DooPHP 1.1 have just been released with a more complete and mature list of features, in addition to performance improvements, again ! The benchmark comparison of v1.0 and v1.1 show a slightly high number of Requests Per Second (RPS) supported by v1.1 compared to 1.0, In addition to a new benchmark showing the new frontend cache mechanism performance with a database connection.

Noticeable New Features in v1.1 :

• Access Control List(ACL) as built-in authentication support.
• Data caching which supports APC, Memcache, XCache, EAccelerator & file based cache.
• Sophisticated Frontend cache mechanism where both full page(single/recurvise) & partial page cache are supported.
• Database replication (master-slave) support in the ORM tools
• Better conventional modular directory structure support.
• Auto loading of the framework classes.
• IF statement and Cache tag support for template engine.
• Enhanced model class generator. PostgreSQL supported.
• Image manipulation helper for resize, crop, watermark, upload, etc.
• Pager component for item list pagination.
• Text helper class for string manipulation.
• Url builder class to generates URLs based on route ID or controller & method names
• Log/Profile viewer tool.
• Sitemap Generator tool to generate routes and controller files.

Download latest DooPHP. New demos and tools are added in to help you get started with the Framework. There are already some mentions of DooPHP in our PHP Frameworks Trends, so if you are on twitter you can voice your opinion or share your experience with DooPHP.

Many people look at web applications as magic. WOW!! That site can do that? How can I get a web site to do all that stuff and wait a minute, its easy to modify the text or a graphic? I don’t need to know HTML or any of that techie stuff?

Web Designers, Web Developers and everyone else will love this new wave of maintaining your new web sites (or your site re-designs). Using this newly released Open Source Content Management System called Concrete 5, you can easily have a web site up and running with Web 2.0 functionalities in literally minutes. There are no funky complicated rules or ways to do things. The installation is done through your favorite browser but works best using Gecko or Mozilla browsers. Designers like it because they can create custom themes very easily. Developers like it because the php used is straight forward and uses the MVC architecture.

Let’s start this review on why I think it is an important addition to the Content Management System arena. Why not just use Drupal or Joomla? A couple of reasons. 1. Drupal and Joomla are really well developed and community supported. Nothing wrong with that, but both of these CMS’s have become bloated. (Lots of code and it is heavy) 2. Support from the core team is nominal. Granted the support forums and documents are far more developed than Concrete 5 is at the moment but that is improving. 3. A plethora of add-ons that are not completely checked to ensure it runs well with current versions of software. 4. Some add-ons for Drupal and Joomla are tedious and you have to understand the back-end administrative area just to install it and then, in some cases, configure it. Now with those reasons stated, web savvy developers and designers normally have very little problem doing these things but a site owner (from my observation) has a very hard time with it. They even have a much more difficult time of just modifying a page, adding a new page or updating information that takes a designer a few minutes (and the money to have them do it) where as most site owners would prefer to do it themselves. Document management is not as easy as they say. Changing images are not easy either.

(I must say this. Before judging this system (if you have problems), you must must must, take a look at the tutorials and help section of Concrete 5. The forums also answer many questions new users have. I will be the first to say that searching the documents and forum can sometimes be frustrating but most of the answers are there if you take the time to look. This holds true with any system, including Drupal and Joomla. I would say the number one asked question about installation problems is actually caused by the hosting platform. The system is not integrally made for a MS server, it is designed out of the box to be run on a Linux server. So please, review the available videos and documents on the Concrete 5 site before saying you can’t do something.)

Gina Trapani, of LifeHacker, released an alpha preview of a new PHP web application Twitalytic which aims to provide Twitter data crawler, replies archiver, and statistics generator. After crawling your tweets, Twitalytic will provide a web interface with some key stats about your followers, friends, tweets, and replies. You can also export all your tweets in a text file, in addition to an extended view of tweets with conversation, mutual friends, … etc. You can get also more details about your followers : most followed, least likely, earliest and former.

I realize there are ten dozen Twitter applications out there that do much of this, and possibly better. Creating yet another Twitter app is probably the most cliché development undertaking of the year, but I’ve had a ball using this little thing to teach myself a few things about the Twitter API, OAuth, and jQuery and brush up on my PHP and MySQL skills.

Twitalytic came also with a public timeline of your tweets with replies. As mentioned Gina, this is not ready yet for production, but if you have ideas or time you can contribute and improve the project. Gina did not mention any license for the code, I don’t know if you can use the Creative Commons on her blog or better ask for more details about it.

Interoperability @ Microsoft have just announced today a new bridge for PHP developers to .NET through REST : PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services. ADO.NET Data Services have been recently added to the .NET Framework, it offer a simple way to expose any sort of data in a RESTful way. The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services is an open source project funded by Microsoft and developed by Persistent Systems. The blog post came with a sample demo showing how to run the PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET to create the PHP proxy classes, then to query over the data service and display data.

PHP Toolkit for ADO .NET Data Services enables PHP developers to access data services created using ADO .NET Data Services framework. The goal is to provide the similar functionality as .NET library to access and modify the data and its relationship using URIs which points to pieces of data integrated with the web.

Usage require PHP5 installed and configured on the machine where the ADO.NET Data Services toolkit is installed. Download PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services from codeplex.

We talked previously about the JavaScriptMVC Framework – a really good JavaScript Framework project to keep an eye on. Since MVC now became a “default” feature in most web frameworks, it was interesting to explore its usage in JavaScript, Ajax, and web 2.0. The MVC pattern is mostly used in web application development to separate between design and logic and make development easier and highly maintainable in enterprise environments. Since JavaScript is excessively used in enterprise today, how could we make it better with design patterns ?

Jonathan Snook wrote an interesting introduction to MVC usage in JavaScript where he applied Model-View-Controller pattern on form validation. It’s probably very complex to use in small application, but if you are writing large JavaScriupt-based application this could be with big benefits. Jonathan pointed also to other JavaScript MVC frameworks in addition to JavaScriptMVC : SproutCore and TrimJunction.

Like anything else in development, you’ll have to decide if the trade-off of this kind of separation is worth it. For small applications where you only have a few functions, this type of separation is surely overkill. The larger your application gets, though, the more it benefits from the separating code into Model, View, and Controller.

Would you use MVC in your JavaScript web application ?