Martynas Jusevicius' Blog: Reading Excel files with PHP
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Martynas Jusevicius has pointed out a handy tool to work with Microsoft Excel files in PHP - PHPExcelReader.   There is a nice tool for reading Microsoft Excel files called PHPExcelReader. It works with .xls files up to Excel version 2003, which are based on the BIFF format (later versions use OOXML). It is written in native PHP and does not require any third-party libraries or the MS Office package.   He includes an example of it in use - a loop that runs through the cells of a spreadsheet and outputs each of them (going across the row via an inner for loop as well).
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Paul Jones will be one of the presenters at this year's php/db|works Conference happening up in Toronto this week and he's offering a teaser of his talk (here's the synopsis) for those interested - "Organizing Your PHP Projects".   Fans of Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" will recognize the kind of talk I have in store, although I don't have the time available to expound in detail the way Hazlitt does. The talk will consist of a one-sentence lesson for you to remember when deciding how to organize your PHP project, whether it's a library, an application, a CMS, or a framework. I'll then explain how to apply the One Lesson in your project, and the various follow-on effects the One Lesson will have on your project organization.   He also jokes that he'll be the only presenter to use references to livestock, Jimmy Hoffa, and Mir as a part of the talk. He's even included a slide of the presentation for even more info.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Reinhold Weber's Blog: 40 signs you really are a lousy PHP programmerScott Klarr's Blog: PHP Cheat SheetsDeveloperTutorials.com: Building Desktop Applications in PHPPadraic Brady's Blog: The Zend Framework and Microformats: Zend_Microformat ProposedCommunity News: GoPHP5 Project Wraps UpJob Posting: Technology Resources, Inc Seeks Senior PHP Developer (New York, NY)Job Posting: Red Ventures Seeks Sr. Systems Analyst/Web Developer (Charlotte, NC)Community News: Forage - A Search Abstraction LayerCommunity News: php|architect Launches C7Y Site (News/Podcast/Forums)Richard Heyes' Blog: SMTP for PHP 5
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On CodeSnipers.com there's a new book review of one of O'Reilly's PHP-related offerings, "PHP Hacks" by "Jack D. Herrington".   I had borrowed a Perl Hacks book from and friend and really liked it, it was great! It had a lot of practical things as well as some fun things. I expected the same from PHP Hacks and I was not disappointed!   She links to both the table of contents and the sample chapter to give you an idea of the feel of the book. There's two main sections in the review covering both aspects of the book - the Practical Stuff and the Fun Stuff. Of course, no book is perfect, so there is one thing she mentions that wasn't really worked into the book, but you'll need to read the review to find out what.
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Evert Pot has posted about a library he's creating to integrate WebDAV support with PHP and make things simpler for those needing to access the shares.   I intend to make this library as easy as possible to use, without making it a black-box-like system. Focus will not be on everything WebDAV could possibly provide, but instead on the features that are actually supported by the operating systems.   His goal is to make it as simple as making a 'File' and 'Directory' class to interface with the remote system and has two things he's deliberating on as far as features to include in the library - support for the custom properties WebDAV allows and the ability to lock files and directories.   If you'd like to check out the current progress of the library, check out its page on the Google Code site (as well as this discussion group he's set up).
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Padraic Brady has put together a very comprehensive post on his blog today about using the Zend_Feed component of the Zend Framework to help with the aggregation of content from other sites (like RSS and Atom feeds).   In this entry I explore Zend_Feed from the perspective of someone aggregating RSS and Atom feeds with a view to building a database of uniquely identified content for later presentation in a "Planet" style application. [...] In fact all we create here is a simple command line script to aggregate content frequently (e.g. just set up cron to run it every hour or so) into a database for later presentation.   He guides you through each step of the way:   Setting Up Database And Models The Aggregator Script Foundation Using Zend_Feed to get common data for RSS/Atom entries Putting It All Together   There's plenty of code (and SQL to insert) in the post and he explains each point well, helping to make the development process smoother. There's even a summary section to toss in a few extra bits of information just in case you missed them along the way.
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Adding to his popular Install PHP 5 on Windows workshop, Edward Tanguay has just posted two new steps, which teach you PHP 5 object-oriented programming in a very practical manner: In the first step you download and set up a PHP 5 page which reads an XML file and displays book reviews linked to the Amazon Associate program. In the next step, Edward goes line-by-line through the code and examines the classes, properties, constructors, public methods, private methods and static methods discussing how each works and why programming in this fashion is better than procedural programming. There are dozens of screen screenshots which make this tutorial easy to follow. If you get stuck or want to discuss an issue, you can instantly post questions and comments on each step without registering.
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On his "Yet andother PHP blog" today, William Candillon shares a script he's written up to create a visualization of the parse tree of a bit of PHP source code.   I wrote this xslt stylesheet to visualize the parse tree of a PHP source code. The stylesheet can actually convert any XML tree to graph in the dot format interpreted by Graphviz.   His code is a simple seven line script that outputs a nice, clean tree structure image of how the process flows. He includes links to all of the source and files he used to create the tree image.
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Damien Seguy has continued his series looking at PHP configurations around the web and is sharing the results in the form of two new reports over on Nexen.net.   I just published the second part of the serie about PHP configurations. This part focuses on three aspects of PHP: PHP extensions, PHP streams, and disabled functions.   You can find the statistics themselves here and the latest configuration statistics here. It's interesting to see the drop-off when it comes to the various modules that are installed ("php, ftp and http are the most common. Besides them, tough luck.") and to see the somewhat more gradual curve of which functions are disabled - with system() topping out the list (with good reason).
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This is a followup on Marco Tablini's discussion of the PHP programmer availablity and my earlier attempt at defining enterprise PHP.
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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Michael Kimsal mentions the posting of his latest show for his podcast - WebDevRadio, episode #34:   [This show contains a] quick overview of upcoming interviews, and mentions of the projectzero webdev project from IBM, Sheeri KritzerÃ¢ÂÂs OurSQL podcast, my upcoming SOLR presentation @ OSCON, and a bit more.   Also included in this show is a look at a PHP4->PHP5 XML wrapper that looks to take care of some of the transition of XML functionality when making the move between PHP4 and PHP5.   You can grab this latest show here or subscribe to the feed and get more shows, both past and future.
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Zend has a new tutorial posted in their PHP 101 series - PHP 101 (part 9): SQLite My Fire!
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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In a new posting from Joshua Eichorn's weblog today, he talks about the latest PHP London meeting and the final topic of the night - his work with phpDocumentor.
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With a bit of a rebuttal for Harry Fuecks' statement that PHP has a great lack of international support comes this new posting from John Lim at PHPEverywhere.
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On the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans has posted a quick look at one of the new offerings from the Manning Publishing group - "PHP in Action".   My buddy Olivia over at Manning Publications sent us a present recently. They are working on the title PHP in Action and they sent us a chapter to share with you. PHP in Action is scheduled to release in April of this year but it's available now in "Manning Early Release Program", or MEAP. MEAP is a cool program that allows you to buy the book long before it is released and have access to the chapters as they are released. Then, when the final dead-tree edition ships, they will send you one. The great thing is, there is no additional cost for MEAP.   He links to the book's description on the Manning site and gives some credit to the authors, Dagfinn Reiersol with Marcus Baker and Chris Shiflett. And, of course, the link to the sample chapter from the book - a look at Design Patterns.