Ok, ZendCon is over and I'm back to surfing for things you will find interesting. Two articles posted that I didn't cover but feel they are content rich enough to mention are "Create a productivity package with the Zend Framework V1.5 and Google Apps" and "How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2". Click on in and I'll give you details and links.

The productivity package is a series of articles (three) where John Mertic shows how to integrate your ZF application with the many tools Google offers.

In the infrastructure and EC2 articles Mike Brittain talks about an EC2-driven Zend Framework application (the "why" not really the "how").

Just wanted to let you know about a new addition to the debuggable scraps repository: An API for the Amazon Associates Web Service. Right now it's really just a simple wrapper to allow you to search their catalog since that was all I needed for now.

You can download the scrap and easily integrate it with your app - he includes some sample code to show you exactly how.

However, over the past few years, WebDAV has started gaining traction as the underlying protocol for Subversion repositories over the web and in several other places. That makes this story about a new PHP library for working with WebDAV interesting.

He notes that he's moved a lot of his file storage to Amazon's s3 service and having this new PHP library would make it even easier for him to get at his content directly from his applications.

Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.

He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).

This is an example of non-interactive PHP script which downloads file from Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). Additional libraries like HMAC-SHA1 are not required.

You'll need at least PHP 4.1.0 or higher to follow along but the entire code block is there and ready for use. It makes the GET request to the bucket for your object with the correct authentication and opens a socket to pull the file down.

PHP streams are absolutely amazing. As mentioned by Elizabeth Smith (a great read if you don't know how to use streams) PHP streams are super powerful. Streams is something that is (to my knowledge) unique to PHP. The closest thing I've seen to it, is Linux's FUSE "user space" (i.e. not kernel module) file systems.

He shows an example of a stream in action and suggests an interface he'd like to see - an automatic connection to the Amazon S3 storage.

Are you sick of annoying ads that take up large parts of the screen, pop up, under or anywhere else, move around, blink and flash? You want to learn how to create ads that rock with a few lines of simple JavaScript and PHP code? Then let me show you how.

He shows his method for the creation of his unobtrusive ads with the advertising content that Amazon has to offer. The process is broken up into four steps:

• The Data Structure - an array of arrays with the Amazon information for the items (in this case books)
• Converting the PHP Array to JavaScript - using a Drupal module to assign the PHP array to a Javascript variable
• The HTML Output - a function that outputs a "block" of ads
• The JavaScript - the jQuery Javascript code to handle the clicks on each of the links.

You can see it in action at the top of the right sidebar on the SEO Expert website.

With PHP5 XML processing finally became easy thanks to the SimpleXML functions, that convert an XML document to an object that can be processed using property selectors and array iterators. A few days ago I integrated my Amazon wish list on this site with very few lines of code as you will see when you read the rest of this brief tutorial.

He walks through the connection both creating the XML request and handling the XML response to output the resulting images (books) linked to their Amazon pages.

Included in the list are books like:

• Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's PHP and MySQL Web Development
• Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Jason Gilmore
• Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell's Pro PHP Security (Pro)

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.