Today’s special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey is a regular on PHP Abstract and I’ve receited his bio enough so that those of you who listen regularly can probably recite along with me. Davey is a full time developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. He is an author of both magazine articles as well as books and regularly speaks at PHP conferences. His latest book was just released, “The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition” which he co wrote with another PHP Abstract host, Matthew Weier O’Phinney. They had a lot of help from other PHP Lumminaries including Ligaya Turmelle of phpwomen.org. A link to this brand new book can be found in the show notes.

p. Ok, again, I’ve fallen way behind now on my book reviews. Here’s one that was released late last year that I’m just now getting around to reviewing. Click on inside, lets talk about “PHP Programming with PEAR”.

p. Welcome back to our third edition of the Zend Framework: Hidden Gems series of articles. In the previous two articles we discussed Zend_Cache and Zend_Config. I promised that we would move into a multi-part article on using the Zend_Db database component of the framework, however this week we will look at some of the underlying “framework” components of the Zend framework, and will start with databases next week.

p. A few months ago, apress released an expansive tome by Rob Richards’ titled “Pro PHP XML and Web Services”. They were kind enough to send me a copy for review. Click on inside and let’s chat about it for a while.

p. !

p. If you’re familiar with C or C++, you’ve probably already heard of Remote Procedure Calls – they’re the framework by which procedures on a server are remotely executed by other clients on the network. RPCs are interesting, because they make it possible to design services that can be used independently of the client’s operating environment. So long as both client and server understand the RPC protocol, they can communicate with each other to execute commands and process return values.

This tutorial teaches you, step-by-step, how to build an XML-RPC client in PHP using the XML-RPC library written by Edd Dumbill. It covers each of the PHP classes you will be using, and how they fit together to form the final client.

A primer is included to introduce the basics of the XML-RPC specification. The primer provides enough information to work with the XML-RPC library. If you want to learn more about the XML-RPC specification see http://www.xmlrpc.com.