PHP5

A couple of years ago I've shared my expierience about how to setup virtual mail hosting with Postfix and Dovecot. Some time ago I needed to make that accessible via Web. So, a webmail.

After trying a couple of engines I've decided in favour of SquirrelMail. This worked like a charm with SSL, etc. so the full mailing functionality was available just out of the box. The one thing I was still missing was a possibility to change password. There are already several plugins to achieve the goal, for instance when logging in over LDAP, but nothing could really fit for me. That's because the maildir setup I'm using is non standard. Luckily, the SquirrelMail API is simple and just well documented, so I was able to write a custom change password plugin very fast.

There is a new PHP extension I've written to work with Varnish. The extension allows interaction from within a PHP script with a running Varnish instance. For now there is a basic useful functionality such as ban URLs or set/get Varnish configuration. There will be more with the time. For now I would give a couple of examples for the extension usage, as there is not really any docs for the extension here.

Anyone who did unit testing in PHP knows that private methods are untestable. One workaround for this could be to make no private but protected only members and to call methods using a proxy class. Another approach I'd like to present here is a small extension hack.

Hi again,

whole last week I was mad about hearing music. I've heared tons of mp3's and radio stations over the internet. After a couple of days hearing music at work and at home I was really bored with creating and syncronizing playlists/files. Based on this, I came to the idea to make an online playlist which I would must update only one time and in one place and it would be accessible from anywhere. The idea was easy brougth out with PHP. So just a light reading for you:

Hi there,

last week I wrote a PHP port for Joerg Michael's gender program. The program stands for gender recognition based on firstnames and has a base of >40000 firstnames from around the world. I hope the stuff is deserved to be accepted on PECL.

Hey you all (and me too) web developers. The huge important news today is - now we can send IMs from a script running within a web server - isn't it cool? Only one restriction conditioned by libpurple itself is there - use is definitely safe within CGI environment only. The second important news, as you see from the title - the project was renamed to Phurple. Furthermore there are a couple essential changes I was made as refactoring of the code was written so far.

Became interested? Lets look onto most important points in the changelog:

So, new PHPurple version was issued yesterday and is downloadable from sf.net. What's inside:

* PurpleAccount::isConnecting() added
* PurpleAccount::getUserName() added
* PurpleAccount::getPassword() added
* PurpleClient::deleteAccount() added
* PurpleClient::findAccount() added
* PurpleClient::addAccount returns now a PurpleAccount instance (but was null)
* PurpleClient::authorizeRequest() added

The most interesting thing there is of course the remote client authorization.

Recently I had a little discussion about our style guide with one of the co-workers. And the matter was concerning the line length. Most default is to limit the line length with 79-85 characters - because of terminals, printing etc. But an other question took my head in the middle of the conversation: limiting the line length would mean for example to encapsulate deep included blocks of the code into functions - sounds not bad, but ...

Today I've maked the second PHPurple release and changed it's status to alpha. The changes, came into it, are:

* fixed zts compatibility
* implemented the loopHeartBeat method
* the runLoop method was changed to set the heartbeat interval
* fixed memory leak on empty alias
* purple.debug_enabled is now boolean

The most interesting on this release is the PurpleClient::loopHeartBeat() story, which is of course implemented with g_timeout_add. Take a look at the new example script to see how it works.

The first pre-alpha is released and can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpurple/. The common documentation I've started to make was placed to http://phpurple.rubay.de/.

The main features implemented are:

- send and recieve IMs
- fully implemented account dsn like string
- ability to make account specific settings
- basic work with buddy, buddy group and buddy list

The license was changed to the BSD like proprietary license.

and so it will be in the future ...

Namely, i had the excellent oo design suggestion from the Alexey on the pecl mailing list (and it is better, than I could invent), and it works fully for php 5.3 and unfortunately partly for php 5.2. So lets take a look on it ... just get the latest version ...

Some time ago i've started to write the binding for the libpurple, the im lib. About 3-4 weeks ago i had a simple functional implementation, which i've presented on php pecl and libpurple mailing lists. Subsequently i've completely revised the whole thing to be OO and would present it again. There is the same minimal functionality implemented, but all is OO. So, lets begin. First install the php development package and get the code: