Over on SitePoint this morning, they have a new article about something that I (personally) this is a pretty cool idea for anyone running a distributed system or wanting to create a web service for people to use and abuse. Build your own Web Service with PHP and XML-RPC gives you a good introduction on how you can use the XML abilities of PHP to create something that users of the web can come to and either make requests to either give or recieve information. There's lots of stuff floating around these days about "web services" and how everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and make one - but few really know what to think about on one and how to even go about it. This article goes through an intro to XML-RPC, some of the implementations that are out there, and they even give you tons of code to help you create your own service quickly and easily. We (the PHPDN) offer something similar to this with all of the news from our various sites. And, in the near future, we plan to get the Unified Search to work with an XML backend so that anyone, anywhere can search the PHPDN's information.

One of the most widely used web interfaces for MySQL, phpMyAdmin, has an upcoming version release planned for the middle of August - the final version of 2.3.0 should be released on August 11th. This project has been around for as long as I can remember, and, thankfully, is still one of the best tools that one can get for accessing a MySQL database remotely via the web. They haven't sold out, and they haven't reworked it to put in features that everyone hates - they've done very well to keep it a good, solid product. This is definitely one of the examples that I point to when people ask about good, well-established Open Source projects. Thanks to Steffen for pointing this one out...

Note: as an update to the "MySQL Best Practices" story posted here a few days ago - Matt Parlane sent me a link to another article (really part of a blog) that talks about the same thing. Though Matt says that this guy knows what he's on about as far as MySQL goes...., more so that the other article. What do you all think?