Hello again from sunny Watford.



We have some great articles for you this week, including an interesting insight into the theory that it was actually Wordpress that made PHP popular, and not PHP frameworks.



Also, with the Web and PHP Conference coming up next month, you can have your say in the program by voting for your favourite speaker.



Love to hear your thoughts and opinions on all we do here at PHPWeekly.



Enjoy the sunshine, see you next week!



Katie

Articles PHP Development and Cloud Computing

An interview with Cloud Computing champion Vito Chin.



Facebook Invents a PHP Virtual Machine

Social networking giant Facebook has taken another step at making the PHP Web programming language run more quickly. The company has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems.



7 Reasons Why Wordpress Made PHP Popular, not PHP Frameworks

Recently the Tiobe Index published an update of their programming language index on which they claim PHP has been raising in popularity due to Zend Framework 2, but they do not justify why. Read this article to learn about the opinion why this claim is unfounded and PHP popularity has more to do with Wordpress than with PHP, as one language may be more popular than PHP Frameworks.



PHP Phragmentation - Get Off My Lawn!

Daily grumblings of MrSmileyFace



The Seven Stages of Drupal Development

Read this recent presentation by Fredric Mitchell, from the Twin Cities Drupal Camp last week.



News and Announcements



PHP OCI8 2.0.0-devel for Oracle Database is on PECL

PHP OCI8 2.0.0-devel is now available on PECL (and in the PHP 'master' branch). This is a development release, so changes may occur.



Web & PHP Conference Sep 16-18th - Timetable Preview

Web & PHP Conference has previewed the timetable for their FREE conference. The conference welcomes the PHP community to an event that boasts some of the greatest speakers - from the already renowned in the PHP industry to the rising stars; to great content and sessions. All this can be accessed completely free! Head to the website for more information. Make sure to register for your place at the event!



Web & PHP Conference - Session Vote

For this year’s FREE Web & PHP Conference in San Jose, Sep 16-18, we want YOU to get involved and have YOUR say in the program. We have reserved a number of places in the schedule to be picked by the community, decided by an online vote. Each week, we’ll be putting up a group of four abstracts and asking you to vote on your favourite. This week in Round 4, battling it out for your vote, we have: Evan Coury v Mike Stowe v Joshua Thijssen v Matt Simonsen. Who is your favourite? Who do you want to see speaking at the Conference? Make your choice and you can see them give their session... and it won't even cost you a penny or a cent! Have your say and vote now!



Ski PHP Conference - Call For Speakers

The Utah PHP Users Group is organising the Ski PHP Conference 2014, in Salt Lake City on January 17th and 18th 2014. They have started a call for speakers. Learn here about their generous speaker package, in order to get the best speakers possible. If you are interested in speaking submit your proposal by August 31st.



Reading and Viewing

The Power of PHP - Meet Michelangelo van Dam

In our first "video podcast", I recently spoke with prominent PHP developer Michelangelo van Dam (aka @DragonBe) about PHP, its history, current trends toward convergence and compatibility, use in the enterprise, and where Drupal fits in the picture. This conversation is a follow-up to Michelangelo's guest blogpost on Acquia.com: "The power of PHP: The Swiss Army Knife of Digital".



Instant PHP Web Scraping (by Jacob Ward, published 26th July 2013)

Get up and running with the basic techniques of web scraping using PHP.



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

Rockmongo for PHP-Powered MongoDB Administration

By default, MongoDB provides the interactive JavaScript-based mongo shell which can be used for performing database operations. Although this shell may be the best approach to start with MongoDB queries, a GUI tool to administer the service is always useful.



Phalcon PHP - Higher Performance Web Framework

Phalcon PHP is a web framework delivered as a C extension providing high performance and lower resource consumption. Phalcon PHP is written in C with platform independence in mind. As a result, Phalcon PHP is available on Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, You can either download a binary package for the system of your choice or build it from sources.



Stringy

A PHP library with a variety of string manipulation functions with multibyte support. Offers both OO method chaining and a procedural-style static wrapper. Compatible with PHP 5.3+. Inspired by underscore.string.js.



eloquent/pathogen

Pathogen is a general purpose library for path manipulation. Pathogen supports file system paths including Unix and Windows style paths, but is truly a general-purpose path implementation, capable of representing URI paths and other path-like structures while providing a comprehensive API.



Fetch

Fetch is a library for reading email and attachments, primarily using the POP and IMAP protocols. Fetch was part of a large project, Mortar, which is hosted on Google Code. It is currently being migrated over to Github, as well as being updated to support modern php features. While the project is in flux I encourage you to try it out, but be careful about using it in a production environment without proper testing.



PHPUnit -Coverage-Listener

PHPUnit Coverage Listener is a utility library that allows you to process the PHPUnit code-coverage information and send it into some remote location via cURL. The main goal of the PHPunit Coverage Listener package is to provide a mechanism that generates a payload data (from PHPUnit code-coverage information) named coverage.json and send it to remote location.



Introducing Nanimator Library - for Nano Animations

It’s primary purpose is to animate a set of DOM elements inside a container, mainly translate, translateX, translateY and opacity. It also reduces your code by writing almost nothing at all, except initialising the library.



eloquent/schemer

Generic schema validation library for PHP, based on JSON Schema.



LitleCo/little-sdk-for-PHP

Litle & Co. powers the payment processing engines for leading companies that sell directly to consumers through internet retail, direct response marketing (TV, radio and telephone), and online services. Litle & Co. is the leading, independent authority in card-not-present (CNP) commerce, transaction processing and merchant services.



saasu

This is a PHP Client library for Saasu, the online accounting software. This library is designed to make it easy to work with the Saasu API for general purpose.



ramsey/uuid

A PHP 5.3+ library for generating and working with RFC 4122 version 1, 3, 4, and 5 universally unique identifiers (UUID). Much inspiration for this library came from the Java and Python UUID libraries.



SocalNick/ScnSocialAuth

Uses the HybridAuth PHP library to Enable authentication via Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, etc for the ZfcUser ZF2 module.



PHP Mongo Query

PHPMongoQuery implements MongoDB queries in PHP, allowing developers to query a 'document' (an array containing data) against a Mongo query object, returning a boolean value for pass or fail. Additionally a set of documents can be queried to filter them, as queries are used in MongoDB.