All news about PHP

‘Ten years ago,’ Coach Wei tells Jeremy Geelan in this exclusive interview with AJAXWorld Magazine, ‘I was as a poor graduate student naive enough to start a company at the bottom of the ‘dot-bomb’ burst. I learned so much coping with the ‘nuclear winter,’ raising $18M in financing, working through all the challenges associated with the market, dealing with investors and everything else. I only wish that I had known all this before I got started.’

While AJAX, as XML co-inventor Tim Bray puts it, ‘tries to do everything in the browser using just what the browser ships with,’ RIA frameworks like Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and JavaFX aim to take developers beyond the limitations of the browser. ‘I’m not brave enough to predict who wins,’ Bray notes, ‘but I do predict that 2008 will be a crucial year; either RIAs enter the mainstream, or they start to smell like a red herring left in the sun.’

christian.einfeldt writes “According to open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver, Microsoft will be deprecating certain functionality in its Microsoft Office Open XML specification. Ossendryver says the move is an attempt to quiet critics of the specification in the run up to the crucial February ISO vote. The Microsoft-led industry standards group formally offering OOXML confirms in a 21 December 2007 announcement that issues related to the ‘leap year bug’, VML, compatibility settings such as ‘AutoSpaceLikeWord95′ and others will be ‘extracted from the main specification and relocated to an independent annex in DIS 29500 for deprecated functionality.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

yali writes “The U.S. Transportation and Security Administration has issued new rules limiting travel with lithium batteries. As of January 1, no spare lithium batteries are allowed in checked luggage. Batteries carried in the cabin are subject to limitations on per-battery and total lithium content, and spare batteries must have the terminals covered. If you’re returning home from the holidays with new toys, be sure to check out the new restrictions before you pack.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ponca City, We Love You writes “Daily Domainer has a story alleging that there may be a leak that allows domain tasters to intercept, analyze and register your domain ideas in minutes. ‘Every time you do a whois search with any service, you run a risk of losing your domain,’ says one industry insider. ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC ) has not been able to find hard evidence of Domain Name Front Running but they have issued an advisory (pdf) for people to come forward with hard evidence it is happening. Here is how domain name research theft crimes can occur and some tips to avoiding being a victim.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ivo Jansch is very happy to announce that it’s official he will be authoring a book for php|architect all about PHP in the Enterprise:

It will be one of the first books about PHP that will not cover PHP code. It is loosely based on my ‘enterprise PHP development’ talk at the Zend UK Business Conference last year. It will cover the entire development lifecycle of a software project, but targeted at PHP development teams.

He points out that the first version of the book will be handed in in March so ideally it will be released soon after that. He’s also open to ideas/content suggestions/etc that you might want to post to his blog for consideration.

Evan Sims has official released his first version of a library he’s worked up to interface PHP with the GameFly.com video game rental service:

I’m releasing libGameFly, a PHP class for interacting with GameFly.com the video game rental service. At the moment it’s very simple, just allowing you to expose your GameFly queue as a native PHP class and doing… well, whatever the hell you want with it.

It works with some of the feed functionality (RSS/APIs) to grab data about users’ accounts. You can download the code here from the project’s Google Code page.

The ProDevTips website has posted part seven of their series covering the construction of a community site (or CMS) with the combination of Smarty and the Zend Framework.

Since XOOPS didn’t do it for me when it comes to this project I have started with the blog component. As it turns out, a blog is more complicated than you would think. Therefore this part will not cover the whole component, only as far as I’ve gotten at the moment. Covering the whole process in one piece would make it a very long piece indeed.

He provides the code examples and complete SQL structure to get the blog up and rolling as well as some handy tips and explanations along the way.