On the Debuggable blog Felix Geisendorfer points out a new scrap from their repository - one to interface with the Amazon Web Service.

Just wanted to let you know about a new addition to the debuggable scraps repository: An API for the Amazon Associates Web Service. Right now it's really just a simple wrapper to allow you to search their catalog since that was all I needed for now.

You can download the scrap and easily integrate it with your app - he includes some sample code to show you exactly how.

Jim Wynia has posted some thoughts about a recent announcement of the development of a WebDAV library for PHP to his blog today:

However, over the past few years, WebDAV has started gaining traction as the underlying protocol for Subversion repositories over the web and in several other places. That makes this story about a new PHP library for working with WebDAV interesting.

He notes that he's moved a lot of his file storage to Amazon's s3 service and having this new PHP library would make it even easier for him to get at his content directly from his applications.

Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"

Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.

He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).

The AnyExample.com website has a new tutorial today showing how to download files from the Amazon S3 service through PHP:

This is an example of non-interactive PHP script which downloads file from Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). Additional libraries like HMAC-SHA1 are not required.

You'll need at least PHP 4.1.0 or higher to follow along but the entire code block is there and ready for use. It makes the GET request to the bucket for your object with the correct authentication and opens a socket to pull the file down.

Davey Shafik has gotten more than a little excited by the streams functionality in his latest blog post:

PHP streams are absolutely amazing. As mentioned by Elizabeth Smith (a great read if you don't know how to use streams) PHP streams are super powerful. Streams is something that is (to my knowledge) unique to PHP. The closest thing I've seen to it, is Linux's FUSE "user space" (i.e. not kernel module) file systems.

He shows an example of a stream in action and suggests an interface he'd like to see - an automatic connection to the Amazon S3 storage.

From the SEO Expert Blog, there's a new tutorial focusing on making "Amazon ads that rock" by combining jQuery and PHP.

Are you sick of annoying ads that take up large parts of the screen, pop up, under or anywhere else, move around, blink and flash? You want to learn how to create ads that rock with a few lines of simple JavaScript and PHP code? Then let me show you how.

He shows his method for the creation of his unobtrusive ads with the advertising content that Amazon has to offer. The process is broken up into four steps:

• The Data Structure - an array of arrays with the Amazon information for the items (in this case books)
• Converting the PHP Array to JavaScript - using a Drupal module to assign the PHP array to a Javascript variable
• The HTML Output - a function that outputs a "block" of ads
• The JavaScript - the jQuery Javascript code to handle the clicks on each of the links.

You can see it in action at the top of the right sidebar on the SEO Expert website.

On the SEO Expert Blog today, there's a new tutorial showing hos to consume the XML provided by the Amazon wish list service with the help of PHP5's SimpleXML functionality.

With PHP5 XML processing finally became easy thanks to the SimpleXML functions, that convert an XML document to an object that can be processed using property selectors and array iterators. A few days ago I integrated my Amazon wish list on this site with very few lines of code as you will see when you read the rest of this brief tutorial.

He walks through the connection both creating the XML request and handling the XML response to output the resulting images (books) linked to their Amazon pages.

If you're looking for a good PHP resource, check out this list from Top-books.org - a listing of PHP and web-related books ranked by their Amazon ranking.

Included in the list are books like:

• Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's PHP and MySQL Web Development
• Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Jason Gilmore
• Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell's Pro PHP Security (Pro)

On the SearchOpenSource.com site today, there's this new article combining two popular things together to make one powerful and productive tool using the Amazon web services and the Zend Framework.

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.

On the Cake Baker's Blog, there's a handy example for anyone out there using the CakePHP framework wanting to reach out and touch someone with SOAP.

The code in this post is derived from the example presented in the article "Using PHP5's SOAP Support". You find explanations there, I will only describe some CakePHP specific things.

The simple example defines the model (where the real action happens), a simple controller (basically setting the output), and a simple view (echoing it out is the easy thing to do). His example makes a request out to the Amazon web service and searches the "books" category for items matching the term "php".