Tech Chorus

Bizsense is an open source CRM project which uses Zend Framework. The open source project was started by Binary Vibes about three years ago and was released under the GPL V3 license. Some of you might have noticed that I am no longer active in Binary Vibes.

I wanted Bizsense project development to continue to nourish, flourish and cherish. Therefore, there we did a few changes. Bizsense is now released under the new BSD license. Bizsense uses Google open source project hosting which offers issue tracker, Wiki and source control. Bizsense now uses Mercurial for source control. The documentation is published at docs.jubero.com. In order to contribute to Bizsense, signing a CLA is no longer required.

Here are the project links:

• Bizsense project home page
• Bizsense end user documentation
• Bizsense developer documentation
• We hang out at #bizsense channel on Freenode IRC network.
• We also have a mailing list. Send an email to bizsensebms@googlegroups.com

Date and time handling in general is a problem in programming. For PHP programmers, there's a good library out there that performs all the difficult tasks and provides convenient APIs. Zend_Date has several constants defined. It is good to know what each one of them represents. For this purpose, I have made a cheat sheet. Download the PDF and enjoy.

The table has the constant name and sample value columns.

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.

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.