In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last six months—the iPhone comes out this Friday and people are already lining up to buy one. Whether you get one or not, as a developer, you are probably wondering how your existing applications will perform and are eager to discover any iPhone details worth remembering during future development.

O’Reilly’s blog has the details on iPhoneDevCamp. Like BarCamp it will be a free, non-commercial event, organized by volunteers. There will be collaborative development projects as well as opportunities to optimize and test existing web applications on the iPhone. You won’t need an iPhone to attend, but if you are already in line, you’ll definitely want to come show off yours.

Edward Z. Yang released HTML Purifier 2.0 last week. HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter written in PHP. It uses whitelists and a comprehensive knowledge of the HTML specification to output stanards compliant code while also filtering out malicious JavaScript and Cross-site Scripting injections (XSS). In fact, instead of just removing malformed input (like missing HTML end tags), it fixes it! It even validates your CSS and converts deprecated tags.

Geez, maybe version 3.0 will do my laundry too…

[Hat tip to Pádraic Brady for the original link.]

Whether it’s Agile Software Development or Test Driven Development, every year new systems of code and project management spring up like tullips. Each one comes with loyal devotees who swear by it and denounce all the other heathen religions.

Scott Berkun feels that none of the current models accurately describe the way software development actually happens. Sure, you may be aspiring to adhere to the tenants of the Rational Unified Process (RUP), but isn’t Asshole Driven Development (ADD) a more accurate description? Or maybe Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE)?

Check out Scott’s full list and be sure to read the user submitted additions.

You probably already know how to write if-then statements in PHP and Ruby.

<?php // a simple PHP example
  if (condition) {
    statement1;
  } else {
    statement2;
  }
?>

But have you discovered the usefulness of ternary operators yet?

(more…)

The first two episodes of PHP Abstract, a podcast by Zend Technologies for PHP developers, were posted last week.

• Episode 1: PHP Security Tips with Eli White from Digg
• Episode 2: Backup or Die with Matthew Weier O’Phinney from Zend

Future podcasts should come out every Tuesday and Thursday and you can subscribe to their RSS feed.

I won’t blog about every one but I’ll highlight a few or post a summary from time to time.

The PEAR group has elected new officers and launched a blog. The blog should be a great way to keep up with the most recent developments and changes in the PEAR code.

If you don’t already know it, PEAR is short for “PHP Extension and Application Repository”. PEAR is a framework of PHP code which allows web developers to use standardized packages of components to accomplish common web tasks (such as authentication, caching, database access, encryption, and web services) without having to write them from scratch.

The PHP development team has released PHP 5.2.3.

In their words: “This release continues to improve the security and the stability of the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.” They have also detailed the security fixes and key improvements.

If you are upgrading from PHP 5.0 or PHP 5.1 you should refer to their upgrade guide first.

Kevin Yank has a blog post up at SitePoint about the difference between Good and Bad PHP Code.

Yank says that when he interviews developers for jobs he always asks: “In your mind, what are the differences between good PHP code and bad PHP code?” The answer reveals whether the candidate simply knows the fundamental syntax of the language or whether they understand the additional coding principles necessary to wield that syntax effectively. It also reveals the amount of pain the applicant’s code will cause a development team. He goes on to list “structured”, “consistent”, “portable” and “secure” as some of the key traits of good code and gives a concrete example to illustrate his point.

It’s true for PHP, but his points can also be applied to most programming languages.

php|Tek took place last week in Chicago. Some of the slides from the sessions have been generously made available by the conference and the speakers. There’s an official page being maintained by the conference. Where my list overlaps theirs it is because a) some of the speaker’s blog entries contain information to supplement the slides, or b) they are updating their list more often.

If you know of any more, let me know and I’ll add them to this post.

php|Tek official slide page

Jason Sweat:
Test Driven Development

Sebastian Bergmann:
Testing PHP/Web Applications with PHPUnit 3 and Selenium

Lukas Smith:
Database Meets OOP / Lock Your Database Application!

Jeff Moore:
Writing Maintainable PHP Code / Dependency Injection / Exceptional PHP

WordPress, the popular PHP blogging application, has announced that version 2.2 is now available for download. The code name for version 2.2 is “Getz” after Stan Getz, who is pictured at left. The biggest change is that Widgets (formerly available as a plug-in) are now included in the core and in the default themes. There have also been many bug fixes, UI improvements, and optimizations.

This release is part of the WordPress team’s commitment to put out a new release every four months; which means the next release will be out in September.