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Proven Zend Studio technology powered by Eclipse
Zend Studio for Eclipse combines proven Zend technology and the Eclipse PHP Developers Tools (PDT) project to create the world’s most powerful IDE for developing rich Web applications. By combining proven Zend PHP editor technology, integration with Zend Platform and Zend Core, built in database connectivity, integrated debugging , profiling, code coverage and testing capabilities, team support with extensible version control support, support for Zend Framework, support for Web Services, comprehensive with multi-language support and extensibility provided by the vibrant Eclipse open source community, developers have the tools they need for support of the entire PHP application lifecycle.

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Curiosity about the Reliance social networking site BigAdda led me to PHPizabi.

It seems that BigAdda is completely done with  PHPizabi an open source social networking platform.

Way to go PHP.

Sebastian Bergmann points out a new feature that PHPUnit (the popular PHP unit testing tool) now has - parallel_test_execution allowing for each test to execute on a separate PHP process.

The advantages of this include full test isolation and the fact that a test can now cause a PHP fatal error or even a segmentation fault of the PHP interpreter without interrupting the test execution.

He does mention, however, that it can cause a bit more overhead for larger testing suites since it needs to create a new process (complete with memory usage) for each running test. There are also coding issues that could be thrown off by this option (he gives an example of an inheritance issue with eZ Components).

He also notes some of his thoughts on how to control/configure the process (like in a configuration file) and via an “@isolated” notation to make it easy to do it dynamically.

On the RegDeveloper website, there’s a new tutorial posted that covers the creation of both PDF files and Excel reports from inside of PHP (with the help of the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR component and the ClibPDF PHP Library (bundled with PHP 5.3).

Given the prevelance of PHP, Excel and PDF it’s fortunate there exists class libraries for the generation of PDF documents and Excel spreadsheets using PHP.

They start with the PDF generation and show the installation process for ClibPDF and an example of creating a document on the fly. Their example sets up a title, some content text and a table of information. Creating the Excel spreadsheet is even simpler with the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer - installation via a PEAR channel and defining the worksheet, fonts and content are quick and easy function calls.

Marco Tabini (of php|architect magazine) has posted some of his thoughts on why PHP just might be the “new Java” in the upcoming year.

Historically, PHP has been developed following the scratch-an-itch method [...]. This development process makes for some haphazard functionality, and has, in the past, been the source of many annoyances that need to be handled with extreme care.

He does mention some of the good things that have come out of this process like OOP in PHP4, SimpleXML functionality and type hinting but warns that if things swing too much the other way (planning out everything, only adding things by committee) that PHP might swerve towards a dangerous precedent - the Java community’s mentality.

Cal has posted the latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions podcast series today - episode four of Thornsten Rinne’s “IBM DB2 with PHP 5.2 and AJAX” talk given at this past year’s ZendCon.

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today’s session as we listen to Thornsten Rinne present “IBM DB2 with PHP 5.2 and AJAX”.

You know the drill - you can get it one of three ways: , listen on the page or the easiest option - subscribe to the feed and get each new episode delivered right to you.

On PHPBuilder.com today there’s this new tutorial for those out there at the most basic level of PHP development looking to get up to speed on what PHP is and what makes it one of the most popular web scripting languages out there.

PHP (or Personal HomePage Tools) was created by Rasmus Lerdorf over three years ago to track visitors to his homepage. PHP has since evolved into a powerful server-side markup language with syntax that resembles a mix between Perl and C.

They cover all of the key questions - what is PHP, why use it and a simple explanation of a basic script (outputting the date) as well as links to other external resources where you can get more information.