Google translation is an interesting service. Not only can you do language translation, you can also detect the language of a particular text. I recently needed to create a Wordpress plugin to translate post titles from one language to another. As the translation API is only available for Java and Javascript, I decided to create a quick one for PHP.

You'll need to register for an API key before you can follow along with the examples. Sameer includes a few small code snippets showing how to run a "self test" to be sure things are working, a sample translation of a string and how to grab errors should they happen during the process. You can grab the library from the Google Code page for the project.

Like many Web 2.0 applications, Flickr exposes its data to the public via a REST API, making it possible to develop customized applications that run on top of the base service. This REST API allows access to a number of important functions, including photo searching, tagging and uploading; photoset retrieval; contact retrieval; and panda recommendations.

The tutorial uses the Zend_Rest_Client component of the Zend Framework to make the actual request to the Flickr API and you'll need a API key/shared secret to be able to use it. The rest of the tutorial is code dedicated to helping you connect to the service, fetch data, search the API (and output the results), and looking at some of the "interestingness" magic Flickr has to share.

I'm going to focus more on Zend_Paginator and Zend_Rest_Client to access Twitters API since I've already created a post on Zend_Cache. Normally, I would use Zend_Service_Twitter to access the twitter service but it still seems to require authentication to retrieve a users timeline where only protected users should require authentication.

He includes all of the needed code including the bootstrap.ini file and his own custom Twitter service class that grabs the timeline of the given user and calls the REST interface to grab the latest posts and caches them to a file.

This tutorial will guide you to the process of integration of your web community with Facebook. This means that when a visitor comes to your site it can log in with normal credentials if it has, but if it has not it can click on the "facebook connect" button and try to log in with its facebook account, automatically.

You'll need to register the application with Facebook before getting started and get an API key you can use to work with their backend. With the help of the Facebook-provided libraries and a file for the cross-domain interaction (a xd_receiver file) you can use the code he's provided to allow the user to log in with their Facebook username/password and it be mapped to a user on your local application.

We will be using the php function "file_get_contents" to receive data from flickr. The data which we will receive will be a serialized PHP array which means all we need to do is unserialize the array and we will easily be able to use the data returned. As an alternative we can use a cURL function to get the data, for example if the function "file_get_contents" is not allowed on your web host.

They show how to get your API key from the Flickr website and the sample code that you'll need to make a GET request (with file_get_contents) and an example of a loop displaying the response.

Another great way to integrate LCCS and PHP is with the REST APIs and the library that ships with the LCCS SDK. With those APIs we can perform a number of management functions including creating and deleting rooms, managing roles, and creating templates. These APIs make it very easy to create a customized, dynamic collaboration experience with PHP. You can create rooms on the fly for your users and get information about what kind of content is in those rooms. In this example we're going to create a basic room manager with PHP that will let us create, delete, and view information about specific rooms.

Code is included to use the AFCS PHP library to connect to the Services API and pass in the username and password directly from the user. The request is made and a token is passed back to the calling script. The XML description of the full Flex application is included in the tutorial.

Every company starts with a single website or web application, but as a company's online presence grows, many different applications and sites are deployed. With a traditional approach of treating each of these applications as separate solutions, a number of problems occur [...] Service APIs can help you reuse a set of common functionality, which is implemented only once into the service layer. They can also help integrate third party applications in a consistent and robust way, and work around possible performance limitations.

The whitepaper covers the differences between the traditional development model and how the service model changes how you think about your backend. He covers implementation, development, documentation, testing methods and general maintenance down the line.

Unlike PHP, C generally resolves function calls at compile time. When you introduce dynamically loadable shared objects, the ability to know their exact address ahead of time goes out the window [...] One of the things that makes this unnecessarily slower is libraries which export a lot of symbols which aren't needed outside of the file they were defined in.

Because of some of the lazy ways of extension developers (well, some of them) there's been issues with some extensions not making things static when they should be. To counteract the problems this can cause, the PHP 5.3 developers changed the macros to expand out to static instead of const.

]]> Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:52:39 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/13582 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/13582 Jeez Tech has a new post with a great (and long) list of PHP scripts to connect your application to any number of popular APIs out there.

Do you want to use an API but you are too lazy to write your own code to handle the requests? If you code in PHP as I do, then you will definitely need these classes. By using the classes listed here you will be able of using a great number of web services with an easy and documented way.

They link to libraries to work with the APIs for Alexa, Babelfish, Bing, eBay, Facebooks, Flickr, Linkedin, MSN, Twitter, Skype and Yahoo. They also mention PEAR and the role it plays in the foundation of many web service connections.

]]> Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:57:53 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/13533 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/13533 On the PHPEveryday.com site there's two new articles looking at interacting with the Facebook API to grab information about its users. In the first article they look at getting friend information and in the other they look at getting events.

Facebook is an incredible site. At the time this tutorial was written, this site reaches ranking second only to Google in the achievement of visitors. What does it mean? Facebook could attract so many visitors. This site even has defeated Friendster friendship site that had been rampant.

These articles are parts four and five of a series, here's the rest - parts one, two and three.

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