HP offers comprehensive autoglobals to access external data sent with each request. These variables do not expose all the possibilities allowed by the HTTP protocol, but a controlled use can in practice minimize the impact of this limitation. Two problems are particularly troublesome: the lack of access to multi-valued keys without using a special syntax and complexity of the magic bracketed syntax. Until PHP natively provides another interface freed from these problems, a different interface in user space can circumvent them.

He gives some code examples of methods that can be used to parse strings like those found in cookies (or pulled in via php://stdin) including mentions of key normalization and accessing the values by literal keys. You can see a more full implementation here.

Zend_Pdf, while generally quite good, has one big issue: It does not support word wrapping text! There's a new and still a bit obscure framework called RE Framework, which has an excellent PDF component - it includes support for word wrapping, better support for PDF templates, image loading etc.

The several of the interfaces (method calls) are similar between Zend_Pdf and RE_Pdf, so there's not too much rewriting involved if you're already using Zend's option. He shows how to parse an XML file, plug those values, the fonts and fields, in the PDF object then flesh it out with a presentation layer and information to fill in the blanks.

After a welcome break, over the late summer public holiday here in England, here's the final part in my object-oriented PHP series. Sorry about the rather extended pause since "Part 3: Taking Relationships Further".

Having already looked at definition, relationships and taking those relationships further, I'm going to look at how PHP5's new Object Model introduces more advanced functionality.

In this latest part they look at clas constants, abstract classes, object interfaces, and magic methods (including overloading).