Since PHP 5.3 was released last year I’ve been wandering if Zend was going to introduce a new ZCE certification for this version.

Seems like with the version PHP 6 abandoned some time back the direction was to a PHP 5.3 certification.

I don’t think the time was random considering that Zend Con, the biggest PHP conference, is near.

What’s new?

Differences between PHP 5 and PHP 5.3 are in the manual here.

Some of the most important once:

• Namespaces
• Late static binding
• Lambda Functions and Closures

Materials

The certification information is on the Zend website.

After finding that the certification for Zend Framework has a study guide completely free for registered users, I was wandering why there isn’t one for the regular PHP certification. It looks like now there is: Zend-PHP-5.3-Study-Guide-v1-3.pdf, in beta version! And is free for download!

Of course the most important material remains the manual manualul PHP, because the guide is used in conjunction with it.

It looks like the mock tests are out, as for the Zend Framework never existed anyway.

Price

The price has gone up, it isn’t 160$ anymore but 190$! The price remains a very small one anyway considering that an exam at Sun was 200$, and now at Oracle is 300$.

The already certified users receive an 20% discount until the end of the year, so if you are already certified you will pay 152$.

Best of luck!

In the 256’th day we celebrate programmer’s day, so for all those concerned: Happy programmer’s day!

Packt Publishing launched Open Source Awards 2010.

This Open Source award is an online event held by Packt to distinguish excellence among the various projects within the community.

This is a great opportunity to vote for your favorite Open Source software. The main categories are:

• Open Source CMS Award
• Hall of Fame CMS
• Most Promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-Commerce Applications
• Open Source JavaScript Libraries
• Open Source Graphics Software

You can nominate until November 6! After that voting will take place.

This is a good opportunity to show your gratitude to your favorite open-source software!

So go to Packt Publishing – Open Source Awards 2010 and play your part!

When it comes to Android and PHP a lot has been written about PHP for Android.

The concept is simple, Google launched Android Scripting Environment (ASE).

ASE is as the name suggests, a scripting environment, and the apps are not compiled and they can be modified at all times by the user.

Over ASE there are extensions installed for different languages like: Python, LUA, Perl, JavaScript or JRuby.

Unfortunately there isn’t official support for PHP from Google, but there is PHP for Android, project which allows the integration between PHP CLI and this environment.

The installation is very simple and is done directly on the phone. For development Android SDK simulator can be used.

One of the issues is that the app can’t be packed as an APK, so it can’t be posted on Android Market.

Basically this was the only issue raised so far everywhere, issue that doesn’t seem exactly big considering the facilities available in this environment.

I’ve searched for apps build with PFA, I’ve found only a few, actually I found only a few even in other languages using ASE. Why aren’t the users eager to develop in this environment? Simple, using the scripting environment you can access a lot of facilities of available on the phone, like vibrating for instance and about all the available dialogs. But there is an essential feature which is totally lacking (or at least at the time this blog is written), there isn’t a graphical interface, like any kind of window that isn’t a dialog.

So what is the purpose of adding an app to Android Market if there is no graphic interface? I don’t believe there is almost no real consistent reason at this point.

But what are the developers doing in this environment then? Well Cellbots for instance.Basically you can do some interesting toys, but don’t expect to do real apps (yet). Another project it was sending a NexusOne into space.

So the project is interesting, but I don’t think it has the purpose of developing traditional apps just yet.

Recently I’ve changed my “old” HTC Diamond running Windows Mobile 6.1 with an HTC Desire running Android 2.1.

Why Desire? Mainly for Android. There are 3 platforms out there which deserve attention:  iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. There is Blackberry two, but I’m not a big fan.

Briefly, I’ve chosen  Android for the multitude of ways in which you can write an app.

The native language for Android is Java, but for web developers there are alternatives like: Titanium, Phonegap, PHP for Android or Adobe AIR.

I what to explore these alternative technologies to see what and how easy is to develop whit each one of them.

All I can say at the moment is that my first app took me almost 2 days to build, but the result is interesting.