XHP: Inline XML For PHP

Anyone developing with PHP quickly learns that PHP’s ability to generate HTML is both a blessing and a curse. While PHP supports the ability to generate dynamic websites and HTML, it often creates kludgy and difficult code. Facebook, one of the world’s largest consumers of PHP and fresh off their announcement of HipHop, has noted this problem as well, and decided to try and solve it by introducing XHP.

XHP, in a nutshell, is designed to augment the syntax of PHP to allow for inline XML to be included in PHP code. More simply put, XHP permits PHP to understand HTML syntax, eliminating the need for quotation marks, concatenation, escaping and all of the other headaches associated with including HTML directly into PHP code.

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Compiling HipHop-PHP on Ubuntu 9.10 64bit

Facebook recently open-sourced their new software, HipHop-PHP. HPHP compiles PHP source to very efficient C++, which is then compiled to an executable binary. After a few hiccups, building HPHP is surprisingly easy. HPHP must be compiled on a 64bit platform. If you only have a 32bit platform and you really want to play with it, set up a VM at Slicehost or Linode and compile it there (if you have a 32bit platform, you can’t install a 64bit VM). I eventually used my Linode account and built it there.

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HipHop for PHP finally released

An initial release of HipHop for PHP, Facebook’s PHP-to-C++ transformer, is finally available for download from Github.

HipHop comes with a number of rather specific requirements, including cmake 2.6 or higher, and several patches that need to be applied to libcurl and libevent in order for the project to compile against them.

Facebook employee (and core PHP contributor) Scott MacVicar announced the availability of the package through a post on the project’s Google group, adding that “while we’re running HipHop in production it might not yet be stable for you.”

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HipHop for PHP: First look

Just this tuesday Facebook announced a ambitious project called “HipHop for PHP”, if you missed it general opinion says you have been coding PHP in a cave. As I write this review no code has been posted yet, but Facebook has made a great move to open source the project so we can all get our hands on it, use it and contribute to it. So since the code is not out there yet, this is literally a first impression article based on the presentation made by Facebook and various posts from core PHP developers who got a first look at the technology before the release.

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Create better namespaces in PHP

PHP V5.3 introduces the ability to provide namespaces to your PHP classes, constants, and functions. Using namespaces allows you to avoid naming collisions and provide context for your PHP code. These tips provide a few guidelines for building your namespaces so that you get the most out of them.

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NetBeans 6.5 review

During the weekend, I tried out NetBeans 6.5 and its new PHP related functionality. I had earlier seen some quick shots of how the support was, and it seemed like a good contender for big names like Zend Studio.

What features does NetBeans 6.5 have for PHP developers? How does it compare against Zend Studio for Eclipse?

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10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming

PHP programming has climbed rapidly since its humble beginnings in 1995. Since then, PHP has become the most popular programming language for Web applications. Many popular websites are powered by PHP, and an overwhelming majority of scripts and Web projects are built with the popular language.

Because of PHP’s huge popularity, it has become almost impossible for Web developers not to have at least a working knowledge of PHP. This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.

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Building Your Own Desktop Notepad Application Using PHP-GTK

If you think building a desktop application such as Notepad is difficult, think again. If you use PHP-GTK, it's almost ridiculously easy. This article will show you how. By the time you're done, you'll have a full cross-platform application in about 100 lines.

Getting Started with Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT)

"Are you ready to take a step beyond writing code in a text editor like UltraEdit, BBEdit, or TextMate? Would you like to see those PHP and JavaScript syntax errors in the editor, without transferring files to the server or opening a browser? If so, then you're ready to jump into the world of the IDE — Integrated Development Environment. I'll compare the free, open source Eclipse IDE to a few of its commercial competitors Then we'll go through the steps to install Eclipse PDT All-In-One, the Zend Debugger, JSEclipse, and Subclipse."

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The 10 unknown features about PHP

Here’s a short list of cool features that might have slipped under your radar as well.

FreeBSD: Apache + MySQL + PHP

"Setting up a LAMP server is a common task for systems administrators, and FreeBSD is one of the most reliable and stable operating systems available. You can swap out the L in LAMP with F for FreeBSD to build a fast and reliable Web server..."

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Simple Easy Parallel Processing in PHP

The proliferation of multicore CPUs and the inability of our learned CPU vendors to squeeze many more GHz into their designs means that often the only way to get additional performance is by writing clever parallel software.

One problem we were having is that some of our batch processing jobs were taking too long to run. In order to speed the processing, we tried to split the processing file into half, and let a separate PHP process run each job. Given that we were using a dual core server, each process would be able to run close to full speed (subject to I/O constraints).

Here is our technique for running multiple parallel jobs in PHP.

PHP 5.3.0alpha2 is released

"If you check the qa website you will see that there is a new alpha release of our next minor version PHP 5.3.0 out that is awaiting your testing (remember no whining about BC breaks if you did not test the pre-release versions)."

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Call for proposals of requirements for a complete support of Phar archives in Eclipse PDT

As PHP 5.3 is marching towards the final release, Eclipse PDT's next version needs to support its new features. Two major additions to PHP 5.3 are namespaces and bundling the Phar extension. Especially used in combination, libraries could/should be distributed like Jars in the Java world.

The Phar extension provides a way to put entire PHP libraries or applications into a single file called a "Phar" (PHP Archive) for easy distribution and installation. Phar archives are best characterized as a convenient way to group several files into a single file. As such, a Phar archive provides a way to distribute a complete PHP library or application in a single file and run it from that file without the need to extract it to disk. Additionally, Phar archives can be executed by PHP as easily as any other file, both on the command line and from a web server. Phar is kind of like a thumb drive for PHP applications.

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Upcoming features in PHP 5.3

"PHP 5.3 alpha1 just got released yesterday, and I thought this might be a good time to list some of the new things that are coming, and how it could benefit you. Even though its a minor release, a lot of new features made it in and from a marketing standpoint it should have really been 6.0, if you'd ask me."

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Adobe AMF Support in Zend Framework

"This ZF component will allow for client-side applications built with Flex and Adobe AIR to communicate easily and efficiently with PHP on the server-side."

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Setting up FAMP on FreeBSD

Setting up a LAMP server is a common task for systems administrators, and FreeBSD is one of the most reliable and stable operating systems available. You can swap out the L in LAMP with F for FreeBSD to build a fast and reliable Web server.

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PHP 5.3 alpha1 released!

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release (Windows binaries will appear in the next few days) of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.

There have been a great number of other additions and improvements, but here is a short overview of the most important changes:

* Namespaces (documentation maybe out dated)

* Late static binding and __callStatic

* Lambda functions and closures

* Addition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of
alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensions

* Optional cyclic garbage collection

* Optional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysql

* Windows older than Windows 2000 (Windows 98, NT4, etc.) are not supported anymore
(details)

* New syntax features like NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut "?:"

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Set Up Eclipse PDT 2.0 On Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede)

This is a howto about setting up a proffessional PHP IDE using Eclipse by hand. I'll be using Eclipse PDT for PHP support. The PDT project provides a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project encompasses all development components necessary to develop PHP and facilitate extensibility. It leverages the existing Web Tools Project in providing developers with PHP capabilities. We will have in the end features like subversion support, edit remote files, database development, debugging and more.

Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL

"We are happy to announce the release of a new set of Infrastructure Stacks: LAPPStack, MAPPStack and WAPPStack. These stacks provide an easy to install distribution of Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP and supporting libraries. The user-friendly installer allows users to quickly install and configure a PHP-PostgreSQL platform on Linux, Windows and OS X."

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