Today I had to use NTLM authentication method, unfortunately it isn’t supported by NuSOAP yet, but I’ve found that if you combine cURL with NuSOAP you can get through without a problem.

So here is the solution I came up with:

First of all I’ve upgraded NuSOAP to it’s latest version which is 0.7.3 (the one provided by SugarCRM didn’t supported cURL yet), then I wrote something similar to the code below.

<?php

$wsdl = 'http://project/file.php?wsdl';

$client = new nusoap_client($wsdl, true);
$client->setCredentials('', '', 'ntlm');
$client->setUseCurl(true);
$client->useHTTPPersistentConnection();
$client->setCurlOption(CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'auth_username:auth_password');

?>

Manuel Lemos made an interview with Sandeep Kadam, a leader of PHP community in India which is also involved in PHPCamp organization, an event which is focused on PHP based web applications development targetted to all PHP enthusiasts and starters.

“The number of Indian PHP developers has been growing at a large pace in the last few years, when compared to other countries. A few years ago, India was just one of the top ten countries with more PHP developers. Now India is number two and is almost surpassing United States, which is still number one.”

This article presents some numbers based on PHPClasses statistics and a reflection about why this growth happened just in the latest years, as well what it means for the PHP world.

After reading the full article, I can’t help but wonder why doesn’t Portugal appear on presented statistics since there’s a huge community around PHP, there’s a couple of new job offers every single week and there’s also activities like PHP Summer School (3rd edition currently running) which seems to have great acceptance by the audience.

Today I’ve spent some time looking for good articles on this subject. I’ve found two great articles that cover a lot of topics including strategies to use while working with MySQL:

Handling UTF-8 with PHP
Scripters UTF-8 Survival Guide

You can download the second one in PDF format and read it later.

I totally agree with this project ideas and support them 100%, in my opinion it doesn’t make sense to keep developing applications using old PHP versions.

At the moment there are already a couple of big projects associated such as Drupal, CMS Made Simple, phpMyAdmin and others.

If you’re going to develop a new project or develop new features to an existing one, take a look at the website, spend some time reading and GoPHP5.

At the moment I’m only working with PHP5 and I’ve got to say, the new features are great.

This new release is a security release made to solve a high level security issue, then it’s recommended to upgrade immediately.

Some websites are already being owned because of this security flaw, do not risk to get owned too and update your website software as soon as possible.

If you need help read the migration/upgrade instructions in here.

At the moment I’m running Joomla! 1.5.5 stable.

Yesterday after I installed the software I’ve looked for some tutorials that would guide me through the process of developing a component for this version of Joomla!.

It would be expectable to have some great tutorials in Joomla! Developer Network but to be honest I’ve got to say that the ones that are available are a bit poor, and most of Documentation is written for the older versions.

After a lot of searches I’ve found these tutorials and they are great, at least for helping me out in these first steps.

Another thing that I’ve noticed was that there are a lot of people with problems related with the installation of extensions and a lot of discussions about this in Joomla! forums, it seems that there isn’t a final solution for this kind of problem.

One popular solution (and from what I’ve read it does not solve this problem for everyone) is to change directory permissions to 777. In my opinion that’s not the best way to solve this problem, because if you have a shared host, you’ll probably get into troubles soon or later since other users will have permissions to mess with your files.

Another thing you can do, if you have enough privileges, is to change the user/group in your httpd.conf that way when your script creates any files/directories, they are created with the same user/group as your account.

I’ve used the second option, because at the moment I’m working locally, then I have root privileges. In the future I hope to find a better solution otherwise I’ll stick to this one, since I’ll also have root privileges in the production server too.

Some of the features are:

• Built on top of PHP 5, for me that’s a plus since I’m only working with PHP 5 at the moment.
• MVC support makes application building faster and easier.
• CRUD generator will reduce code repetitions and useless boring time spent on building this tasks.
• Lots of support, when you start learning something new, all the support available you can get is a plus.
• And a lot of other features, such as: Ajax support, smart URL’s, cache management, multilingualism and l18N support, scaffolding, among others. You can check the features list at Symfony Project website.

The only thing I think it’s a bit hard, is the learning curve. What I mean is, you really have to “waste” some time to get to know how the application works, but I think in the end it will compensate.