This Week’s Link List (February 25, 2011)

With all the snow in Seattle this week (I know people in the mid-west and on the east coast are laughing at me when I say that), I feel out of sync. I’m sure I’ve missed lots of interesting links this week…I should have plenty of time this weekend to hunt more down since we’ll be iced in. But, what I did come across this week is good – lots of PHP/Azure news as the PHP on Azure contest heats up…

• Windows/SQL Azure news…
  • Stefan Koopmanschap shares his reasons for participating in the PHP on Azure contest: http://www.leftontheweb.com/message/PHP_on_Azure_contest_The_cool_stuff
  • Michelangelo van Dam provides details for the PHP on Azure contest: http://www.dragonbe.com/2011/02/php-on-azure-and-you-in-vegas.html
  • Cory Fowler posts part 2 of his series about leveraging full IIS support when running PHP in Windows Azure: http://blog.syntaxc4.net/post/2011/02/20/Installing-PHP-on-Windows-Azure-leveraging-Full-IIS-Support-Part-2.aspx
  • I thought this forum post contained a fair comparison of SQL Azure and Amazon RDS: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ssdsgetstarted/thread/ab24a61c-72b6-459f-b9b1-3c8228477706
  • Robert Duffner, Microsoft's Director of Product Management for Windows Azure, talks about what open source has to do with Windows Azure: http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-65-what-does-open-source-have-to-do-with-windows-azure/

• Conference news…
  • Holy smoke! Look at this lineup of speakers/talks for Tek11: http://tek11.phparch.com/talk-synopses/
  • Lorna Mitchell shares here experiences at the PHP Unconference Europe and PHP Days: http://www.lornajane.net/posts/2011/PHP-Days-and-PHP-Unconference-Europe

• Framework news
  • Podcast (from ZendCon 2010) by Hector Virgen on reusable bootstrap resouces with Zend_Application: http://devzone.zend.com/article/13061-ZendCon-Sessions-Episode-038-Reusable-Bootstrap-Resources-with-Zend_Application
  • Want to build a very small MVC app without having to leverage a framework? This video might be useful: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/create-your-first-tiny-mvc-boilerplate-with-php/
  • Michael Dorf explains database model relationships (i.e. associations – hasOne, belongsTo, hasMany, hasAndBelongsToMany) in CakePHP: http://www.learncomputer.com/cakephp-relationships/

• Code…
  • A short post showing how to add weather information to a site based on geo-location: http://www.geekword.net/how-to-add-geolocation-weather/
  • Derick Rethans shares tips for creating short, useful URLs: http://derickrethans.nl/short-urls.html
  • Giorgio Sironi shows how to get rid of getters and setters: http://css.dzone.com/articles/how-remove-getters-and-setters
  • Octavia Andreea Anghel takes you through the why’s and how’s of using the factory pattern in PHP: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/factory-pattern/Octavia_Anghel022311.php3
  • Gonzalo Ayuso shares ideas (and code) for improving page loading speed by combining Javascript files with PHP: http://css.dzone.com/news/speed-page-page-load-combining
  • A short post on using proxies with cURL in PHP: http://query7.com/using-proxies-with-curl-in-php
  • Michael Maclean shows how his PHP wrapper for Pango can be used with the PECL/Cairo extension to draw text with an advanced layout: http://mgdm.net/weblog/using-pango-for-php-a-taster

• Specs/encodings/meta-development/stuff…
  • Paul Krill provides his take on what’s still missing in the HTML 5 specification: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9210818/What_s_still_missing_in_the_HTML5_spec
  • This is an older article (by Joel Spolsky) about Unicode and character sets, but I still found it very helpful: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
  • Keith Casey warns of the dangers of incurring too much technical debt: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/technical-debt-doesn039t-disappear
  • Cal Evans’ series about ways to be a better client for your developer won’t end! http://blog.calevans.com/2011/02/22/six-ways-to-be-a-better-client-for-your-developer-point-8/

• Miscellaneous…
  • I should have known this was out there…Accessing the Bing Maps REST Services using PHP: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817004.aspx
  • Ruslan Yakushev walks through enabling XDebug in WebMatrix: http://ruslany.net/2011/02/how-to-enable-xdebug-in-webmatrix/
  • This is a post from last year that show you step-by-step to access SQL Server from Linux. I can’t say I’d recommend using the php_mssql extension as the *best* way (I would probably consider the php_odbc extension first), but this shows *one* way: http://pointbeing.net/weblog/2010/05/successful-microsoft-sql-server-support-for-php-on-linux.html
  • A video introduction to using the IIS URL Rewrite module: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2011/02/20/an-intro-to-iis-url-rewrite-plus-redirecting-urls-to-www-web-pro-week-8-of-52.aspx

• Just for fun…
  • I’m not much of a language buff, but I found this satire by Najaf Ali about “why PHP is better than Ruby” to be pretty funny: http://najafali.com/php-is-better-than-ruby.html
  • A somewhat comedic look at things you should avoid if you want do be a good developer: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/why-youre-a-bad-php-programmer/

Have a great weekend!

-Brian

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