Padraic Brady has posted part one in a new series he's developed covering documentation (and using Docbook, Phing and Apache FOP to create some professional looking results).
This article series proposes using Docbook XML as the ultimate source format for all documentation. The difference between most formats and Docbook, is that Docbook can be used to generate numerous final formats. [...] The series was written to introduce programmers to a PHP oriented publishing process which uses Docbook XML as the basis for generating professional looking HTML and PDF output.
Part one introduces the "ingredients" - Docbook XML, PHP5, Phing and Apache FOP - and includes an install process to help you get things set up.
Kevin Waterson has posted a new tutorial today looking at a key part of any web application - the configuration settings and how they can be stored.
PHP applications come in many shapes and sizes. Some used locally from command line, and more commonly, for web based applications. More often than not, regardless of size or type, some form of configuration variables will be stored for global access. [...] Each options has its pros and cons. Here each of these options is explored to see which method is right for your application.
He looks at four different options:
an ini file that can be parsed/modified directly by PHP
an XML file slightly more complex, but still simple for PHP to use
a PHP file with things like PHP arrays defining settings
and a database with one or more configuration tables
Each type comes with some example code and format to give you an idea of how they'd work.
Jeremy Johnstone has come up with a simple plist xml parser. The plist format is what iTunes (and some other application) uses for its library files.
Normally SimpleXML is enough to handle most XMLparsing needs, but the plistXML format is just broken enough to make parsing it with SimpleXML virtually impossible. Since I hadn't played with XMLReader much, I thought it would be a good chance to give it a spin. For the anxious types, the code is available on github in my php_class_lib project, so dig right in.
His parser takes in the name of the file to fetch and a parser() method is called to do the actual work. The contents of the file are returned as an array (he includes a print_r() of that output too).
Christian Weiske set out on a project - no small thing - to convert the current PEAR documentation info over to the PhD DocBook rendering system. In a new post he talks about the conversion process and some of the technology involved.
The reason for PhD to exist was that the previously used DSSSL based system was slow: a full build (all formats and all languages) took 24 hours to complete. Further, the tools the system based on were old, rusty and nobody understood why they broke on some machines, but also why they worked on other ones. Having a php-based system for PHP ensures that there is always someone around who can fix it if it's broken. This wasn't the case with the old documentation build system.
The conversion was spurred on by the fact that the PEAR documentation stopped building and more and more people were finding it hard to build on their machines too. He walks through the steps he took - installing PhD, converting over the docs to the DocBook 5 format and the first builds with the new system.
Now that at the XML was shiny, too, it was time to actually use PhD on it. The numbers were amazing: While a build for one format and one language took around 40 minutes on my system (dual core Macbook with 2GHz and 2GiB RAM), building the same with PhD takes 45 seconds!
In a recent post to his blog Christoph Dorn shows off a cool little trick to getting your Mac to respond to your (vocal) request for website stats from FeedBurner.
You have a blog and you are proud of it. Your sense of self-worth depends on how many people are following it. Making a detour to FeedBurner every day (the feed stats only update once a day) to check on your vitals is simple and does not take long (with a bookmark) but there has to be a more automated way.
His better way involves tying together the speech recognition that OS X offers, the "say" command line tool and a PHP5 script that can go out and read/parse the FeedBurner XML information for your website. Throw in a little command line script and some set up in the Speech tools and you have a handy little script that can fetch your latest stat information just from your request.
New on the KillerPHP blog today is a video tutorial by Stefan Mischook that introduces some of the key concepts and code required to make a simple cart.
I just released a new PHP shopping cart video tutorial for beginners. In this series of videos, you learn how to build a PHP based shopping cart that works with Paypal.
The result is an object-oriented cart script that can interface with PayPal via XML messages. You can find other great video tutorials in the PHP videos section of the site.
Lorna Mitchell has posted the last part of her development process towards creating a sample REST server in PHP:
This is part 3 of my article about writing a restful service server. If you haven't already, you might like to read part 1 (covering the core library and grabbing the information we need from the incoming request) and part 2 (covering the service handler itself) before reading this section. This part covers the Response object that I used to return the data to the user in the correct format.
She show how she created the object to push the response back out to the client with an output() method that displays the XML response in a manually generated format.
Chris Hartjes has answered some more questions his readers have asked in a new post to his blog today. This time the focus is on XML handling.
Welcome to the 3rd installment of me answering reader feedback questions. Today we deal with a topic that I deal with every day at my day job - working with XML in PHP.
He talks about SimpleXML (and how well it does its job) and their (his work's) current method of handling the storage of XML in a database. He describes both their current process and his ideal one, how he'd want to interface with their eXist backend.
Christian Weiske has a quick tip on how to get larger XML files to pull into PHP5 and be usable:
At work I had the task to implement the synchronization between an online shop and a commodity management system. Data exchange format was XML - one big XML file for all of the products (some thousands with dozens of attributes). Big question: How do I import the file in a way that is most convenient for me as a programmer - and without exceeding the machine's RAM when loading a 1 GiB file?
The newer alternatives both use the same technology (DOM and SimpleXML - with DOM behind it) so he goes more "low tech" than that and opts for the XMLReader extension to pull in the large amounts of data. Available in PHP5, the XMLReader extension, which he combines with an Iterator from the SPL to makes for a simple, quick little parser.
Stefan Koopmanschap had a problem - adding a link to a Zend Framework form (Zend_Form) built from an XML definition:
I was quickly told by the friendly people in #php_bnl on irc.freenode.net that I needed to use Decorators for that, so I went diving into the documentation. Reading the official documentation, I couldn't really get into how exactly the decorators worked and what I could do with them.
It was this article on the Zend Developer Zone that helped him the most, though. He explains his solution, defining the Decorator with a setDecorator method call, and includes the one-liner that made it work.
