Tutorial:

http://electrotek.wordpress.com/2008/04/19/soap-web-service-with-zend-framework/

I was looking for ways to practice for Zend PHP5 Certification test when I came by this blog. There are some questions with answers and you can definitely measure your level with this.

Check it out: Zend Certification Self Test

Alright, more stuff was found and I have actually found another blog with some very good examples, real ones, of how the certification work and what you should expect.

Preparing for the Zend Certification

During the study period for the Zend Certification, I have read a lot about the MySQLi library from PHP and all Zend Certification for PHP5 is based on this library. Considering this, I have decided to take a practical look on the library and it’s really amazing what they have done with the new lib.

For making a long story short, this is what - so far - this is what I can say about the new lib.

- Good Points:
* No more need to use pear libraries or any kind of library for doing muti-queries or procedures, this new library has built in features for that.

* The library consider the connection and statements as two different objects.

* You can set the charset, user, server from the object itself.

* It gives support to Master and Slaves servers.

* It will only execute the query after it verify that the statement is correct and you have bind the statement.

* It has a lot of info available on the object that a Db Administrator can use. Information like Server info, protocol, client info, client version, host info, host version and so on.

- Annoying point

* As far as I know you have to specify the columns as vars when you are binding the statement.

The next step is creating a benchmark between this improved library and the old library to see how fast both work.

Sitting here in the opening keynote of the PHP/Zend conference and Microsoft announces that FastCGI for IIS will be included in Zend Core. More information can be found at iis.net/php. Also, Zend will be supporting windows server 2008 including the “Server Core” option. But that’s not all… They also announced that Zend framework will support information Card-based athentication for php-applications. This will enable easy and quick authentication for users on you php applications/websites.

Finally Microsoft announced that they are releasing a technology preview of SQL serever 2005 driver for PHP.