If there are relations (an Author has a Book, for example). the generated forms will complain that the generated Models need a __toString() method to be used in the Form/View. In grails, this is the case, but every domain (corresponding to a Symfony 'model') has an implicit toString() method already generated, which return the string ":". For most production work, you'll want to override it with whatever you need the string to read, but for prototyping, it's fine.

He went in and modified the Symfony core to add in a __toString call that would return the object correctly. Several of the commentors agree with his frustration and some of the Symfony developers even chime in with some of the reasoning behind why it's like that.

In this second part of the series I'll show you how to introduce some important modifications to the initial skeleton of the image generator class, to make it slightly more modular and independent, while maintaining its functionality nearly the same as before. Sounds pretty interesting, right?

The validation they add checks the input the developer gives the mini-app's image creation function to ensure that it's getting valid height, width, text color, etc. Exceptions are thrown when the information is incorrect.

In my latest round of web services work in PHP5 I was creating a PHP5 client that interacts with our Java-based ERP. The client needs to be a combination of a couple of WSDL's into one, nice, compact and powerful client. It should be noted this client will be distributed via the State of Iowa PEAR channel so it will undoubted by used by other project in our organization and throughout state government so the result needs to have a lot more fit-and-finish than would be typical.

He mentions his expectations for PHP's usage of the protocol, including the automatic generation of variables/methods/etc to help the developer use the remote application easier.

Modern web-applications often provide (during registration, or password-reset) random-generated passwords for its users. However these passwords (usually a random combination of letters or numbers) are quite hard to remember: in fact, it's even impossible to read them. This article provides a function for generating English-like readable passwords.

The key difference in this script is that last sentence - making the passwords somewhat human-readable. They give an example of what the traditional (md5-ish) approach to making passwords is before giving the code to create something a bit easier to remember like "lyttakor" or "fapoution". Example usage code is also provided.

They assume you know a little something about the graphics functionality in PHP before you've started because they dive right into the code for the CAPTCHA image. They explain what the code's doing, but if you're not familiar with the PHP GD functions, you might be a little lost. Their string for the image is a randomly generated md5 hash.

The bar graph example is similar and they include a bit more for it - pulling information from a database (MySQL) backend (the results from a poll). They provide all of the code for this example and finish the tutorial off with a brief look at the options for using these types of dynamic images on the other pages in your site.

The resulting SVG is generated through GraphViz. He just ran the script on the eZ components.

It's a bash script that can run local to the machine and make the images as it speeds through your PHP code. Jakob mentions that the script it free for all, and offers a direct download from his page. You can see a more full-size example in the current graphs of the eZ components trunk.

Without going into theoretical details, some of which are quite alien to me, I'll try to describe some of the challenges that pattern patching rewriting macros might pose for a language like php. After brief explanation what kind of a beast is this, I try to explore some of the finer points, which might cause problems. The intent of this post is to sketch a design and highlight some of the possible issues.

He breaks up the post into a few sections:

• pattern matching rewrite only macros - a bird eye view
• Transformation time
• Basic/skeleton shapes and intermediate shapes
• Code generation issues specific to php
• Hygiene
• A rough macro shape outline
• Output/Status of the project

That's where this post on Katy's homepge comes in. It details updates Katy has made to a class offered by David Griffin called wsdl-writer-0.3.

There have been several attempts to write WSDL auto-generation code for PHP. They typically work by having the developer provide additional data about the types of each argument and return value to each web service defined, for example in comments or arrays.

All of the published solutions are rather limited. Perhaps the best attempt I found is David Giffin's wsdl-writer-0.3, but [it] has some major limitations as it stands. David unfortunately does not maintain wsdl-writer so I have decided to publish my modifications here.

She details the changes, noting updates to interoperability, new features (including native SOAP header support), and a few other bug fixes. A simple code example is also included, showing a sample web service class.

The code is simple and uses the SimpleXML PHP functionality to grab all of the items tagged with "blogroll" and parse through them, echoing them back out as simple links (to a "blogroll" section on a site). He has the script firing nightly, regenerating the OPML file each time, making it simple to automatically keep his list up-to-date while only having to update in one place.

Topics covered in this issue include:

• Building Ning Apps - by David Sklar
• a look at SimpleXML in PHP - by Thomas Myer
• Code Generation Techniques - by Jon Ramsey
• "Navigating the maze of Phorum" - by Brent Knigge, Boulos Mansour and Andy Cachia
• and a spotlight on KINKY, an application framework with over 300 modules

You can check out the full detailed table of contents for every article in the issue, or just hop on over and puchase the issue today - a single issue only costs around $5.00 USD.]]> Tue, 07 Feb 2006 07:03:14 -0600