Hi there



Another week and another hot one in the UK this week. It's so rare that we need to enjoy it whilst it's here! We've still been able to gather some juicy content from the past week which we have here in your regular hit of PHP links :)



Please help us to keep growing and tell all of your friends and colleagues.



All the best,



Katie

News and Announcements



Google App Engine 1.8.2 Release Boosts Creation of Large Scale Applications

The Google App Engine team has been having a solid year with regular releases of enterprise grade features across regular monthly releases. The latest version 1.8.2 is squarely targeted at large scale application creation, better tooling support in Eclipse and updates to Python and PHP Runtimes



PHP 5.5.1 Released

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.1. About 20 bugs were fixed including a security fix in the XML parser (Bug #65236).



Ski PHP 2014

For those who like to do more than just code, we're pleased to announce Ski PHP 2014, which will be held on January 17th and 18th 2014 in the U.S. This is a 3-day weekend, so attendees will be able to enjoy the skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling and other activities that Utah has to offer after the conclusion of the conference.



Pavel Durov and his colleagues have developed an improved version of PHP

Pavel Durov, the founder of "Vkontakte", last night presented the new compiled programming language that they developed two years. According to the author, at the end of May, at the height of site traffic 50 million people had completed the transfer of all the code "Vkontakte" to the new language. As a result, almost all the pages have to be loaded in half the time.



Nomad PHP July 25th 2013 8pm EDT

The PHP virtual user group, for people who don't have a group nearby. Special guest presenter Corey Ballou talks Creating Realtime Applications with PHP and Websockets.



Reading and Viewing

The Development Hell Podcast - Episode #34 - Is Sara Pissed?

This time out our Very Special Guest is Sara Goleman, long-time PHP core contributor, author of the only good book on writing extensions for PHP and the driving force behind that open source project of HipHop for PHP, a virtual machine, runtime and Just-In-Time compiler for PHP that powers much of Facebook’s infrastructure.



Mastering the SPL Library: a php[architect] guide (by Joshua Thijssen, published 19th July 2013)

The Standard PHP Library is already a few years old, but recently the library has gained a lot of popularity among PHP developers. With more complex applications and more data to process, the library’s many functionalities can make development more efficient and easy. However, one of the major problems of the SPL is the fact that the documentation falls behind the rest of the PHP documentation. This book covers all the facets of the library and gives you some background information where needed. Everything is accompanied with examples to give you an idea on how to use it in practice.

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.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

sabre-event

A simple event management library for PHP 5.4.



Negotiation

Yet another missing PHP library... about Content Negotiation. Negotiation is a standalone library without any dependencies that allows you to implement content negotiation in your application, whatever framework you use.



Using 3rd Party Libraries in Composer Projects

Recently, Cal Evans discussed a lesson he learned about “Managing the Verbosity of Symfony’s Command Object With a Trait” while building a project. This particular project has been very instructional to him so here he is sharing something else he learned.



url-shortener

A PHP5 library that allows you to generate shortened URL through famous API like bitly. Reverse is also possible.



ladybug-bundle

Symfony2 bundle for Ladybug library (Simple and Extensible PHP Dumper). This bundle provides an easy and extensible var_dump/print_r replacement for Symfony2 projects, both in controllers or Twig templates.



slim

Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs. Slim is easy to use for both beginners and professionals. Slim favors cleanliness over terseness and common cases over edge cases. It's interface is simple, intuitive, and extensively documented — both online and in the code itself.



bugfree-dangerzone

A PHP namespace validator written in PHP. Type verification for PHP source, ensures uses and all types within a file verify against the projects auto loader.



Vagrant

A simple GUI to set up virtual machines for PHP development. You can create your box on your local machine (default behaviour) or create a new instance on a few hosting providers.



Criterion: A PHP CI Server

This week the Romhut team released an open source project that has been aggressively developed over the last few weeks. It started as a personal tool to test our many private repositories in a controlled environment but quickly evolved into a fully fledged, generic open source continuous integration server. Thanks to hours of discussion and endless commits (mainly from @scottymeuk), Criterion was born.



sausage

A PHP framework for the Sauce Labs REST API. Your one-stop shop for everything Selenium + Sauce Labs + PHP. This is a set of classes and libraries that make it easy to run your Selenium tests, either locally or on Sauce Labs. You run the tests with PHPUnit.



grunt

Inspired by Ruby's Capistrano, Grunt is a PHP library for executing commands in parallel on multiple remote machines, via SSH. Specifically, this library was written to simplify and automate deployment of PHP applications to distributed environments.



Jig

Lightweight, fast, flexible PHP templating system. Jig - "A device that holds a piece of machine work and guides the tools operating on it." Or to put it another way, a jig allows you to work fast with sharp tools without cutting your fingers off.



transmission

A fully-tested PHP JSON-RPC client library for Transmission



fenom

A fast template engine for PHP



PHP Markdown Lib

It’s time for PHP Markdown to become a mature well-packaged PHP library instead of a hybrid file that tries to be everything for everyone.





