Digg offers a Web service API that makes possible to develop customized applications on top of the base service. This API, currently in its second incarnation, allows access to a number of important Digg functions, including searching and commenting on Digg stories. This article takes a fast look at how to integrate Digg's Web service with a PHP application using the PEAR Services_Digg2 class. […]

Let’s take a look at php|architect’s latest book, “php|architect’s guide to Web Scraping with PHP”. Click on in, I’ll tell what’s in it and what’s not. I’ll cover the good, the bad and the ugly. In short, I’ll give you enough information to make the decision to buy or not to buy but I won’t give away the ending. […]

PEAR's Translation2 package provides a sophisticated framework for adding multi-language support to a Web application. This article takes a close look at the special features of this package, with examples of using it with both MySQL and XML data sources. […]

The PEAR Services_Twitter package provides a full-featured interface for interacting with the Twitter API through a PHP application. This article looks at the various methods supported by this package, and illustrates how they can be used to integrate Twitter data into a Web application with PHP. […]

Christoph Dorn recently started to play around with Zend Server CE, and wanted to get FirePHP, a debugging tool, working on it. On his blog he takes you through his process to show you how to do this, and also gives a little history on PEAR […]

On his blog Nabeel Shahzad goes through creating a deployment using Phing, replacing nasty shell scripts; extracting from Subversion, variable replacements and file manipulation, and creating multiple deployment types in one build file. […]

Ever since the big search engines added auto-suggest, hardly a week goes by without a client asking me to build similar autocomplete functionality into a Web form. Fortunately, modern programming toolkits like Dojo provide ready-made widgets that have the necessary client-side functions for autocomplete. Add a little bit of server-side glue, in the form of a PHP script that talks to a database to generate valid suggestions, and enabling this functionality in a Web application now becomes a matter of hours, rather than days. In this article, I’ll show you how to do this using three different libraries: PEAR HTML_QuickForm, YUI, and Dojo. Come on in, and find out more! […]

Unless you've spent the past couple of years down a rabbit hole, you've already heard about AJAX: it's a technique that combines asynchronous client-server communication with a set of existing toolkits (JavaScript, CSS, the DOM) to selectively update parts of a Web page, instead of the traditional "full page reload". This produces applications that are quicker and more responsive to user input, resulting in a better user experience. But what does all this have to do with PHP, you ask? Well, PHP is commonly used on the server end of the connection, to handle AJAX requests and send back responses. But that isn't all it can do - with a little PEAR package called HTML_AJAX, you can use PHP to significantly simplify the work that goes into building and deploying an AJAX application. That's where this article comes in. Over the next few pages, I'm going to give you a quick run-down on the PEAR HTML_AJAX class, together with a few examples of how you can use it to AJAX-ify various Web applications. Keep reading, and be prepared to be amazed! […]

W. Jason Gilmore has written an article about different ways of sending email with PHP. His article discusses the native mailer function, the PEAR Mail package, and the Zend_Mail component under a Zend Framework approach. […]

Let’s take a look at two extensions can help you organize and catalog your digital media collection so that it’s easier to navigate and search. […]