In this DevX tutorial, Octavia Anghel shows how use PHP to create images based on the SVG libraries available to any browser.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML specification for producing vector-based graphic content that you can create, modify, and manipulate dynamically from programming languages. Here, you’ll explore the most important techniques and libraries for integrating SVG with PHP to create diverse graphic content—from simple shapes to complex graphs.
They show a few different ways to get the job done including a straight ‘echo’ call with the output, sending a converted SVG document over with a PHP header or including another (or multiple) SVG documents into another and outputting them. They also talk about tools like the phpHtmlLib library, the PEAR::XML_SVG package and the PEAR::Image_Canvas package.
Ivo Jansch has posted more details about this year’s Dutch PHP Conference happening in Amsterdam this June on the 13th and 14th.
I’m proud to announce that we’re organizing another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference, with the help of the great people at Zend. It will be in Amsterdam on June 13 and 14 this year. Last year we organized it for the first time, and based on feedback from our visitors we have made several changes to this years event.
Changes include the expansion into two days, increased capacity and the primary language of the conference is English this year. They also included an interesting twist – allowing those attending (or potentially attending) the conference to submit their thoughts to the “Call for Ideas” they would like to see presented.
The main conference site has full details about everything you’d need to know including where and how to register to save your spot.
Julie Lerman calls in to tell us about her experiences with the Entity Framework.
Andrew Johnstone has a new post today with a look at a project he’d worked on – an implementation of a web service with the Zend Framework functionality.
I was recently working on a project to expose our trading systems via XmlRpc, Rest and SOAP. It was quite an interesting project, which took two of us three weeks to develop (Amongst other things).
He talks about some of the issues they worked through (like the ZF’s “not quite ready” in the web services department) and problems they found with how the web services functionality was implemented in the framework’s components. They also came across two strange bugs – one with accepting raw input and the other with a wrong return type from a method call.
Ilia Alshanetsky has officially announced that the latest release candidate for the PHP 5.2.5 series (RC1) has been posted and is ready to test.
This RC includes a fair number of fixes since our last release and predominantly works on improving the stability of the 5.2 tree as well as including a small number of minor security fixes. I’d like to ask everyone to test this release against your code and setups, we are aiming for a quick release cycle and user feedback is critical for a successful release.
You can download this latest version here.
php|architect is hosting a coding contest that started on Saturday. The task is to grab the contents of an HTML file and grab all of the links out of it, removing duplicates.
You may use any built in function, the phpinfo() of the server used for testing will be attached. You just need to retrieve the links, you don’t need to worry about them being relative or absolute.
It should be able to be called from the command line and return the links, one per line. They include how the scripts will be measured (speed, accuracy, etc) and the prize list – $100 gift card for phparch.com, a one year subscription or *drum roll* an autographed picture of ProPHP podcast hosts Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coates.
To submit your entry just email it over to c7ycontests@phparch.com with the subject of “C7Y Contest – February” on it.
For those that weren’t able to attend this year’s CakeFest (2008), you might want to check out Felix Geisendorfer’s summary of the event that happened in early February down in Orlando, Florida – complete with lots of pictures.
Since I’m not much of a story teller I’ll make this a picture post (my hosting company should really re-think that unlimited bandwidth package, haha).
He has shots of several of the attendees (including names known to most of the CakePHP community), the location for the conference, shots of the “off time” during the conference and some alligator kissing.
I just want to say thank you to all of the folks who came and especially those who have been involved with the logistics of all of this. It was a pleasure to meet everybody and I’m looking forward to the next CakeFest in Argentina.
Andreas Gohr has a new blog post today that talks about a way to really get to know your code better – use XDebug to see it from the inside out.
Xdebug is a PHP extension which helps you to understand, debug and profile PHP. It can help you to find bottlenecks or give you an quick overview what happens in code you aren’t familiar with, yet.
The post gives a brief overview of the installation of the extension (building a shared module) and shows how to get started with profiling an application. He talks about the cachegrind tool you can use to parse the results and the kcachegrind app that will make the results a bit more visual.
As a bonus, he also throws in a bit about function tracing – picking out each small bit of functionality in the code (the function/methods) and gathering stats for each.
The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode in their PHP Abstract podcast series today – an advanced look at using APIs in PHP from Davey Shafik.
Today’s special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey Shafik is a full time developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. He is an author of both books and magazines and no stranger to the regular listeners of PHP Abstract. Today, Davey is going to talk to take an advanced look at APIs.
You can grab this latest bit of PHP audio goodness three ways – from the on-page player, via a subscription to the podcast feed or just by downloading the mp3.
The Bakery (the CakePHP repository) has posted lost of great new content to their site recently. Here’s just a taste:
Also be sure to check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related articles, tutorials and helpful hints.
