PHPDeveloper.org

ThinkPHP Blog: Accessing Nike+ data with PHP

Thu, 15 May 2008 10:26:40 -0500

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Stephanie Ehrling has posted about a method for PHP to take in the output of the Nike+ equipment and put it into a usable form.

There is no official API that allows you to use the raw data. Nevertheless the data are sent to the Flash via XML so there is a chance to use them. For PHP Rasmus Lerdorf himself has implemented a class to access these data. The class allows to authenticate a user and fetch the running data of a user in a XML-Format

She gives an example of it in action - simple creation of an object then a call with the username and password. Behind the scenes, the data is pulled in and dropped into a SimpleXML object that includes total distance, total calories burned and data on the most recent run.

Marco Tabini's Blog: 5 PHP 5 features you can't afford to ignore

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:06:45 -0500

Marco Tabini has posted his list of what he considers five features of PHP5 that you "can't afford to ignore" when doing your development work:

Despite the fact that you may not have a choice in the matter, upgrading comes with a number of bonus new features that can help you write better code and gain access to new functionality that required a fair amount of hacking in previous version. Here's a quick list of 5 personal favourites.

The feature to make his list are SimpleXML, JSON/SOAP, PDO, the Standard PHP Library and SQLite. Each has their own bonus feature(s) included too for a little extra incentive to check them out.

DevShed: A Quick Overview of the XML DOM Extension in PHP 5

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:26:00 -0600

DevShed has started up a new tutorial series today with part one of their overview of the DOM extension that's included with PHP5:

Simply put, the DOM XML extension, as its name suggests, will permit you to work on XML documents by way of the DOM API. [...] In this article series I'll be discussing some of its most relevant methods and properties and accompanying all of these explanations with concise and instructive hands-on examples.

They look at using the DOM to create new documents, modify documents by adding additional nodes and converting over a SimpleXML document to be manipulated.

WebReference.com: XML-Enabled Applications

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 10:24:00 -0500

WebReference.com has an excerpt posted from one of Packt Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings, "PHP Oracle Web Development: Data processing, Security, Caching, XML, Web Services, and Ajax" (by Yuli Vasiliev). This specific chapter talks about XML-enabled applications and how PHP fits into the mix.

Both PHP and Oracle provide comprehensive support for XML and XML-related technologies. Practically, this means you can perform any XML processing either with PHP or inside an Oracle database. [...] This chapter explains how to effectively use XML techniques and technologies available in PHP and Oracle when building XML-enabled PHP/Oracle applications.

They cover the processing of XML in PHP/Oracle apps (including the SAX, DOM and SimpleXML methods), working with XPath and processing the XML in the other half of the two - Oracle's XML processing functionality.

Check out the Packt website for more information on the book.