The Fliquid Studios site has posted their introduction to using the Google Search API via a cURL interface in PHP.
A lot of people these days use 3rd party sites or services to gain SEO data about their site or service. A lot of these people simply do not realize just how simple it is to build some tools to gain statistics from the big search engines. In this post I plan to give you a very basic introduction on how to go about getting some search engine statistics from Google using their API.
They show how to create the connection (including the URL to search on) and a form that can be used to submit the terms back to the script. A demo and downloadable code are included.
Sameer has posted an introduction to a topic he'll be writing up a series on - refactoring for PHP developers:
In the coming year I'll be starting a series on Refactoring. Refactoring is one of those programming ideas besides Design Patterns and Unit Testing which has made an order of magnitude improvement in my productivity. Although refactoring may not be a 'Silver Bullet' for your programming woes, it is a good tool to add to your mental toolbox.
This initial post defines refactoring, looks at how its different than code optimization and lays out some of his plans for what he'll cover in the series.
Stefan Koopmanschap has a new post to the Ibuildings blog today about symfony's 1.2 release.
The first day of december started well: It meant the release of the new symfony 1.2.0 version. Aside from the additions and improvements in the code, this new branch of symfony also reinstates an old tradition in symfony: It comes paired with a huge amount of documentation in many forms. Let's have a look at what symfony 1.2 has to offer.
He mentions multiple updates and changes to the framework as well as three specific improvements in the realm of documentation - the jobeet advent calendar, a symfony + doctrine book and the constant stream of tutorials coming out of the community.
On the PHPro.org website, Kevin Waterson has written up an introduction to the handy autoloading functionality that comes with PHP5 releases - the __autoload method from the Standard PHP Library (SPL).
The SPL __autoload() method is one of the Magic Methods supplied in PHP. The __autoload method is called whenever a class is instantiated and will load the classs the the first time it is called. No longer is include(), require, include_once() or require_once needed as the SPL autoload takes care of this interally.
He looks at how you can use it to load a directory of classes, how to use multiple autoloads in a single script and how to use it with interfaces to register a loader and include it as needed.
Kevin Waterson has posted a new tutorial to the PHPro.org website today - a pretty comprehensive look at the DirectoryIterator in the Standard PHP Library (SPL).
SPL provides a standard set of interfaces for PHP5. The aim of SPL is to implement some efficient data access interfaces and classes for PHP. Functionally it is designed to traverse aggregate structures (anything you want to loop over). These may include arrays, database result sets, xml trees, directory listings or any list at all. Currently SPL deals with Iterators.
Lorna Mitchell has an introduction to Zend_Db, the Zend Framework database abstraction layer posted to her blog today:
I recently worked on a project which was based on Zend Framework - I haven't worked with it before and I was temporarily confused by the existing implementation of some of the database-level stuff. After much reading and untangling of code, I'm now pretty clear how this should look, so here's my overview. I'm not going to go into setting up a whole application, but this is a quick primer on how data models go together.
She talks about table modeling, fetching rows/data from the model and working with rows/rowsets.
PHPBuilder.com has a new basic tutorial introducing you to the world of the powerful combination of Oracle and PHP:
This article is for the developer who wants to use the PHP scripting language with an Oracle database to develop their application. PHP is one of the most commonly used scripting languages, as it is open source and has procedural as well as object-oriented capabilities. Oracle is a popular RDBMS and that's the reason this combination is very useful for web-based application development.
The article talks about the OCI8 extension and gives a sample of its use to connect to a remote machine (using a full TNSNAMES-formatted string for the host). The code is explained a bit from the connect down to the oci_close.
On the NETTUTS site today there's a new tutorial, an introduction to the CakePHP framework.
CakePHP is an open-source framework for PHP intended to make developing, deploying and maintaining applications much easier. CakePHP offers many useful design patterns, such as the Model-View-Controller pattern, seen in other popular frameworks like Ruby On Rails. The CakePHP framework also provides a slew of valuable reusable libraries for dealing with common tasks. An example is "Inflector" (a routine that takes a string and handles pluralization).
They step you through the download, installation and configuration of the basic CakePHP setup. Included are definitions for some of the common parts of the framework like models, controllers, plugins and the vendors directories.
Michelangelo van Dam has written up a quick introductory post on his blog about the process around throwing and catching exceptions in your apps.
One thing that I noticed was that although the code was well written [in the Zend Framework], implementing coding standards and best practices on many of the classes, I did notice a wrong usage of throwing exceptions (the try - catch statements).
He gives a few examples - catching a "divide by zero" the right and wrong way, how to grab/handle the message that comes along with the exception and how to define your own custom exception handler to help your code do more useful things with the errors it might throw.
Robert Basic recently posted this introduction to the Zend Framework, a simple overview to how the framework is laid out and how you can get started.
Zend Framework is a big & heavy object-oriented framework for PHP. I started working with ZF a couple of months ago, I liked it's documention (it's very well documented) and decided to stick with this framework. Here is the latest version of the framework '" at the time of writing v1.6.1.
He talks about the framework's use of the MVC pattern, its coding standards, and some of the basic terms and file structure behind a simple ZF application. He's even included an .htaccess file and a sample bootstrap (index.php) to get you started.
