While poking around the disks in my linux box, I found my materials for a session on extending PHP that I originally gave as a 3 hour tutorial at PHP{Con West 2003.

Sadly, I seem to have lost the working C code (libares bindings for PHP), but all the relevant parts can be found in the comprehensive PDF I made from the slides: Extending PHP Slides (PDF). The content is based on PHP 4, but should still be applicable to PHP 5.

As it happens, Mike Wallner has recently built his own PECL extension for libares, which is much more complete (and complex) than my examples.

The second edition of Programming PHP was recently published. The O'Reilly press release said:

Rasmus Lerdorf and Kevin Tatroe provided the guidelines for this book. The newest author is Peter MacIntyre, a Zend Certified Engineer with more than five years experience in PHP. Wez Furlong and Chris Shiflett also contributed. Furlong modernized the "Extending PHP" chapter, and Shiflett brought his renowned expertise in updating the "Security" chapter.

After much paperwork shuffling (IBM loves paperwork, it seems :-), the article that I wrote about connecting to DB2 and Cloudscape via PDO is finally available online here

[The following mini-article is something that I wrote for the International PHP Magazine a while back, as part of the 'ask a guru' column; I'm re-publishing it here because it's useful and because people have asked me about the topic twice in the last two days]

Question:

Is there a way to do a form of threading in PHP?

Say for instance you write a PHP application to monitor a service on a number of servers, it would be nice to be able query a number of servers at the same time rather then query them one-by-one.

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Just published today on the Oracle Technology Network is my article on PDO, giving an overview of what it is, installation, sample code, portability and so on.

Although it has a focus on Oracle, pretty much everything covered there should be portable to the other available pdo drivers with minimal changes (essentially just the parameters to your connection), if you are writing portable SQL.

Please do read it, even if you're only mildly curious, as the stipend I earned from writing the article effectively paid for some of my time working on PDO. As it was actually written a few weeks back (OTN has a long publishing process), the "Future of" section is missing details of the iterator (eg: foreach) support that Marcus keeps nagging me to merge in.