The PEAR blog has posted some handy instructions for those out there that want to get PEAR and PEAR2 checkouts working from the new Subversion repository (recently moved from CVS).

Now that pear2 is in svn.php.net, it is possible to do commits with
multiple packages using a feature of subversion called “sparse checkouts.” [...] Here is the version I used to set up pear and pear2 in a way that will allow committing to both pear and pear2 packages in a single commit.

Rasmus Lerdorf has written about the same thing for the main PHP side of things. All the commands you’ll need are there to get things set up and working more efficiently.

The Symfony blog has annoucned the Symfony Day Cologne event coming in September:

It is with great pleasure that I announce a new symfony event: symfony Day Cologne. symfony Day will be the first symfony conference in Germany. On september 4th 2009, symfony fans from Europe and beyond are invited to come visit the beautiful city of Cologne for excellent speakers, great discussions and an awesome party.

Registration is open and you can reserve your spot in the event’s website. The day will cost 80 Euro and includes food and drinks during the event.

If you’re planning on attending this year’s Zend/PHP Conference, you’ll be happy to know that the official schedule has been posted and allows you to make your very own customized version.

There’s more than fifty sessions at this year’s conference so narrowing it down to just what you want to see can make quite a bit of difference. Topics range anywhere from looks at various frameworks, using PHP 5.3, working with XML, best practices and interfacing PHP with Java.

There’s still lots of time to get in on the Early Bird Discount (ends August 28th) to get your pass to the conference for either all days or a pass minus the tutorials.

New on the Zend Developer Zone today Wil Sinclair has this new article looking at the Zend Server Community Edition and getting it set up on the EC2 service from Amazon via a special image they’ve already created.

The barrier to entry for EC2 is relatively low, but there are a few new concepts to get under your belt. The first- and possibly most important- decision you’ll face is what AMI to use. Zend has just made this decision a lot easier. We’ve prepared an AMI with a fully optimized, feature-complete installation of Zend Server CE.

The rest of the tutorial walks you through the process of getting the EC2 account up and running, a quick look at the AWS Management Console and how to get the Zend CE image out to the instance and up and running (responding to requests on port 18001).

If you’ve been planning on attending either the Miami, Washington/Baltimore or New York City stops of the CodeWorks 2009 conference, you’ll be happy to know they’ve announced the venues for each of the locations.

We’re happy to finally be able to announce the CodeWorks 09 locations for our Miami, Washington/Baltimore and New York City locations’”and, in case you were waiting to find out where each event was going to take place, we’re extending the early-early-bird special all the way to July 31st!

Here’s the list of locations:

• New York will be at the New York Marriott Brooklyn Bridge
• Washington/Baltimore will be at the Embassy Suites Old Town Alexandria
• Miami will be at the Hilton Miami Downtown Hotel

You can get more information about the conference (including how to register – the Early Bird special is still going) from the main conference website.

The Debuggable blog has posted an interview with Nate Abele (of the CakePHP project) they were able to do at this year’s CakeFest in Berlin.

Since there is still little public information about CakePHP 2.0 and especially the all-new 3.0, I decided to do a little interview with Nate Abele, lead developer of CakePHP.

They talk about what’s coming up in CakePHP 3.0, the upgrades being done to CakePHP 2.0, the use of non-relational data storage and a possible time for release for the CakePHP 3.0 branch.

Jim Plush is back with a third part of his look at rethinking models in Zend Framework applications (part one, part two), this time focusing on validation rules.

I’ve gone ahead and added validation to our test project.
If you take a look at the indexController you’ll now see I’ve added an updateAction that uses a Zend Form component. The goal of the validation was to provide context sensitive validation on a model.

He’s set up a system that allows you to add “validators” to the model to define how it should handle itself. A later call to “isValid” uses this context to see how it should be evaluated.

On the Techfounder.net blog today Eran Galperin asks the question “what makes a good programmer?“:

Some casual surfing led me to this article from a couple of years ago, titled “How to recognize a good programmer”. [...] It got me thinking though, on what are the attributes I consider useful in fellow programmers. So what makes a good programmer?

Some of the key features he suggests looking for in a good programmer include:

• An analytical thinker
• Gets things done
• Does more than “just enough”
• Responsible
• Good human relations

Matthew Turland has posted a guide to compiling PHP with the Tidy extension (a tool to clean and repair HTML documents through direct manipulation).

I dug around a bit, but most resources I came across on Google were about using the tidy extension for PHP rather than doing a custom build of PHP that included the tidy extension. Once I figured the details out, I thought I’d share. They admittedly seemed somewhat obvious after the fact, though also were not communicated as explicitly as I would have liked anywhere that I could see.

TO use his method you’ll need to have CVS working (either on a server or, like he did, a local machine) and be able to grab the latest PHP 5.3.x and tidy extension versions. When you do the compile for PHP, all you need to do is point it at the CVS checkout of tidy and you should be all set.

Brandon Savage has posted a quick look at using one of the more popular design patterns – Registry – to handle object storage and retrieval.

One of the biggest challenges in OOP programming with PHP is the ability to pass around objects and let other objects use them. This challenge can be solved with careful design, however. Here we will discuss the registry pattern, not a member of the GoF’s original patterns but still an important pattern nonetheless.

He looks at a few different ways to solve a few different problems – first, sharing a database resource between multiple objects, then making sure that you have a connection no matter where its called from and finally – what the registry is used for – sharing multiple database connections between multiple objects. He uses static methods in an abstract class to handle the set/get of the correct object.

There’s also a bit of discussion about the registry pattern versus dependency injection and which is better for most instances.