I’m spending this holiday season trying to plow through some of the books that have been stacking up lately. There are just too many good books out there. Today’s book is by Vikram Viswani, a name regular readers will recognize instantly. Click on in and let’s take a look at his latest work.

It would be a fair statement to say that I have not paid attention to Flash for several years. Obviously I know that those awesome interfaces for movie web sites are made in flash, as are those annoying video ads that start screaming at you as soon as you load up a page, competing with Megadeth on Rhapsody, cranked out on the 700 watts of power I have in my office. But the last time I really looked seriously at Flash was almost a decade ago and I was thrilled at tweening widgets from one place to another. Unfortunately, there's not really any benefit to tweening a text box. Cool? Yes. Practical? No. So I never really picked it up. Plus I was cheap.

That is the reason why I had not really been paying attention to Flash for the past several years. I generally don't look into something if it's cool. I look into something if it is practical. Flash, generally, is meant to be, well, flashy. And it is. But for someone such as myself, I didn't think I had much of a reason to pay attention. Until now…

Quentin Zervaas has written a new article on PhpRiot about using the Zend_Service_Amazon_S3 component of the Zend Framework.

The article discusses how to manage buckets and objects within buckets, as well as how to use Amazon S3 as a Content Delivery Network for your own web sites.

Matthew wrote up an article on modules in Zend_Application and that got me thinking a little bit. When I have done training for Zend Framework, one of the things that mystifies students to some extent is the whole plugin architecture and where things can go. There has been several articles written about it, but they tend to use code to describe it. I was only able to find a small handfull of articles that used some kind of chart to describe what goes on. Not that that’s a problem, but I had found that when I drew out the request lifecycle that it helped the students understand it better.

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.

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification provides a way to programmatically generate images using vector paths expressed in XML. This makes it ideal for generating images that need to be scaled to different resolutions without losing fidelity.

A common requirement in Web applications is to dynamically generate charts and graphs from numerical data. If these graphs are expressed using SVG, they can be blown up to different sizes without any deterioration in quality, and they are also typically smaller in size as compared to their GIF or JPEG counterparts. With this in mind, this article examines various open source PHP libraries that allow you to add SVG charting capabilities to your PHP application.

In a new post on Chris Renner's blog, Chris discusses his experiences in implementing Zend_Registry as a stand-alone module in his appliciations.

You’ve successfully installed the Zend Core for i5 on your System i. Now what? This tutorial helps you write your first PHP scripts on the System i. You will learn where Zend Core is located on the System i, how to make sure Zend Core is running, how to set up Zend Studio, how to write a simple ‘hello world’ script, and how to access a DB2 file on the System i.

On his blog, Stas Malyshev (Core Contributor to PHP and Zend Employee) has posted a list of PHP Performance tips that he wants novices to know about. He realized that while he had previously panned a post by Google about PHP Performance of having lots of incorrect or misleading information, but that he never gave good substitute advice himself.

Right along with some of the other posts about the “best practices” that Google also responded to dispel some of the recommendations Google gives.