Category: Programming

David Cummins on Fulltext Search as a Webservice

David Cummins has a neat little post up about replicating some of Solr’s features in a PHP based solution. His post “Fulltext search as a webservice” should sound familiar to Solr’s approach from the title, and David describes how they built a similiar solution on top of Zend_Search_Lucene (Solr also uses Lucene in the backend). Seems like it would be easier to just set up a dedicated Solr cluster instead, but hey, how often has “it would be easier to do something else” sparked innovation?

I’d also like to note that the coming Solr 1.3 supports php serialization as an output format, so you can just unserialize() the response from Solr. Should provide for even easier integration between PHP and Solr in the future. While on the subject, I’d like to suggest reading Stemming in Zend_Search_Lucene too, an introduction to adding filters to Zend_Search_Lucene. Also worth a look is the Search Tools in PHP presentation from phplondon.

Web Frontends for Xdebug

David Coallier has a post up about a Google Summer of Code project that has been launched to finally get a web frontend for Xdebug, something many people have been requesting for quite some time. Simultaneously Webgrind has been released, another web based frontend that replicates some of the features from kcachegrind in a web based fashion. Here we go several years without a decent front end, and then two gets announced in the same week. Neat! You can check out Webgrind at their Google Code page.

Orto – A Java VM Implemented in Javascript

Meant to publish this earlier, but it’s just been sitting in a tab in my browser for a day now. Anyways, John Resig (hm, familiar domain name / real name combination there…) has a post about Orto from Japan, a compiler that transformers Java bytecode to JavaScript statements . The end result is Java applications that do not depend on Java, but can be run with just JavaScript available in a browser. Not quite sure what I’d want to use this for, but on a scale for awesome, this ranks pretty high! John’s page has screenshots and links to several more interesting sources about Orto and is well worth the read.

Mikko Posts About Imagick in PHP and Fill Patterns

Mikko is quite active with the development of the Imagick-extension in PHP, possibly the best thing to hit PHP since it’s birth over ten years ago. There’s nothing like the Imagick-extension to make you realize how much you’ve been missing from the GD extension (kindly reworded for Pierre) :-) Anyways: Mikko has a new post up about how to use an image as a fill pattern in Imagick under PHP . Well worth a read!

You should also check out all the other interesting Imagick related posts Mikko has made.

Christer Puts on His Problem Solver Hat

I’m not sure how much sugar Christer got into his system today, but he’s been completely on fire with his blog posts. This one shows how to write a custom Zend_Form_Decorator_Label , which he wrote after someone asked a question about how to do something in particular on the Zend MVC mail list. That guy is amazing.