Presenting the latest edition of The ZendCon Sessions. The podcast that rebroadcasts sessions/talks from the last ZendCon PHP Conference. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and features David Sklar giving his talk: “Static and Dynamic Analysis at Ning”

The recent release of Adobe Flash Builder 4 Beta (formerly Adobe Flex Builder) includes an impressive lineup of features aimed at enterprise PHP development, in large part because of a partnership with Zend & Zend Framework. This tutorial will describe how to use the new data-centric features of Flash Builder for PHP development.

Not too long ago, it seemed like there was a pretty clear distinction between client-side technologies and server-side technologies. Languages like PHP, Perl and Python resided on the server, taking care of tasks like database connectivity, transaction management and remote procedure calls, while tools like JavaScript, CSS and HTML were used exclusively on the client to render pages, perform whizzy effects and respond to user events. Things aren't that clear any longer. Projects like Jaxer and Phobos are blurring these distinctions, by making it possible to run JavaScript on the server and use it for tasks ranging from server-side file access to input validation. And in this article, I'm going to show you how to add a JavaScript engine to your PHP build, with a little help from PECL's SpiderMonkey extension. Keep reading!

For those in the Manchester, UK area (or really anyone willing to travel up there for a day), you'll be happy to know that the schedule has been set for this year's PHP North West conference - October 10th!

Freelance author Esther Shindler is looking for help from the PHP community. She has a short survey that she is asking US and Canadian developers to fill out. Respondents that meet their profile may be asked for a phone interview. Here is your chance to help shape how people see the PHP community.

Some best practices on how best to organize your project, when you are using Zend Framework. Specifically, just where should you be putting the Zend Framework Source Code? What differences about your specific application and environment would make you chose the various options that exist, such as putting in inside of your application, or up at the system/library level?

New on his blog today Wenbert Del Rosario has posted a tutorial about getting the Zend_Navigation helper to work in your application and correctly handle making/updating breadcrumbs as you navigate around the site.

The last two days of php|tek were so packed full and sessions, meetings, and community, that I was unable to report on them until now, the week afterwards.

The Zend Framework team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the 1.8.2 release. This release is the second maintenance release in the 1.8 series. Fixes for this release focus on Zend_Db and autoloading improvements. In all, over 50 issues were closed for the release. You may download it from the Zend Framework site .

On the symfony blog Fabien Potencier has posted about the new "getting started" tutorial that's been posted for the symfony 1.2 release of the framework.

The second full day of PHP |tek, was also the first day of the main conference. It kicked off with a wonderful keynote, and then was jam packed with sessions full of information. Usually leaving one to have a hard decision as to which talk to see. The evening was marked by a lightning round of Pecha Kucha talks on random, entertaining, topics.

Web services are software systems designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Nowadays if you want to connect external systems, you probably want or have to use web services. What I will discuss here is how to get your own SOAP web service up in minutes.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new installment in their "ABCs of PHP" series posted - a look at working with regular expressions.

I’m attending and presenting at PHP |tek this year, and will be providing daily summaries of the information and activities of the day. Day 1, May 19th, is the Tutorial Day

Vikram Vaswani has written an article for IIS .net, describing how one can configure and setup a production web server on Windows using IIS and Zend Server. The tutorial takes you from installing Zend Server, writing a basic application, and setting up both SQL Server as well as MySQL. It then wraps up by showing how Zend Server Cache can be used to increase the performance of the application without changing any code.

On the NETTUTS.com site, a new tutorial has been posted about implementing a system to validate new members/signups for your site via their email.

On her blog, Lorna Jane Mitchell has written an article discussing how best various API s & Web Services might want to best return error codes to programmers, and discusses the frustrations that programmers can have dealing with Web Services that do not respond with descriptive, and complete, error codes.

In this recent post to his blog Madarco shows how to create a simple Facebook application using the Zend Framework as the backend.

The Call for Papers has gone out for the International PHP Conference 2009 Fall Edition in Karlsruhe, Germany from November 16th through 19th. This year in addition of the main conference, they are having Workshops, an Uncon, an Architecture Day, and a MySQL Day. The Call for Papers ends on June 6th.

The Zend Framework team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Zend Framework 1.8.1, the first maintenance release in the 1.8 series. You can download it via our downloads page ; Use the CDN link for fast downloads, or scroll down the page for direct downloads of the 1.8.1 packages from the ZF servers.