Community News: ODF-XSLT Project Released
640530
A note was passed along to me about a new project that's been created to help make the generation of ODF-XSLT documents simpler - the ODF-XSLT Project from Lone Wolves.   Lone Wolves is happy to announce the ODF-XSLT project [1]. The ODF-XSLT Document Generator is a library written in PHP 5 that brings the full power of XSLT to your OpenDocument files. It enables you to use ODF files as if they were plain XSLT templates. It also includes a few extra parsing options that allow you to edit the XSLT parts of these ODF from within your favourite office suite.   The tool was developed by Tribal Internet Marketing and is being released under a GNU Public license, version 3. You can get more information about the project from its homepage including things like downloads, the manual and their subversion repository address.
635738
JaXLib is a platform independent free open source Java library.It provides efficient in-memory datastructures for objects and primitive types, I/O streams and a bunch of related utilities. Many tools for every day tasks like file system access, event handling and string manipulation are also bundled. This release just fixes a little nasty bug in class  jaxlib.col.AbstractXCollection which caused the toString() method failing with a NoSuchElementException for collections containing exactly one element.    This latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=54897&package_id=49681  Regards,  j.
330214
ODF? It's for poseurs Large organisations that are considering a move away from Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) in favour of rival standard (Open Document Format) ODF should think again, concludes a new report.â¦
595557
Microsoft has published a new beta of its Open XML File Format Converter for Mac.
661026
The votes are in, and Microsoft's Office OpenXML document format fails to achieve international standard status with the ISO. Microsoft's OOXML -- the native office-doc format for Office 2007 -- needed a two-thirds majority approval among the national bodies eligible to vote on the standard. Ballots came in at 53 percent yes, far short of the 67 percent required.
31443
(InfoWorld) - It may be Valentine's Day but there are no love letters being exchanged between duelling electronic document formats, ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML. Instead, Microsoft, the backer of Open XML, took a public swing at ODF supporter IBM. Microsoft posted an open letter on its Web site Wednesday titled "Interoperability, Choice, and Open XML," signed by two of its general managers -- Tom Robertson, who handles interoperability and standards, and Jean Paoli, responsible for interoperability and XML architecture. In the letter, Microsoft claimed that IBM is attempting to slow down the approval process by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to recognize Open XML as an international standard. IBM declined to comment publicly on the letter, but a spokesman said the company had previously addressed many of the issues raised by Microsoft. In May, ISO approved ODF as an international standard and is currently considering whether to award the same recognition to Open XML. ODF has the backing of such companiesÂ as IBM, Google, Novell, Sun, and open-source players. Open XML is the default file format for Microsoft's Office 2007 desktop applications suite. What has yet to become clear is which document format users will favor -- ODF or Open XML -- or whether they'd adopt a mix of the two. Some vendors, such as Corel, have already announced they're adopting a neutral approach and will support both formats in their software. IT users and governments around the world are expressing interest in open-standard document formats to help ensure continued access to archived information and also free them from having to use Microsoft's Office software. In December, standards body ECMA International voted 20 to 1 to approve Open XML as a global standard and submitted the format to ISO for its approval. The dissenting vote came from IBM, according to Microsoft. "IBM has declared victory in blocking Open XML," the Microsoft letter alleges, claiming that IBM is holding up the standards process in a "blatant attempt" to limit choice in the marketplace designed to favor the vendor's Lotus Notes groupware, which doesn't support Open XML. Microsoft and IBM are the two leading desktop collaboration software vendors with IBM's Notes pitted against Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange software. Microsoft is fearful that ODF may become the de facto electronic document format by default simply because it was first to achieve ISO recognition as an international standard, the letter stated. "In XML-based file formats, which can easily interoperate through translators and be implemented side by side in productivity software, this exclusivity makes no sense -- except to those who lack confidence in their ability to compete in the marketplace on the technical merits of their alternative standard," the letter continued. "This campaign to limit choice and force their single standard on consumers should be resisted." The timing of the release of Microsoft's letter is interesting given that it comes a day after the Oasis standards body announced its approval of a new version of the ODF standard, OpenDocument 1.1. The changes in ODF 1.1 are designed to address concerns voiced by advocacy groups that the previous release didn't meet the needs of people with disabilities. The level of accessibility support provided in ODF 1.1 is now on a par or exceeds that available in other file formats. Â
28574
Builder.com as posted a quick tutorial on working with the DOM functionality in PHP to create a dynamic XML document (Doctype and all).   Over the course of this article, I'll be introducing you to the main functions in this API, showing you how to programmatically generate a complete well-formed XML document from scratch and save it to disk.   They start off with creating the Doctype declaration before actually adding the content into the file (elements and text nodes), adding some attributes to the nodes, putting CDATA blocks inside them, and pushing out the results on the other side to be saved to a local "order.xml" file.   You can also download this article if you'd like to work with it (and its included PHP files) on your own.
415966
XML Copy Editor is a fast, free, validating XML editor.   Version 1.1.0.6 introduces full Aspell support and XML Schema-based element inspection.  https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=141776
761840
This library contains classes that generate documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF) and/or HTML.   Whenever people think of PDF and Java, they think of iText. That's great, but it also involves a lot of responsibility: we have to keep on working on the product; fixing bugs, adding new functionality, making it a better product.  The first thing that jumps in the eye with this new release, is the reorganization of the source code. Whereas in the past all the source code was in one com.lowagie.* tree right under src, we now have subdirectories core, rtf and rups. There's also a test directory with different subdirectories containing series of code for testing with JUnit.  Most of these changes are made with the next release in mind. The old RtfWriter will soon disappear, and some new RTF code for manipulating RTF will be added in the new rtf directory: this code will go into a separate jar.  The rups directory contains some code for a new tool that is available in pre-beta as a Java WebStart application. It uses SUN's PDF Renderer to view a PDF document, but adds iText functionality to look beyond the surface: you can easily browse through the syntax that makes your PDF document tick.  Aside from these changes, Paulo made TIFF support more tolerant for broken TIFFs, fixed a bug in PdfSmartCopy, added some new PdfGraphics2D functionality, and much more. Xavier managed the code reorganization and applied the necessary changes to the ANT scripts. Mark did the same for the RTF part and fix a bug concerning styles. I wrote the RUPS code and I introduced some new concepts.  This is the last 2.0.x release, the next release will be iText 2.1.0.
368826
On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a new post from Maarten Balliauw about a set of PHP classes he's created to work with Office 2007 SpreadsheetML documents (yay! another format!).   I finished my first goals (some basic XLSX writing), and I want to share this set of classes to the community. [...] Each cell supports the following data formats: string, number, formula, boolean. Visual formatting is not implemented, but I'll get to that later.   Features supported currently include the creation of the Spreadsheet object, adding worksheets, adding cells, and exporting the object to the Excel 2007 OpenXML format.   You can check out the project and the latest version over on his blog.
517028
In this section we look at validating XML documents against XML schemas. Topics covered include: retrieving XML data, accessing relational data through XMLType views, using XMLType views and performing DML operations on XML schema-based XMLType views. By Yuli Vasiliev. 1001
16442
The XPL editor is an RCP Eclipse application based on the eXtensible Presentation Language, an xml-based presentation language built on top of Visual Design Patterns. For more information about XPL, visit http://semantics.eng.it/xpl/index.html   Hi all  the version 0.0.4 of the XPLEditor has been released. Moreover the website related to the editor has been updated and is available at the following address: http://semantics.eng.it/xpl.  You will find the release notes in the XPL Editor 0.0.4 package.    Enjoy XPL Editor!    Giuseppe Vella
548087
InfoWorld - Sun&#160;has created software that will provide translation between the file format in Microsoft&#39;s Office 2003 suite and ODF (Open Document Format for XML). The plug-in lets people who use computers with assistive technologies to access documents written in ODF.
149526
This week we conclude our three part series. Topics include XML and Web Services and E4X: ECMAScript for XML. Note that while E4X includes language syntax and APIs for working with XML namespaces, the examples don't illustrate this syntax (for simplicity). By David Flanagan. 1002
769389
Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:Class TreeviewPHP User ClassDHTMLDumpSalatCSV Parse and ReadRSAsmb4phpClient infoTrue Singleton ClassRounded Border Table Generator
466256
Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.   Now I have to admit to being curious about what is going on - after all anything new dealing with the web affects me as PHP coder. Since the W3C is supposedly interested in input from the Web community and content developers, I decided to see who from PHP would be there. Granted it is very early for the formation of the group so it didn't really surprise me to see no one from PHP that I know or heard about in there, but I wonder if anyone from the PHP Group will become a "invited expert" somewhere down the road.   The group is looking for members to help define this next generation of markup on the web. Check out their page for some of the qualifications needed to participate and for some of the upcoming events.W3C Launches New HTML Working Group
449834
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.