Tech Chorus

I was contacted by PackT to review the book PHP 5 e-commerce Development by Michael Peacock.

The book serves as an introductory tutorial on developing an e-commerce website using PHP. The book has 15 chapters covered in 310 pages.

You can grab a sample chapter from the publisher's website.

The publisher's website has a detailed table of contents.

Who should read the book?

You should read the book if you are learning PHP and new to e-commerce. Beginners trying to utilize out of the box software like Drupal CMS or OSCommerce tend to be frustrated sooner or later. These content management systems have their own ways of doing things. Being new to PHP and complex software like Drupal can intimidate you until you thoroughly understand the inner workings of the software. Often developers choose to roll their own software to avoid the steep learning curve of existing open source software. If you have experienced similar feeling you can sure try this book.

Today, I was looking for a quick way to get the current weather information on my computer. There are so many websites out there that offer the information. But I was looking for a program I could permanently install on my computer and launch it whenever I want to lookup the weather information. Oddly, I didn't find any satisfying program. At the same time I was also watching a video about network programming. That inspired me to quickly write a program in PHP to print the current weather information where I live.

I started to look out for a web service that offers information about weather for free. Did I tell you programmableweb.com is a useful website to find web services? If you have subscribed to the Tech Chorus blog you know we've been talking about REST, XML-RPC and web services in general for a while. I landed up on the Yahoo! Weather API web page.

I wrote a program to print the weather information in 7 lines of PHP code. I have published this program on Code Album github repository. You can grab it and use it.

If you want to know how to write similar programs, read on. If you know a bit of PHP and have heard about XML and RSS before you can understand the program and start building upon it.

Last Saturday, the Bangalore PHP User Group conducted a meeting. The venue was same as the last time, Microsoft office, Bangalore! The topic of the meeting was Framework Shootout. The frameworks represented were:

• Zend Framework

In our last example, we used Zend_Rest_Route and Zend_Rest_Controller to demonstrate how to map requests to controller actions. We also used the response object to send text content in the HTTP response. In this article let us send appropriate HTTP response codes using the response object.

RFC 2616 describes HTTP response codes to use in various contexts.

In this example, we will use a few response codes

Title: Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development
Author: Keith Pope
Publisher: Packt Publishing Ltd
ISBN 1847194222
ISBN 13 978-1-847194-22-0

The Zend Framework community needed a book covering version 1.8+. Version 1.8 brought new notable features. Zend_Application is one among them. Zend_Application introduced object oriented bootstrapping in applications that otherwise used a procedural script. A bunch of users had difficulty understanding how to set up their applications to make use of the new bootstrapping component. All of them have seem to understand it well now, thanks to support in the official mailing lists and IRC channel. Zend_Navigation, Zend_Tool and enhancements to filter and validation components were other noteworthy additions to Zend Framework 1.8. For a full list of changes and additions to the 1.8 version see the release notes.

I contacted PackT Publishing Ltd and asked for the book to write this review. They were kind enough to quickly send me a copy of the ebook.

Let's begin exploring the book.

Title: Pro PHP XML and web services
Author: Robert Richards
Publisher: Apress
ISBN13: 978-1-59059-633-3

If you are a PHP programmer and looking to expand your knowledge in XML and web services areas, the book is a good resource. The book assumes no prior knowledge about XML and web services. It assumes you are capable of writing PHP programs independently.

Download the table of contents PDF document from the publisher.

In the previous articles I've written about using Dojo date pickers and filteringSelect widgets.

The Zend Framework 1.9 release added a new feature - Zend_Rest_Controller. Zend_Rest_Controller and Zend_Rest_Route classes go hand in hand. In the previous versions of the Zend Framework, we have had the Zend_Rest_Server component. We still have. Since Zend_Rest_Server provides an RPC like component violating the REST architectural constraint, it is likely to be deprecated in the future versions of the Zend Framework.

What's the problem with PHP's mail() function?

PHP language provides the mail() function. But it requires properly configured mail server on the local machine. Developers often don't have the necessary infrastructure at their disposal. Sometimes sending emails from a PHP script becomes a frustrating experience.

If you are a

• PHP programmer looking to write a script to send changelog email notification when a commit is made to the SVN server
• SVN server admin looking for a script to send changelog email notification when a commit is made

you have come to the right place.

For the impatient, the script is posted at the end of the article.

Before we delve into writing the script, let us summarize the environment.

• We have our SVN project at the path /var/svn/myproject/
• The project name is myproject

Exploring svnlook