The July 2009 issue of php|architect is out—this month, our editorial team has trained its collectively keen eye on the future of PHP with coverage of hot topics that will shape things to come.

Contents

Here’s a quick overview of the contents of this month’s
issue:

• Future PHP, Future Java? by Marcel Esser
  Write PHP once, run anywhere – with anything.
   
• Writing Custom PHP Extensions by Gwynne Amaya Raskind
  Sometimes, what PHP provides simply isn’t enough. But fearnot! The power of the Zend Engine has an answer. This articleexplores the basics of harnessing that power to build your own custom PHP extensions.
   
• Extending OXID eShop with Custom Modules by Vikram Vaswani
  Learn how to develop custom modules for OXID eShop CE, a GPL shopping cart system with a well-defined, extensible module API.
   
• Continuous Integration With PHP by Felix De Vliegher
  Best practices for PHP such as unit testing or documentation writing are getting more and more widespread. But how do you ensure that the unit tests are run each and every time, or that your documentation gets built? You’d need some sort of automatic process that does these tasks for you every time you integrate your piece of software within the project. This is exactly what Continuous Integration can help you with.
   
• Yii: Flex Your Flash by Jeff Winesett
  Adding a little Flash to applications is a common approach web developers take as they strive to meet today’s buzzword compliance. Maximizing interoperability and data exchange by leveraging web Services to allow application-to-application communication has revolutionized the Web business model. It’s hard to imagine the Internet today without the Web service APIs of, among many others, Google, Yahoo and Amazon. This article shows how to easily accomplish both of these modern Web development demands by using the extremely powerful and light-weight PHP framework, Yii.
   
• Enterprise PHP: Continuous Integration Background by Ivo Jansch
  Programming large systems can be challenging. Dependencies between parts of the code make it very easy to fix a feature on one side of the code base only to break something on the other. Continuous Integration is a practice that helps fight problems like this and helps improving the quality of code. Elsewhere in this issue, Felix De Vliegher has a tutorial on how to work with Continuous Integration in PHP. In this column, Ivo looks at why Continuous Integration is important. Where Felix’ article tells you how to do it, Ivo’s will show you why.
   
• Security Roundup: Trust Me – I know What I’m Doing by Arne Blankerts
  Just because you are following good security practices, does not mean you are safe. Learn where you may still be at risk.
   
• From the Cloud – Services in the Cloud by Ben Ramsey
  Need to scale your web application but finding the cost of physical services too much for your budget? Cloud services may be just the answer for you.
   
• exit(0): The Seven Seas of Insanity by Marco Tabini
  Get a glimpse into the purpose and the madness that is
  CodeWorks.