• Git for the lazy – Spheriki – A nice git cheatsheet
• Debugging on the Command Line with xdebug « Davey Shafik – A handy approach to debugging cli apps if you're developing in Netbeans
• Teambox – Project Collaboration – A great looking app for team collaboration and doc mgnt, surprised it's open source, will be installing it.

If you’re a newb I recommend giving it a read, you can pick up a copy on Amazon.

You will be involved in Web Application design and development, third-party integrations (Social Networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) via Web Services / API / XML, development and integration of reporting tools, design and implementation of SQL databases.

We are offering an enriching experience, within a small and agile team, mentored by a senior architect. And hey, maybe you could end up joining the team? Forgot to ask how good is your sea-legs as you will be working in an amazing boat on the Seine. But don’t worry, you should get used to it within 2 weeks.

In this internship you will:
• develop sclalable, secured and reliable Web Applications
• integrate third-party applications
• use Social Web platforms to enhance the App (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, …)
• learn to optimise and enhance through iterations
• get satisfaction in seeing the product launch before the end of your internship
• learn and implement development best practices

You are:
• passionate about Web Application Development
• curious and proactive
• constantly reseraching innovative solutions
• enthusiastic about getting involved in a startup

You have:
• strong skills in PHP5 and MySQL and knowledge of at least one php framework
• experience in OOP, Test Driven Development and Agile Methods
• good system administration skills
• a good level of English

You like:
• being autonomous in your work
• working in small teams
• to speak/write English obviously
If you think this is you, just drop us an email at recrutement*_at_*soluo.fr, specifying the reference webdev1003.

It’s a piece of cake to install the tool with the PEAR installer, and since I last used it 2 great new features are on offer:

• tab completion for all (or many) PHP functions and built-in classes and interfaces
• handling of fatal errors

What a relief to have this working again!  I was ssh-ing onto my Fedora servers just to test out code but of course this became impractical pretty quickly.  And did I mention it runs great on PHP 5.3?

And if you’re tempted to use the similarly named phpsh project from the Facebook open src stables, I can confirm this is not an option with the latest version of PHP.

As “the PHP company” I think Zend ought to at least select projects that have some merit in terms of software design, as surely beginner PHP devs look to Zend for good examples and copy/emulate whatever they showcase.

PHPterror took a closer look at some of the OXID code, really jaw-dropping stuff.

A new look at how to create unit tests – using Photoshop!  Sense of humour required …

Thanks to Andrew Betts, a PHPlondon regular, for coming up with BadAPI, a service that allows you to simulate misbehaving APIs.

These days there’s almost no such thing as a web app that’s not integrating data from various external APIs, and with that integration comes a new set of problems the developer must handle.

From the BadApi website:

BadAPI allows you to simulate misbehaving APIs. This is useful if your site relies on the availability of service X, and you want to ensure that any downtime experienced by that service has minimal impact on your own application.

This comic perfectly captures that elusive but all-important question: what are the universal hallmarks of good quality code.

But there are a few niggling hitches remaining in Netbeans that need to be addressed.  Others have written about this already but I’ll paraphrase:

1. fix the double-click drag select bug
2. get a more native-looking Mac look and feel
3. get some themes at least as good as Textmate, eg the default ‘blackboard’ theme

The first problem is in fact very painful and I haven’t been able to find any remedies for it.  Netbeans being a Java app, the GUI is implemented in Swing, which by default doesn’t seem to support the ability to double-click a string of text, then with the mouse button still depressed, drag to select additional words of text.

In any browser, for example, this works as expected: you can click the mouse in the middle of a word, double click to get the whole word, then drag left or right to get the string of words you need.  Not having this feature can be extremely painful because the alternative means you must place, with pixel precision, the cursor at exactly the beginning and end of a word, then click, then drag.

The former system lets you work a lot faster, and in a text selecting business like programming can really cut down on the agro in a day’s work.

If this problem drives anyone else crazy, or someone knows a workaround I’d love to hear about it.

For the second point the Netbeans 6.7 M2 release, out today, seems to address some of the issues.  But it has to be said the IDE is still on the ugly side of things, however slightly less bubbly now which I think is an improvement.

For the third point I dug up a theme this afternoon which is a definite improvement over the sparse selection of themes offered with the Netbeans download.  Check out Ruby Dark Pastels – Mac users beware that the .nbm file gets .jar appended to it when you download the component which makes it unusable.  Simply remove the .jar in the Finder.

The theme is not perfect however, method names are black on a dark blue background, and many code elements (constants, static methods, etc) are white and get match-highlighted in yellow making them unreadable.  Many of these elements are not configurable in the Fonts & Colours preference option.

For example, in the case of Zend PHP certification which has been around for several years now, who ultimately benefits more from the programme – the software devs or Zend?

Currently Zend certification is one of the only options available to PHP devs who want to get accredited, however.  But judging by general feedback from the community  it would appear that, despite the current certification choices, quality discrepancies between PHP devs on the market can still be pretty … impressive.

Getting quality programmers is no problem as long as you have a bulletproof hiring process I hear you say – that’s another subject

Darrens’ final comment gives a nice insight into why PHP certification might not be more widespread:

The third major element of certification is market demand. Of course, if you are a doctor or a lawyer, then you cannot legally practice unless you are certified, which certainly helps with the demand side of things. Unless professional IT certification is legislated (an unlikely prospect for the forseeable future), then certification will only succeed if customers demand it.

Maybe industry demand for certification is not higher due to the lack of independent certifying bodies?