applications

Gonzalo Ayuso writes - Last few days I’ve been working within a Phonegap project for Android devices using Push Notifications. The idea is simple. We need to use the Push Notification Plugin for Android. First we need to register the Google Cloud Messaging for Android service at Google’s console, and then we can send Push notifications to our Android device.



Getting Started with Twilio on Google App Engine for PHP

This guest post was written by Keith Casey, Sr. Developer Evangelist for Twilio - I’ve wanted to explore Google App Engine for years. Between its SLA, automatic scaling, and queuing system, it has always been compelling. Unfortunately, since my Python skills are somewhere between “Hello World” and “OMG What did I just do!?” I decided to save myself the embarrassment. When Google announced PHP support for App Engine, I was both ecstatic and intrigued about what might be possible. To get something running in just a few minutes, I decided to use our Twilio PHP helper.



Generators in PHP

Stefan Froelich writes - If you’ve followed my previous posts about iterators then you’ll know that iteration is an important programming concept, but implementing the required interfaces to create an iterable object can be a hassle at best because of the amount of boilerplate code that is required. With the release of PHP 5.5, we finally have generators! In this article we’ll take a look at generators which provide an easy way to implement simple iterators without the overhead or complexity of the Iterator interface



Rapid Website Development: The Case for LAMP and Wordpress (Part 1)

As more and more people around the world have access to computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones, these users are getting connected to the internet, ready to jump into the virtual world of unlimited and unrestrained information. Websites today are the most popular tool to deliver this vast information to an ever increasing audience. Let's talk about choices when it comes to rapidly developing custom non-enterprise websites.



XHProf PHP Profiling

Adam Culp writes - Today I set up my development environment so I can use XHProf to profile PHP scripts when needed, and it was pretty easy. For starters, I use Ubuntu as the operating system for my desktop environment. So while the information below may be helpful, I will not cover any other OS in my descriptions.



ASCII Art Generator

In this tutorial we are going to create a simple web-based ASCII Art Generator. The concepts found in this tutorial can be applied to other languages.



Using cURL for Remote Requests

If you’re a Linux user then you’ve probably used cURL. It’s a powerful tool used from posting mails to downloading the latest My Little Pony subtitles. In this article I’ll explain how to use the cURL extension in PHP. The extension offers us the functionality as the console utility in the comfortable world of PHP. I’ll discuss sending GET and POST requests, handling login cookies, and FTP functionality.

News and Announcements



PHP London UK Conference, February 21st & 22nd 2014

PHP London are pleased to announce the 9th Annual PHP UK conference; a 2-day event with 3 great tracks held at The Brewery, in the heart of the City of London. With over 700 delegates, speakers and sponsors, PHP UK conference aims to deliver fantastic up to date content about PHP and related web technologies in a comfortable and professional setting. There are countless networking opportunities to engage with international speakers and delegates, which makes the event one you won't want to miss.



PHP South Africa, 4th & 5th October 2013

PHPSouthAfrica is a 2 day conference to be hosted in the most beautiful city in the world, Cape Town South Africa. It is aimed at proficient developers, new developers and people who care about developers. PHPSouthAfrica has been a long time coming. With the increased demand for PHP programmers, not only locally but also internationally, our vision is to marry the latest technologies with international speakers. We are creating a conference that will hone established developers, but also assist up and coming programmers develop and learn new skills.

Reading and Viewing

Lately in PHP Podcast - Episode #38 What is Making PHP More Popular: Wordpress or PHP Frameworks?

The discussion of whether PHP growth is caused more by popular applications like Wordpress or by PHP frameworks was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in Episode 38 of the Lately in PHP podcast. They also talked about the end of line of development for the PHP 5.3 releases and the newer PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 releases, the proposal to import global functions from namespaces, and the call for speakers for the Ski PHP event.



Jobs If you have a position that needs filling, let us know and we will include it.



Performance Telecom (UK) seek freelancer (Remote worker) - Python and PHP Developer

This position is primarily Python, but PHP skills are also required.



Senior PHP Developer in Bucharest, Romania

We are searching for a passionate PHP developer who will be part of a team of senior programmers and experienced testing engineers, directly involved in technical development projects, using Agile Scrum as methodology.



PHP Engineers for Bright.Com in San Francisco

We are looking for PHP engineers to join our growing team! The ideal candidate is language agnostic, and can work with both scripting languages (such as Python and PHP) as well as strongly typed languages (such as C++ and Java), and has a passion for taking an idea and exploring, tinkering, debating, and demonstrating the fastest, most efficient, flexible and scalable implementation approaches. Experience working with traditional SQL databases as well as newer technologies, indexes and data stores is key (such as Solr, ElasticSearch, Redis, or Neo4j), and you must be comfortable using Linux and other open source technologies.



Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries kzykhys/text

Simple text manipulation library for PHP 5.4



enygma/expose

Expose is an Intrusion Detection System for PHP loosely based on the PHPIDS project (and using it's rule set for detecting potential threats)



Phake

Phake is a framework for PHP that aims to provide mock objects, test doubles and method stubs. Phake was inspired by a lack of flexibility and ease of use in the current mocking frameworks combined with a recent experience with Mockito for Java. A key conceptual difference in mocking between Phake and most of php mocking frameworks (ie: mock functionality in PHPUnit, PHPMock, and mock functionality in SimpleTest) is that Phake (like Mockito) employs a verification strategy to ensure that calls get made.



bugsnag-php

The Bugsnag Notifier for PHP gives you instant notification of errors and exceptions in your PHP applications. Bugsnag captures errors in real-time from your web, mobile and desktop applications, helping you to understand and resolve them as fast as possible. Create a free account to start capturing errors from your applications.



bussnet/money

PHP 5.3+ library to make working with money safer, easier, and fun! This is an extended fork of Mathias Verraes' Money Library.



foursquare-api-client

There is no library currently built to interact with the foursquare api using the fantastic Guzzle HTTP Client library. Guzzle is awesome and supplies a lot of great things for building web service clients. Guzzle is fully unit tested which allows this library to be a light wrapper around the Guzzle core.



DigitalOcean

This PHP 5.3+ library helps you to interact with the DigitalOcean API via PHP or CLI. DigitalOcean is built for developers, helps to get things done faster and to deploy an SSD cloud server in less than 55 seconds with a dedicated IP and root access.



alchemy-fr/PHP-FFmpeg

An object oriented library to convert video/audio files with FFmpeg / AVConv



Flow - fast PHP templating engine

Flow began life as a major fork of the original Twig templating engine by Armin Ronacher, which he made for Chyrp, a blogging engine. Flow features template inheritance, includes, macros, custom helpers, auto escaping, whitespace control and many little features that make writing templates enjoyable. Flow tries to give a consistent and coherent experience in writing clean templates. Flow compiles each template into its own PHP class; used with APC, this makes Flow a very fast and efficient templating engine. Templates can be read from files, loaded from string arrays, or even from databases with relative ease.



Alert

Alert provides both native and libevent event reactors for powering event-driven PHP applications and servers. The Alert\Reactor exposes a simple API allowing performant non-blocking and asynchronous execution across operating systems and extension environments.



Mollie

PHP 5.3+ library for communicating with Mollie (PSP). The goal of this PHP 5.3+ library is to simplify the implementation of the payment methods offered by Mollie B.V.



Forum

A fully robust and powerful CakePHP forum plugin. Integrates with an external user system, support for topic and forum subscriptions, and many more features.

