As of February 10th, 2010, jQuery has disabled two popular features, the UI downloader and the Theme Builder. Users visiting those pages on the web site are redirected to a page explaining the decision.

We are aware of the problems with the Download Builder and ThemeRoller and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. We have disabled those components on our web site until the problems with these components can be resolved.

While the problems are being worked out, users are being offered two jQuery UI zip files:

• Development bundle, which contains all of the jQuery UI plugins as well as the base theme
• Themes package, which includes all 21 pre-built themes.

Slipped into today’s announcement that Zend Framework 1.10.1 was released was the news that the Zend Framework team has improved the manual. With the release of Zend Framework 1.10 and 1.10.1 the manual has added, among other things, user contributed comments similar to the PHP manual.

Rob Allen, long time Zend Framework contributor has this to say about the new additions to the manual.

“1.10 significantly improved the manual with the new Learning Zend Framework section and the addition of comments This has been due to the excellent work by ZF contributors to the project enabling the Zend team time to concentrate on documentation during the 1.10 release cycle.”

The PHP community is blessed with excellent documentation and while Zend Framework has copious documentation it has long had a reputation of being difficult to navigate. These new changes are aimed at fixing that perception.

php|architect is proud to continue its long tradition of high-quality web developer training with two new classes, WordPress Essentials and HTML/CSS for Developers. Both of these classes are part of our new Everyday Web Series.

WordPress Essentials

Developers and deployers alike will like this class—a 9 hour introduction to setting up and configuring the most popular blogging platform on the web. WordPress Essentials covers topic like setting up, securing and styling your WP installation and provides an excellent starter course if you’re interested in learning more about this popular blogging and content management platform.

Click here for more information or to register for WordPress Essentials.

HTML/CSS for Developers

Do you and your web designer speak different languages? This could will teach you to “speak designer.” With a focus on the technical aspects of HTML and CSS development, this class is great for both developers and designers. Bring your HTML/CSS skills up to speed and make your designer a happy person.

Click here for more information or to register for HTML/CSS for Developers.

New price on PHP 5 Essentials

PHP 5 Essentials, one of our most popular courses, just got a lot better. Now you can get the same great course for less than half of its original price: for only $400, you get 19 hours of instructor-led learning from the convenience of your home or ffice. This is a great course and we’ve made it even better!

Click here for more information or to register for PHP 5 Essentials.

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.

XHP also does one other amazing thing: it automatically makes your HTML safe. Rather than having to use the escape functions on your HTML to ensure that PHP variables are safe for output, XHP automatically does this, ensuring that anything you output will not result in an XSS or other malicious attack. This builds in security by default, and helps prevent accidental security holes.

Another feature of XHP is that it automatically detects mistakes in your markup at parse time, and reports them along with PHP markup mistakes. This means that it’s impossible to generate malformed pages using XHP, because it would generate a parser error rather than allow such a page to be displayed. XHP actually reads the HTML syntax, ensuring that your HTML is well-formed and correct.

Rasmus Lerdorf does a writeup of the performance implications related to XHP, pointing out that PHP does take a significant performance hit with it turned on. He also points out that PHP’s use of APC, along with HipHop probably mitigates this performance impact, but reminds people that they should consider the impact on their own applications before installing and using the extension themselves. That being said, it’s unlikely that XHP will remain the same forever; performance improvements are likely to continue, especially if other developers like and improve upon the existing extension.

XHP is available now for download on GitHub. Bear in mind you’ll need Flex for installation. You can also read the documentation for more information.

This edition, which shall henceforth be referred to as the one in which Arbi forgot to turn off the Stalker button on his microphone, features guest star Ben Ramsey as we cover one topic:

• Facebook’s HipHop

Yes—that’s right: for the first time in the history of our podcast, we’ve managed to stick to one topic. We are as astonished about this as you are.

Show notes

We might only be covering HipHop, but there’s plenty of interesting things happening around it:

• Facebook’s original announcement
• Marco’s blog post
• HipHop’s github page
• ReadWriteWeb’s article on HipHop

Also, in case you were wondering what inspired the seafaring puns that Keith and Cal start spewing out around midway through the ‘cast… we’ve been talking cruises again—and the jokes just keep on coming.

Subscribe to the Notes

If you have stumbled upon this page and aren’t a regular listner, subscribe to the php|architect podcast Show Notes mailing list. Each week, when we release an episode, we’ll send you an email with all the links and notes from that show.

By now everyone in the PHP community – and most technical leads at companies who rely on PHP – should have heard about Facebook’s revolutionary new open source tool, HipHop. HipHop,
like PHP itself, stands the chance of being a serious game changing technology. Their stated goal was to allow their developers to continue to enjoy the speed of development that PHP gives them while improving the overall performance of their application by transforming it into C++. The resulting “transformed and compiled” application can consume up to 50% less CPU resources than the native PHP application.

There have been attempts in the past to create a PHP compiler to try and improve its speed. There are two points that set HipHop apart from the pack though.

• First, HipHop does not attempt to compile PHP. It reads PHP code and writes C++ code that is then compiled. The distinction is very important.
• Second, unlike other projects, this one is actually being used in production on one of the largest web sites on the Internet.

HipHop was not an idea that someone just wanted to write, like all good open source projects, it was written to scratch an itch. Facebook needed to increase the performance of each server they were deploying in an attempt to reduce the number of new machines they had to bring online to keep up with their demand. However, they did not want to lose the one thing that allowed them to innovate quickly, PHP. Thus was born, HipHop.

Currently HipHop supports about 90% of PHP and the core extensions, so it is not yet a perfect tool. However, development is ongoing and as Facebook opens up the technology for others to get involved, expect to see not only 100% coverage but extensions from PECL to begin to be supported as well.

While all of this is great for Facebook and the PHP community at large, it will take companies deploying applications on PHP a while to understand this new technology and begin deploying it own their own. We at Blue Parabola are doing all we can to help this transition.

“We think that HipHop has the potential to bring significant changes to the way we use and interact with PHP; as a result, we are going to support it through a series of diverse initiatives—from knowledge to consulting.” – said Marco Tabini, CEO of Blue Parabola.

How php|a and Blue Parabola will support HipHop
First, we will be opening a new section of the php|architect website with content and discussion on HIPHOP starting February 15th, 2010. This will be the repository for content and links to content about HipHop. Our hope is to build a central resource that developers, admins and managers can all use to find answers for HipHop related questions.

Second, in Q2 we will announce consulting services that will be designed to help companies move their applications to HipHop. We will help with everything from pre-move code analysis, initial setup and deployment and finally, training PHP developers on how to write HipHop friendly code in the future.

Third, in Q3, we will announce training offerings to assist companies in training their developers on how to work with HipHop. This will include not only best practices for development but deployment and tooling training as well.

We are really excited at the possibilities that HipHop can offer to companies and want to help spread the word about it. Make sure you get involved. As you and your company start looking at HipHop, let us know what you think. If you blog about it, make sure you send us the link. This could be good for us all and we want to make sure everyone has all the information they need to use this great new tool.

Paul M. Jones, founder and lead developer of the Solar Framework for PHP, recently announced the release of Solar Framework 1.0.0Beta4. The very complete and copious release notes can be found here.

In reading the release notes, the main change in Beta4 seems to deal with how models handle child records.

To recap the problem, I very much want to remove the need for the following idiom in records where you have to access a related object:

// where 'foo' is a related record or collection ...
 
if (! $this->foo) {
    $this->;foo = $this->newRelated('foo');
}
 
// ... now you can be sure that $this->foo is actually there

The idea is to have related data always come back as a record or collection, never as a null or empty array(), so that you do not have to check it every time for emptiness. I want to be able to get or set `$this->foo` and have it be there automatically.

Beyond this seemingly large change for a Beta release, there are also many smaller changes, additions, and fixes. Most notable among them seem to be improvements in the Solar manual. (This seems to be a theme these days) The Solar manual is now sporting 3 new chapters: Working with Models, Working with Related Models and Views and Layouts by Jon Elofson

The full release announcement can be found on the Solar blog or you can download it straight from the Solar home page.

Microsoft has announced a release of two new SQL Server service packs; SQL Server 2008 SP2 will be out in the third quarter of 2010, while SQL Server 2005 SP4 will see the light in the fourth quarter of 2010

The MSDN Blog reports that the SQL Server 2005 service pack release is due to the “current support volume as well as the fact that SQL Server 2005 will enter into extended support on 4/13/2011.” However, it also mentions that there were an overwhelming number of requests for another service pack for 2005 as well; therefore, despite SQL Server 2008 being out for over a year and a half now (it was originally released in August of 2008), a significant percentage of users are still using the 2005 edition. php|a was unable to find any official usage statistics comparing the two releases, but Microsoft obviously considers the 2005 usage great enough to warrant a fourth service pack.

Are sluggish IT spending trends preventing people from upgrading to 2008, or are there just not enough new business-critical features in 2008 to convince people that it’s worth the time and effort to switch? A few months after 2008’s release, unofficial performance testing showed no real performance gain in it; however, Visual Studio 2008 will not support SQL Server 2005 projects, so that may encourage upgrading to SQL Server 2008.

A newly-released version of WordPress fixes a potential data leak issue with the popular blogging system.

According to a post on the official WordPress Development blog, the problem at issue allows logged-in users to view trashed posts that belong to other authors.

This is the second maintenance release in the 2.9 series, which was originally released last December and introduced the trash feature for the first time.

The upgrade can be applied to an existing installation through its self-update feature or downloaded directly from the WordPress site.

The Apache Ant project, whose main purpose is the building of Java applications, has been updated to version 1.8.0 on February 8.

This update brings a number of enhancements to Ant, including a big speed improvement in certain cases caused by changes to the directory scanning code, better support for URL- and text-providing resources for data importation and proper handling of the if and unless attributes, in addition to a number of overall bug fixes (you can see the Apache Ant 1.8.0 release notes here).

The new release requires Java 1.4 and can be downloaded directly from the Ant website in either source of binary form.

For a PHP project build system that uses Apache Ant, check out Phing, originally developed by Andreas Aderhold for the Binarycloud project.