The Review

Having seen the annoucements of a new PHP magazine on various news sites, checked out the site and my attention was immediately grabbed by article on Accessing the Win32 API in PHP (Jan 2003 Issue). Drawn by the possibilities of making the MCSE’s at work nervous (actually to help integrate a PHP based Intranet with various Windows systems) and after a few days umming and erring, finally reached for the wallet...

Subscribing is very painless. Better yet, within five minutes I was reading what I’d paid for. Issues are delivered as PDF documents, which are modified on the fly to be protected with a password of your choosing and have your name on the front cover. You can either download them directly (which I did) or have them delivered to your email (a warning: 1mb+ of compressed file).

The ZIP itself contains the magazine (PDF) and code used in the articles.

All in all, a slick and effective form of delivery which will no doubt be of interest to other online magazines.

The first overall impression of the layout is excellent. This could easily be an off-the-shelf magazine. There’s no eye strain. Code listings are all syntax highlighted (and in some cases illustrated with UML). It’s even a novelty, as PHP developer, being targetted with advertising (of 73 pages, I guess no more than 5 pages it total were ads, kept squarely between articles rather than breaking them up annoyingly). I got slightly lost in one article, working out how text related to code listings and diagrams but nothing major.

Only thing I couldn’t quite work out was what the front cover illustration was supposed to represent. Room for much interpretration...

Getting down to the content itself, what made it for me was “Implementing Database Persistence Layers in PHP“. This article should be in depth enough to challenge most all PHP developers. It takes a step beyond what I was talking about with Data Access Objects, this being a “Data Class” in the context of building a complete persistence layer.

What seems to suggest the quality of this article is this tutorial at Codewalkers, which claims to have been inspired.

In terms of writing style, it was well written and well explained - a credit to its author for making a complex subject accessible.

Whether you believe in Object Relational mapping or not, “Implementing Database Persistence Layers in PHP” makes an excellent study in PHP‘s object oriented capabilities (a subject about which there’s still way too little being said or done).

In other words, read this and you’ve already made your $1.99.

The “Accessing the Win32Api” has, as I’d hoped, given me more than a thing or two to play with. David Jorm, the author, writes for O'Reilly as well (surprisingly his chosen subject there is OpenBSD). There may be an issue with PHP 4.3.0 (no fault of the author) which I’ve yet to investigate further but the article itself is excellent.

Having read those, I’m now content but there’s definately something for everyone in terms of learning more about PHP.

“Writing Secure PHP Code” is a very solid summary of the things PHP developers need to be aware of, with useful insight that provokes just enough paranoia to get developers to look at their code from the outside in.

There’s also good stuff on MySQL FULLTEXT searching and manipulating PDF documents with the aide of Ghostscript, both of which provide more than enough depth to convey both understanding and useful experience.

I’d could almost say the content is entirely unique but “Using The .NET Assembly though COM in PHP” is available online at phpBuilder. I’m prepared to forgive as it’s a good article anyway and putting together this kind of material in a month on a tight budget, while still remaining original must be nearly impossible.

There’s also a “tips” section which provides worthwhile PHP trivia that may come in handy some time.

One thing that I think deserves full praise is they’ve made use of classes where ever possible, where it doesn’t detract from the intent.

Hopefully they’ll expand further on the theoretical elements on OOP in PHP in future issues - there’s definately plenty of room for more of this kind of quality material.

Of the reviews, the Wrox book review was the most insightful and might actually help you decided whether to buy it or not.

The ionCube Accelerator review won’t probably be news to most developers but might be something to hand a manager.

The CodeCharge Studio review smelt like an advert and might better have been quietly slotted somewhere at the back. That’s not to criticize the author at all but after claiming “this really isn’t yet another IDE”, and having me holding my breath for something about “UML support” (which didn’t happen), turned out to be... Yet Another IDE. For PHP coders, a free alternative might be QaDram Studio. Of course this may just be me being generally sceptical of this kind of tool but personally I’d be more interested in hearing what Microgold or PowerDesigner can do for PHP, UML-wise. Anyway my guess is the best solution is for more people to subscribe to php|architect...

2) Being prone to rant occasionally myself, the editorial pieces appealed. Marco Tabini’s exit(0) makes an worthwhile and level headed summary of what it’s like to be a misunderstood PHP programmer, pointing out the Slashdot PHP 4.3.0 annoucement which lead to a war between resident PHP and Perl coders.

The interview with Doron Gerstel, CEO of Zend (usually not much heard of) raised a fascinating point, from Gerstel’s side;

“Can you imagine what the adoption rate of PHP would be today if it had the marketting force behind it that Java has?”

When you really think about it, that’s the real degree of seperation. PHP takes alot of flak for “such and such a problem / limitation” but what big company do we know that’s been (knowingly) selling broken products for years and getting away with it?

While people are asking When will IBM buy Sun?, I’m thinking “When will IBM partner with Zend?” who, apart from Macromedia, about the only major software vendor that even acknowledge PHP exists.

Anyway, bottom line: php|architect manages to be thought provoking without being irritating.

Based on the January edition, php|architect is well worth it’s price. There’s enough to learn from and provoke thought in PHP developers of all abilities with an added “you are not alone” feel good factor thrown in.

Are we seeing the beginning of the first international PHP “Industry Magazine”?

In other words, definate buy.