PHP5 Magazine

VS.Php 2.5 integrates ZendFramework with Visual Studio

2008-06-23T06:33:29Z

Miami, FL, June 23, 2008: Jcx.Software today announces the release of VS.Php 2.5 for Visual Studio 2008, a Php integrated development environment (IDE) for Microsoft Visual Studio. Like previous versions of VS.Php, it comes in three different editions:

VS.Php 2.5 for Visual Studio 2008
VS.Php 2.5 for Visual Studio 2005
VS.Php 2.5 Standalone Edition, designed for customers that do not own Visual Studio.

VS.Php 2.5 includes the Zend Framework and integrates it seamlessly to the Visual Studio IDE. The Zend Framework integration includes the following features:

Zend Framework integration to the Php preview built-in engine.
Intellisense support for Zend Framework classes, including support for class auto loaders.
Zend Framework Model-View-Controller project wizard.

PHP|architect Books : Turn your PHP5 upgrade into success

2008-06-13T12:17:16Z

PHP|architect have just released php|architect's Guide to PHP 5 Migration, a book written by Stefan Priebsch. The guide in 250 pages aims to help developers migrate successfuly from PHP4 to PHP5. php|architect's Guide to PHP 5 Migration is available since 6 June in PDF format and will be available in 20 June in print format.

The topics covered include:

Migration Concepts
Strategies for Migration
Migration Aspects
Preparing the Migration
The Migration
After the Migration
Tools
Migrating PHP Code

This is the only book you will need to help you through the rough spots when migrating your PHP apps from PHP4 to PHP5. Not only is this an extremely comprehensive and in-depth resource, it will show you virtually every pitfall you may encounter and will undoubtedly make your migration as smooth as possible.

PHPDevShell 1.0.0, PHP Web Administration Framework Released

2008-06-05T17:37:47Z

PHPDevShell is a stable, secure, fast PHP Web administration framework. It allows rapid deployment of Web based PHP applications. Robust, secure, clean, fast, including many administrative functions, the framework supports an unlimited number of users, user groups, security levels, menu tree levels, and menus.

Latest update include major feature and stability enhancements in the core, database layer, GUI, security, template engine, caching, gzipping, and navigation system, with all reported bugs fixed. PHPDevShell is available under the GNU (LGPL) Open Source License.

Introducing to Xinc, Continuous integration server in PHP5

2008-05-25T11:43:05Z

If we talk about PHP5 test and deployment, a solution come in mind Xinc, the continuous integration server in PHP5. The solution provides a built-in support to Subversion and Phing, and could be easily extended to work with alternative version control or build tools.

The interest of Xinc is especially for projects with many developers working in the same time, everyone can commit changes to an SVN server, where Xinc listen to changes and triggers different build script if a change is detected. After building the project, Xinc reacts on the result of the build. Depending on whether the build was successful or failed it triggers special publishing scripts, which can deploy software, send notification emails or create deliverables.

Xinc runs as a daemon process in the background processing multiple projects. The projects itself are defined in xml and make use of tasks (defined in Plugins) to run the build process.

WebMesh PHP5 Framework

2008-03-14T05:37:02Z

WebMesh framework version 0.11.2 have just been released, based strongly in PHP5 and proposes a standard structure for PHP projects with intention of:

- Force a better organization of the your project classes.
- Encorage the usage of the PHP version 5.
- Increase the code reuse level
- Becomes it a collaborative framework, in other words, which all contribute with new classes, abstrations, libraries, modules or frameworks to be integrated it.

WebMesh is similar to the Geronimo project idea and more friendly to the Java adopts. This project also includes two example projects to show the framework functionalities:

- A simple system with login/logout (webmesh-example_0.11.2).
- A newsletter sender (newsletter_1.1).

Learn Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 with new book from Packt

2007-12-19T22:12:07Z

Packt is pleased to announce the release of a new book titled Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5. Written by Hasin Hayder, this book will teach users to understand the core object-oriented programming concepts with PHP and to write manageable applications with ease.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. It was basically introduced to ease the development process as well as reduce the time of development by reducing the amount of code needed.

PHP is one of the most popular languages for web application development, and PHP5 supports OOP very well. This book will help users to master core OOP features in PHP as well as advanced Topics like Design Patterns including Model-View-Controller (MVC), and Unit Testing.

PHP 5.2.5 Released and More Stable

2007-11-12T07:57:16Z

PHP 5.2.5 have just been released with over 60 bug fixes, including security fixes, but the main purpose of this release is stability according to PHP.net official announcement. Many hosting providers are currenty moving all their customers from PHP4 to PHP5, such Hostdepot, who announced that complete move from PHP 4.3.10 to PHP 5.2.4 will be done on December 1st. More details on this 5.2.5 release are available here. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.5:

Fixed dl() to only accept filenames. Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
Fixed dl() to limit argument size to MAXPATHLEN (CVE-2007-4887). Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
Fixed htmlentities/htmlspecialchars not to accept partial multibyte sequences. Reported by Rasmus Lerdorf
Fixed possible triggering of buffer overflows inside glibc implementations of the fnmatch(), setlocale() and glob() functions. Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
Fixed "mail.force_extra_parameters" php.ini directive not to be modifiable in .htaccess due to the security implications. Reported by SecurityReason.
Fixed bug #42869 (automatic session id insertion adds sessions id to non-local forms).
Fixed bug #41561 (Values set with php_admin_* in httpd.conf can be overwritten with ini_set()).

PHP 5.2.4 RC1 Ready for test

2007-08-07T10:57:40Z

Ilia just announced over his blog the availability of the first RC of PHP 5.2.4. Everyone is invited to try it and see how it behaves, then report test to PHP QA team.

This release have been long in the making so the changelog is a bit intimidating, so we definitely need a lot of testing for this release. I would like to ask everyone to give this RC a shot and see how it behaves with their code and hopefully not find any regressions. If you do find any, please let us know.

Andi Gutmans : Zend_View_Layout is high on our priority list

2007-07-11T22:28:08Z

In a discussion this week over the Zend Framework ML about a Zend Framework's roadmap, Andi Gutmans said that they are spending this week on planning. The good news for the Zend Framework community is that their voices reached the development team "finally", as Andi said "In any case, Zend_View_Layout is high on our priority list [...] So I believe this should move forward quickly soon and even if it's not in an official release you'll be able to pull it out of the incubator."

We have recently posted a note on Zend_view, and it's great to hear that something concrete is coming very soon.

Zend Framework 1.0.0 Released

2007-07-02T09:31:46Z

Today released Zend Framework 1.0.0, stable version of the Zend Framework after three release candidates and lots of bugfixes. The latest 1.0.0 fix about 46 issues since the RC3 in the Zend_Cache, Zend_Controller, Zend_Db, Zend_Db_Adapter_Db2, Zend_Db_Table, Zend_Debug, Zend_Filter / Zend_Validate, Zend_Gdata, Zend_Loader, Zend_Log, Zend_Mail, Zend_Memory, Zend_Pdf, Zend_Registry, Zend_Search_Lucene, Zend_Session, Zend_Translate, Zend_View, and Zend_XmlRpc_Client. There is no new feature since the RC version, but hope to see more change in the next releases especially in the Zend_view. Download Zend Framework 1.0.0

Symfony 1.0.4 Bugfix Release

2007-06-21T17:44:55Z

A new bugfix release of Symfony framework have just been announced over the Symfony's blog. Symfony 1.0.4 fixed bugs include :

fixed sfBrowser keeps previous Dom is response is not XHTML (#1853)
fixed generator themes in the project data directory do not override data in plugin directory (#1813)
fixed $request->hasError() should return true on errors with empty message (#1864)
fixed bug for adjacent CSS selector
fixed a bug in URL generation for route names having a star in the middle

Download Symfony 1.0.4 from the project's website, or using PEAR with : pear upgrade symfony/symfony

Zend_View, the Zend Framework's Nightmare

2007-06-18T11:58:09Z

From the PHP Frameworks actually available, Zend Framework is definitely one of the best, especially if we talk about performance and architecture. Everything is almost perfect, until we reach the Zend_View, which is supposed to show the capabilities of the framework. Compared to many other frameworks such Symfony and CodeIgniter, Zend_View is very limited and can't create complex views with slots and partials.

A quick look over the Zend Framework ML and you will see the number of discussions and requests about Zend_View features, but is anyone listening over there ? Pa'draic Brady is working on a solution not ready yet and which could help, but I think it's something very important which should be implemented in the framework's core. Working on Zend_View and creating your own plugins is possible, but it's a very hard task, compared to the facilities offered in others frameworks. If you don't feel the difference try a complex view on Zend Framework, then on CodeIgniter or Symfony, and see by yourself.

PHP 5.2.3 Security Release

2007-06-02T21:44:19Z

PHP Team released PHP 5.2.3 with many security and stability improvements as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. From the ChangeLog :

Fixed an integer overflow inside chunk_split() (by Gerhard Wagner, CVE-2007-2872)
Fixed possible infinite loop in imagecreatefrompng. (by Xavier Roche, CVE-2007-2756)
Fixed ext/filter Email Validation Vulnerability (MOPB-45 by Stefan Esser, CVE-2007-1900)
Fixed bug #41492 (open_basedir/safe_mode bypass inside realpath()) (by bugs dot php dot net at chsc dot dk)
Improved fix for CVE-2007-1887 to work with non-bundled sqlite2 lib.
Added mysql_set_charset() to allow runtime altering of connection encoding.

To upgrade there is an excellent migration guide over the php.net website, and detailing changes introduced in PHP 5.2.3. Download PHP 5.2.3

PHP 5.2.2 and PHP 4.4.7 Released

2007-05-06T23:13:53Z

The month of PHP Bugs (March 2007) started giving its fruits with the release of PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 which fixed the majority of bugs and issues identified by Stefan Esser as well as some security bugs that were identified by other security researchers as well as PHP's own developers. These releases are major stability and security enhancements of the 5.x and 4.4.x branches, and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. Release details are available in the release announcement for 5.2.2 and for a full list of changes check the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

While majority of the issues outlined above are local, in some circumstances given specific code paths they can be triggered externally. Therefor, we strongly recommend that if you use code utilizing the functions and extensions identified as having had vulnerabilities in them, you consider upgrading your PHP.

PHP 5.2.2 RC2 Released

2007-04-28T11:25:52Z

Ilia Alshanetsky announced the availability of the 2nd release candidate of PHP 5.2.2 which can be downloaded from

http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.2RC2.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 4752195cc5418686914ee1db08774763)
http://downloads.php.net/edink/php-5.2.2RC2-Win32.zip (md5sum: afa59d4219d83b7281f0101c9dae947e)

There is no major regression from RC1 to RC2, mainly a resolution of pre-existing issues. The goal of this RC2 is to proceed to the final release next Thursday. So everyone is welcomed to test heavily PHP 5.2.2 RC2 and report any problem or bug found to get it fixed in time.