Joseph Crawford has a new post to his blog today with a look at his use of the Zend_Rest_Controller and Zend_Rest_Route components of the Zend Framework to create a simple REST service.

You might be asking yourself why do I have to use both components, why is it not rolled into one nice component. The answer is really basic and if you look at the source code for the Zend_Rest_Controller you will see that it is solely an abstract class that defines the methods required for use with the Zend_Rest_Route.

He includes the code to add to your bootstrap file to get the routing working and a sample controller (MyController) that extends the Zend_Rest_Controller and sets up some basic actions - get, put, post and delete. He does mention one issue he's coming across in a feature he's wanting to add - putting the version number of the API in the URL for easier separation.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today they've published the latest episode in their Dutch PHP Conference 2009 podcast series. This time it's Eli White's talk on highly scalable web applications.

A constant pariah on web applications is scaling once you become popular. It's not always an easy task (ok, never). This talk will go into depth on a few of the most common techniques for making your website scalable. So that you can leave with enough knowledge to apply this, if needed. Or just to plan ahead so that your future projects don't preclude taking these steps when needed.

You can listen this new episode in one of two ways - either via the in-page player or by just downloading the mp3 directly and listening to it in your audio player of choice.

New on the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a tutorial (written up by Cesar Rodas) about using MongoDB (a NoSQL database) in PHP applications.

Nowadays there is a new kind of databases that is getting very popular, specially for Web development, including the PHP world, which are the NoSQL databases. This article focus specifically on MongoDB, despite there are several other NoSQL database implementations.

While he starts you from the beginning on the PHP side (with the ) you'll need to already have MongoDB up and running to work with. He shows you how to insert new documents, update ones already in the database, pulling our documents and removing them from the database. He also covers a more real-world application of the database as well as how to store files, work with the map-reduce functionality and auto-sharding abilities.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new post by Sam de Freyssinet about a slight modification to a well-known pattern (MVC) by adding some scalability - the Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller pattern.

It can also be very costly in time and resources to re-architect software that not scaled well. Ideally applications should grow organically as required and without large sums of money being exchanged in the process. [...] The Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller (HMVC) pattern is a direct extension to the MVC pattern that manages to solve many of the scalability issues already mentioned [in this post].

He talks about the benefits of the HMVC style and how its multiple parts work together and how it promotes code reuse more than the traditional MVC pattern. Some sample code is included so you can get your hands dirty with more than just the concepts behind the pattern including a more real-world example, their service (Gazouillement) that works similarly to twitter.

Richard Thomas author of the "Solar Shorts" series has branched out from just talking about the framework and has a new short article posted about security in PHP applications in general.

A search for the phrase "secure php" on Google returns a ton of results but scanning through the first couple pages of results it becomes clear that when you talk about security and PHP people tend to focus on 2 things, the code and PHP itself.

He talks about what should be considered when it comes to PHP applications security, some of the software tools you can use and a few questions to ask yourself to help you get your site along the path to being more secure (like asking about temporary folders, excess packages or firewalls that may or may not be active).

New on his MSDN blog Bruno Terkaly has started up a series on working with PHP on a cloud-computing platform, in this case he chooses the Azure Windows platform.

This blog entry is about running PHP in the cloud. Why would you want to run PHP in the cloud? We will work with our Azure data storage constructs (Blogs, Queues, Tables).

They use the PHP SDK for Windows Azure to connect to and use the application out in the cloud instance they create to run IIS and FastCGI to run a PHP application. He shows how to install the needed software and how to use the Expression Web software to create a simple site and upload it to the cloud instance.

On the ThinkPHP blog today there's a new post looking at one of the better offerings for making desktop applications with the web-related skills you already know - CodeStrong (as a part of the Appcelerator/Titanium project).

Looking how to develop a desktop application in a short term, I came accross "Titanium Developer". This Open-Source tool helps you to create desktop apps. The special feature about it is the possibility to use well-known Web-Technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and PHP. Thus, learning a new programming language is no longer necessary. Another advantage is that you can directly create binaries for Mac, Linux and Windows using the same code.

They look at some example code to create a basic "Hello World" kind of tool and show how PHP can be embedded directly into the code, as made possible by the native PHP support introduced from contributions from people like Ben Ramsey.

In a new post to his blog Juozas Kaziukenas takes a look at one of the pieces of "glue" that makes up the typical web application - the service layer.

During this year I invested quite a lot for a search of a good ways to architecture a big application and make it simply good. Quite a while ago Matthew Weier O'Phinney introduced service layer in one of his great talks about models, since then service layer become one of the key architectural component one my applications. Here I'm going to show a few examples and use cases where it's very useful.

He looks at the "old style" of data interaction that several applications use as compared to injected objects and information more structured applications have put to use. He also outlines a practical use of the service layer structure - thinking of it as a layer allowing to you connect to a service, either local or remote, without the rest of the application needing to know about it.

Giorgio Sironi has been busy posting a whole series of articles looking at testing PHP applications, some with Zend Framework and others just look at testing in general. Here's a list of the current articles:

• Testing and Constructors
• Unit testing and programming paradigms
• How not to test controllers
• Answering some questions on controller testing
• Mocking and template methods