Tech Chorus

There's some talk going on in the interweb about the future of technologies like RSS and email. Some people seem to believe that these fundamental technologies are dead already or will be dead soon. I feel, these zealous folks(tweeps?) have to be brought back to the real world.

Let's analyze RSS first. RSS has become a meme for feeds. Generally, when people are talking about RSS, they mean web feeds. Remember Xerox? RSS is one of the popular feed formats. Atom is the other major format. Personally, I prefer Atom for various reasons. Feeds are ubiquitous in the blog, news and podcast worlds. They are also useful and well received in other areas.

On 30 October 2010, the Bangalore PHP User Group met at Microsoft. I gave a talk, XML For PHP Developers, in the event.

I'm sharing the slides in this entry.

It was an introductory talk on XML for PHP developers. There are hundreds of technologies built on top of XML. We have all heard about RSS, Atom, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc. The goal of the talk was to get PHP developers to start using XML. In the talk, I presented three recipes:

• Parsing RSS feeds using simplexml. This was based on my blog post about retrieving weather information in your location using Yahoo! Weather.
• Generating Atom feed document using DOM.
• Scraping web pages using DOM and XPath. This was based on Web Scraping With lxml. This time I did in PHP.

Jamie asks on LinkedIn.

The short answer

The question is wrong.

The long answer

A true PHP developer is a programmer who knows PHP. A false PHP developer is someone who doesn't know PHP. That's the closest correct answer I can think of.

I think, Jamie wants to ask, "what's your definition of a good PHP developer?". There is no correct answer to the question. All, you can do is highlight some of the good things a PHP developer does.

Let's seize this opportunity to talk about the traits of a good PHP developer. Most of the things that apply for a discussion about good PHP programmer also applies to a good web developer and good programmer in general.

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

Do you want to quickly test some PHP code?

Are you learning PHP?

Are you teaching PHP?

Don't miss out the PHP CLI Interactive mode. You can invoke PHP interactive shell from the terminal

php -a

Example 1: Do you want to see the output of xmlrpc_encode_request()

php > echo xmlrpc_encode_request('myIPAddress', array('username','password'));
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>myIPAddress</methodName>
<params>
 <param>
  <value>
   <string>username</string>
  </value>

When you use a JavaScript framework, library or toolkit in production, you would be interested in improving the performance of the application by:

• Reducing the footprint of the JavaScript code by compressing it, removing comments, white spaces, etc
• Reducing the number of HTTP requests, especially in Ajax applications
• Removing documentation, tests and other project files to be productive with FTP, SCP and VCS operations

Welcome to Tech Chorus. In the coming days you will hear the software technology chorus chimed. The site will initially serve as community platform where we publish articles primarily about free and open source software technology. We would also love to publish information about specific FLOSS projects, web development and occasionally random topics. Sometimes code, sometimes a how to article. All content from LAMPComputing will be imported to this site soon.

Tech Chorus is also open to anyone interested in FLOSS projects and technologies. If you want to write here, want us to write on a specific topic or share ideas, just drop a line. The site is not only about free and open source software, but also about open standards and open computing technologies.

In about two to three weeks, we will open a discussion forum here.