Manuel Lemos - phpclasses.org - posted an interview with Khaled Al-Shamaa, one of the very known PHP figures in the Arab world especially for his book "PHP and the Arabic language" and his classes around Arabic language usage within PHP. In the interview Khaled talked about himself, his experience, projects mainly with PHP and ar-php project.

Arabic is a language spoken in many countries. The number of PHP developers from countries that use the Arabic language has been growing a lot. Currently it represents almost 2% of the users that access the PHPClasses site.

Posted by Hatem at 5:58 AM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

Skill Testing Partner ExpertRating Launches New Code Testing Platform Exclusively On Elance

Mountain View, Calif. (November 17, 2009) - Elance, where companies hire and manage independent workers and teams online, announced today an expansion of its skill testing platform to augment Elance's existing 250 skill tests. The new Code Tests, developed in collaboration with partner ExpertRating, provide technical experts new ways to demonstrate their expertise in writing and debugging leading programming languages such as PHP and SQL.

To launch Code Tests, Elance is simultaneously announcing a 14 day "code-off" in PHP - currently the programming skill in highest demand on Elance -- offering $250 and a full-year premium membership to each of the coders who score in the Top 10 for PHP programming.

Information Technology is the largest category of work on Elance. The November edition of the monthly "Elance Work Index" shows that PHP programming has retained its #1 spot of skills in demand across all categories. "PHP continues to be the hottest technical skill on Elance. The addition of these new Code Tests gives employers yet another way to be certain that the talent they find on Elance has the skills required to get great results," said Jon Diller, VP of Elance's Provider Network. "Meanwhile, the best coders in the market can now further distinguish themselves to help them get paid for what they do best."

The new Code Tests require the test taker to work with actual code to solve a problem. Each test is made up of 10 questions with a time limit for completing the entire test with recommended time allocations for each question. The test taker will be scored on whether they are able to solve the problem in the allotted time, how concisely the code is written, and how efficiently it uses system resources. "We are pleased to partner with Elance and provide programmers with an opportunity to demonstrate verifiable expertise for key technology skills such as PHP, SQL and many more," said Ravi Saundh, Co-Founder of ExpertRating (www.ExpertRating.com).

Continue reading "Ready? Set? Code! Elance Introduces New Code Testing Platform And Sponsors PHP "Code-off"" »

Posted by Hatem at 5:48 AM to General | Permalink | Comments (1)

Microsoft IIS team released today the first beta of the Windows Cache extension for PHP (WinCache 1.0) for PHP 5.2 and 5.3. The new cache extension is a PHP accelerator that aims to increase PHP applications speed running on windows platform. The extension doesn't require any code change, it just need to be enabled in IIS. WinCache have many directives that could be enabled/disabled in php.ini and six utility functions to return extension-specific information about the cache internals.

Joe Stagner, posted an introduction to the windows cache extension and pointed to some notes about compatibilities :

• The extension can only be used with non-thread-safe builds of PHP
• The extension can only be used when IIS is configured to run PHP via FastCGI
• The Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP 5.3 can only be used with the x86 VC9 build of PHP 5.3.

The Windows Cache Extension includes 3 different types of caches. The following describes the purpose of each cache type and the benefits it provides.

Continue reading "Windows Cache Extension for PHP Released" »

Posted by Hatem at 8:23 PM to Dev Tools | Performance | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is a very good reading for the weekend, Jason Austin and Garrison Locke shared their experience on Zend DevZone since they discovered PHP the first time in 98, passing by their PHP 4 certification, ZendCon, Zend Framework, ... etc. Some of the interesting point they mentioned :

- Using Classes is not Object Oriented Design
- Never edit code on the server
- A sign with the aphorism "Do not reinvent the wheel until you know everything there is to know about wheels" was prominently displayed in our office.

Read Move That Bus at DevZone.

Posted by Hatem at 9:34 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gina Trapani, of LifeHacker, released an alpha preview of a new PHP web application Twitalytic which aims to provide Twitter data crawler, replies archiver, and statistics generator. After crawling your tweets, Twitalytic will provide a web interface with some key stats about your followers, friends, tweets, and replies. You can also export all your tweets in a text file, in addition to an extended view of tweets with conversation, mutual friends, ... etc. You can get also more details about your followers : most followed, least likely, earliest and former.

I realize there are ten dozen Twitter applications out there that do much of this, and possibly better. Creating yet another Twitter app is probably the most cliché development undertaking of the year, but I’ve had a ball using this little thing to teach myself a few things about the Twitter API, OAuth, and jQuery and brush up on my PHP and MySQL skills.

Twitalytic came also with a public timeline of your tweets with replies. As mentioned Gina, this is not ready yet for production, but if you have ideas or time you can contribute and improve the project. Gina did not mention any license for the code, I don't know if you can use the Creative Commons on her blog or better ask for more details about it.

Posted by Hatem at 8:25 AM to Twitter Hacks | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interoperability @ Microsoft have just announced today a new bridge for PHP developers to .NET through REST : PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services. ADO.NET Data Services have been recently added to the .NET Framework, it offer a simple way to expose any sort of data in a RESTful way. The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services is an open source project funded by Microsoft and developed by Persistent Systems. The blog post came with a sample demo showing how to run the PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET to create the PHP proxy classes, then to query over the data service and display data.

PHP Toolkit for ADO .NET Data Services enables PHP developers to access data services created using ADO .NET Data Services framework. The goal is to provide the similar functionality as .NET library to access and modify the data and its relationship using URIs which points to pieces of data integrated with the web.

Usage require PHP5 installed and configured on the machine where the ADO.NET Data Services toolkit is installed. Download PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services from codeplex.

Posted by Hatem at 5:44 PM to Dev Tools | General | PHP Frameworks | Permalink | Comments (0)