Not too long ago, it seemed like there was a pretty clear distinction between client-side technologies and server-side technologies. Languages like PHP, Perl and Python resided on the server, taking care of tasks like database connectivity, transaction management and remote procedure calls, while tools like JavaScript, CSS and HTML were used exclusively on the client to render pages, perform whizzy effects and respond to user events. Things aren't that clear any longer. Projects like Jaxer and Phobos are blurring these distinctions, by making it possible to run JavaScript on the server and use it for tasks ranging from server-side file access to input validation. And in this article, I'm going to show you how to add a JavaScript engine to your PHP build, with a little help from PECL's SpiderMonkey extension. Keep reading! […]

Welcome to the next episode of the The ZendCon Sessions podcast! This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and features Elizabeth M Smith give her presentation: “PECL Picks – Extensions to make your life better” […]

You’ve already seen, in previous articles, just how easy it is to read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR. But spreadsheets are just one way of representing structured data – the other, of course, is to use a database. Well, guess what? If your database happens to be Microsoft Access, PHP has you covered there as well! In this article, I’ll introduce you to PHP’s MDBTools extension, which provides an API to programmatically read data from Microsoft Access database files. If your project involves working with such files, extracting database records either for calculations or for conversion to other formats, you’ll find this extension invaluable. Come on in, and see how it works! […]

Todays special guest is Elizabeth Marie Smith. I quote now from her “about me” page of her blog, a link to which can be found in the show notes. Elizabeth has been using PHP since time immemorial but has used PHP 5 for so long now she’s forgotten how she ever got by without SPL and a real object model. She is a certifiable geek, if it can be compiled on windows, she’ll compile it, if not…she’ll fix it so it does. She enjoys doing very perverse things to Windows using PHP as well – all this in between caring for her 4 kids and husband. Today Elizabeth is going to share with us about PECL, the PHP Extension Community Library. […]

One of the things I like best about PHP, is its support for a diverse array of technologies and formats. Take, for instance, YAML. I’ve been using YAML for a while to manage configuration data for a Ruby-based application, but I recently needed to use it for a PHP-based project for the first time. Although PHP doesn’t come with built-in support for this format, a quick Google search revealed a PECL extension, ext/syck, that allowed me to quickly add YAML parsing support to my PHP build and begin reading and managing YAML-formatted files through my PHP application. […]

These tutorials are introductions to the extensions in PHP 4, most of which live in PECL. The articles here will be added to until every extension is covered, so watch this space! […]

Service Data Objects (SDOs) have been around in the Java technology world since November 2003. They are designed as a means of simplifying and unifying working with heterogeneous data sources. In February 2005, IBM and Zend announced a strategic partnership to collaborate on the development and support of the PHP environment. One aspect of this collaboration has been the definition and implementation of SDOs for PHP. This article gives an overview of SDOs and the motivations for using them in the PHP environment. A simple contact management scenario is used to illustrate key concepts. […]

Efficient handling of code can make a big difference; for example when administrating more than one PHP application, or several installations of the same application, or simply to aid the distribution of several PHP applications using the same base libraries. Specifically, this article will look at packaging of your own PHP libraries using the PEAR (http://pear.php.net) package format, and your own PHP extensions using PECL (http://pecl.php.net). Basic PEAR and PECL familiarity is assumed, but most of the features discussed in this article will be explained. […]

This tutorial explores the use of PHP’s socket functions and the sockets extension. A socket server is a service assigned to a particular port that listens to incoming requests and responds to them. […]

With HTML, developers knew where they stood: design, content, and styling were all in one place. However, the new (and superior) trend is towards keeping various parts of data separate: XML stores content, CSS stores styling, and XHTML stores layout. Using the new system, with content and layout clearly split, it is suddenly much easier to manipulate content without affecting layout. This is where XSLT comes in: it provides a way to process and output the data stored in an XML document based upon your processing instructions. […]