Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but itâ'™s hard to tell what you want when you don't know what's available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful.

The five that made his list are:

• Service_Akismet
• HTTP_Request
• Archive_Tar
• Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
• XML_Parser

I've just install the last version of PHP6 dev and I've decided to test the famous new feature, the PHP Unicode Support. I will not explain new things about PHP6 or Unicode or TextIterator, it's just my discoveries test on this features.

He steps through the process he followed - enabling Unicode support, testing various output methods (including just an echo and using the TextIterator) as well as some of the manipulation methods (next/first/current) that can be used to get certain characters out of a string.

Who's that with the catchy URL that's getting all the clicks?

Why, it's del.icio.us! No matter where you are on the "Web 2.0" lash or backlash, the pervasive influence of this little bookmark aggregator can't be denied.

The site offers a myriad ways of accessing its database, from HTML and RSS feeds, to JSON data, to browser integration of various types. Let's take a look at the public API, which offers flexible and easy access to del.icio.us.

In his example, he creates a script that, given the contents of an email message, filters out the URL, breaks it into its parts and sends it off to the del.icio.us API to be bookmarked under his account.]]> Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:04:10 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9118 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9118 Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.

The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.

You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.

I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community

He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords.

Though not too meaningful, it is interesting to see how the different languages stack up in the number of reserved words you can't use for anything else. So, does that mean that Perl is the list limiting?

A few minutes ago, I released phar version 1.2.1. phar is a PHP extension that allows the creation of complete filesystems within a single physical file. In addition, a bootstrap stub written in PHP can be used to run a phar archive as if it were an executable file or shell script. Documentation on its usage and how to create phars is at http://php.net/phar in the PHP manual.

Greg mentions some other issues that were fixed and a refactoring of some of the stream operations to cut the speed in half.

He illustrates the creation of simple archive that pulls in a test file from a given path. This is then pushed into the zip archive and packed down and exported. He also notes the different compression levels that it can be created with - no compression, bzipped and gzipped.

You can download the library here.

PHP too has included support for the ZIP format since PHP 4.x but it was only recently when, idly browsing the PHP manual, I realized that PHP 5.2.0 includes a re-engineered version of the ext/zip extension, one based on the zlib library. Bored and not a little intrigued, I decided to try it out. And over the next few pages, I'm going to tell you what I found.

The tutorial does require that you have the zip extension installed before getting started. He starts with the basics (reading and opening a zip file) but quickly moves on to creating and decompressing them. All of the code needed is included of course, so you'll be up and working with your own zip files in no time.

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.