p. 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.

p. 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.

p. 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.

p. 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.

p. 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.

p. As a programmer you are often assigned to write programs for system administration tasks. By default, command line applications in PHP lack aesthetics. By taking advantage of the ncurses functions you can create a friendly user interface for the application that will be generally uniform across the various terminal types.

p. PHP is a highly flexible and extensible language and can be used to augment your existing shell/Perl scripting solutions or replace them; so ncurses functionality is a natural progression for PHP.

p. This tutorial will give you a kick-start towards writing decent looking command-line applications that benefit the user as well as the writer. I will focus on the ‘meat’ of what is needed and hopefully give you a framework for adding ncurses functionality into your PHP application.

p. Accepting payment in real time is now an integral part of e-commerce and is one of the basic building blocks of an online business. There are many companies offering payment gateways and your or your client’s choice largely depends on location, transaction volume, your bank’s partners etc.

p. This Tutorial concentrates on PHP’s Payflow Pro extension, which allows you to carry out seamless transactions with Verisign. However, the principles discussed in this tutorial can be easily applied to PHP’s other payment extensions such as the CyberMUT extension and general functionality encapsulation into independent libraries.

p. cURL and libcurl are libaries that allow a webserver to transfer files with a remote computer using a variety of Internet protocols. The libaries are highly configurable, allowing practically any type of client-server request to be peformed. By using these tools, a webserver can act as a client, creating and responding to requests using any technology built on HTTP, like XML-RPC, SOAP, or WebDAV.