Maarten Balliauw has made a new blog post today about a method he's using to help reuse some of the business logic that Excel spreadsheets can have in a PHP script with help from PHPExcel.

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to automate parts of their everyday job using Excel. [...] Did you know you can use PHPExcel to take advantage of the Excel-based business logic without having to worry about duplicate business logic?

He creates a quick example of a script that can take in an Excal file and pull it into a PHPExcel object, ready for manipulation. He fills in values for the already defined fields (like "carColor" or "leatherSeats") and uses the getCalculatedValue method to perform the action on the cell. The output is dropped into a variable that can be echoed out or used later on in the PHP script.

If you're in the area of The Netherlands and you're into PHP, consider yourself lucky - just look at all the events that Ivo Jansch mentions in one of his more recent blog entries:

PHP is still growing in The Netherlands (according to nexen.net, 46% of Dutch domains use PHP). A good indicator of PHP's growth is the number of conferences and other events that are organized this year. [...] This year alone, there are already 6 major (>50) events; 3 done, 3 to go.

Some of the events (like Dutch Joomla Days and the PHP Business Seminar) have already passed but there's still a chance to get in on a few others like Kings of Code and the Dutch PHP Conference.

Cal Evans (of the Zend Developer Zone) has written up a summary of an event he recently attend and spoke at in the Netherlands - the PHP Business Seminar.

I've just returned from my second trip to the Netherlands and, as with the first one, I had a wonderful time. This time, I was honored to speak at the PHP Business Seminar put on as a joint project by IBuildings and Sogeti.

He talks about the conference, some of the presentations (a bit of which he caught, they were all in Dutch) and his experience presenting - twice, once with Red Bull and once without. If you want a bit more detail (and the slides from his talk) check out Cal's post on his personal blog too.

David Mytton submitted some information in an email to us today pointing out a new UK-based website, WeLoveLocal.com, and a SOAP API that they offer:

welovelocal.com is essentially the Yellow Pages written by your friends. It provides a full directory of UK businesses (currently London only but launching across the UK shortly) and contextualises the reviews, and a network of friends around you.

The SOAP API allows you to query the sites data stores with different functions that let you get businesses by a search term, get their reviews and search the businesses based on a category and a search term. The reference page includes the input and output values of the API as well as some sample PHP code to show you how to make the request (using the SOAP functionality in PHP5).