On his Code Diesel blog Sameer Borate has posted about a Google Translation wrapper library that can be used to interface with Google's Translation backend.

Google translation is an interesting service. Not only can you do language translation, you can also detect the language of a particular text. I recently needed to create a Wordpress plugin to translate post titles from one language to another. As the translation API is only available for Java and Javascript, I decided to create a quick one for PHP.

You'll need to register for an API key before you can follow along with the examples. Sameer includes a few small code snippets showing how to run a "self test" to be sure things are working, a sample translation of a string and how to grab errors should they happen during the process. You can grab the library from the Google Code page for the project.

In a new post to his blog today Sameer Borate has a tutorial about linking your application to the Google Analytics backend and using the requestReportData method to pull back interesting statistics on your sites.

Although no standard library is available from Google for PHP, some small and easy interfaces are available out there. In this post we will see how to access Google Analytics data using PHP using the GAPI library.

The GAPI library is an open sourced project that provides a direct, easy to use interface you can use to connect directly to the Analytics service without having to handle all of the manual stuff yourself. Sameer shows how to get information from the service like the top ten sources and visit counts, regional information and how to do some filtering on the results returned.

In a recent tutorial from the IBM developerWorks website they show you how to link your site with the Google Book search and parse the results with the Zend Framework's Zend_GData component.

This article will introduce you to the Google Book Search Data API, showing you how to integrate and use book search results with a custom PHP application. It includes examples of searching for books by keyword, by language or by author; retrieving book data (including ISBN numbers and thumbnail images); and adding reviews and ratings to books that are already in the database.

They start with an overview of how the search feeds are structured so you can get an idea of whether or not the returned information looks correct or not. From there they get into the code - parsing those feeds, sending search requests based on input strings, getting details on a specific book and pulling in the contents of a user's library.

In a recent post to his blog Daniel Hofstetter talks about an issue you might been seeing with using the Google OpenID service and the PHP OpenID library.

It is possible that you get an '�Invalid OpenID'� error when you try to login with the Google OpenID (https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id), or any other OpenID that uses '�https'�. In this case, the following steps might help to fix this issue.

He points out that you'll need curl and OpenSSL installed and set up to work with your PHP installation (ether compiled in or included as shared modules. Because of the change from the "http" to "https" format you'll need those two components to create that kind of connection.

On the Komunitasweb.com blog there's a recent post walking you through the steps to add the Google weather content to your site, complete with icons.

If you need to show weather in your website, you can use weather widget such as weatherbug. It's nice and simple, but maybe you need something more integrated with your website. So, take a look at Google Weather API.

They use a SimpleXML object to pull in the XML data from Google's backend (as called via a URL) and loop through the resulting objects to output temperature, current conditions and several days of the forecast.

Right along with some of the other posts about the "best practices" that Google recently post, the PHP group has also responded to dispel some of the recommendations Google gives.

With regards to the new article posted at http://code.google.com/ speed/articles/optimizing-php.html, all of the advice in it is completely incorrect. We at the PHP team would like to offer some thoughts aimed at debunking these claims, which the author has clearly not verified.

The group through each of the five things Google recommends and tells why they are incorrect including the fact that, while some of the recommendations might have been true back in PHP3, they aren't at all true of the current PHP5 releases.

In this new post to the PHP 10.0 blog Stas has some responses to the recent suggestions from Google as to how to optimize your applications.

There are a bunch of advices there, some of them are quite sound, if not new '" like use latest versions if possible, profile your code, cache whatever can be cached, etc. Some are of doubtful value '" like the output buffering one, which could be useful in some situations but do nothing or be worse in others, and if you're a beginner generally it's better for you to leave it alone until you've solved the real performance problems.

He mentions four things that need amending from what Google suggests:

• Don't copy variables for no reason
• Avoid doing SQL queries within a loop.
• Use single-quotes for long strings
• Use switch/case instead of if/else

Herbert has submitted a link to his blog that talks about using PHP on the Google App Engine including a wrapper class, pQg.

Google is now supporting 2 languages for Google App Engine: Phyton and Java. [...] Currently focusing on how to use 'normal' SQL in PHP scripts at Google App Engine.

Topics covered so far include:

• Sending email with PHP at GAE
• Creating, retrieving, updating & deleting records in PHP @ GAE
• pQg = PHP with SQL on GAE
• How to use pQg

On the Ask About PHP blog today there's a new tutorial (and a new class) helping you to connect your applications with the Google Analytics backend.

I've been thinking about how I can make use of this API to enhance the sites I'm working on. But before kicking off ideas, I had to find out how to access and use the API. I finally came up with a PHP class that will do all the grunt work of calling the API, you just need to supply your report's parameter and the PHP class will return you an array of Analytics data.

The class [zip] makes connecting to the Analytics backend as easy as dropping in a username/password, defining which profile to use and the date range. The getReport() method does the hard work

On the PHPClasses.org blog Manuel Lemos has a recent post looking at a method for sending emails using a remote SMTP server (like Google or Yahoo's) via this package.

In most hosting environments, the PHP mail() function is sufficient to send e-mail messages without problems. However, there are situations on which using the mail function is inconvenient and may prevent that your messages reach the destination. [...] Therefore, you may need to find an alternative way for sending your e-mail messages from PHP.

The package lets you define a username/password, server, whether to use a SSL connection or not, and if the connection needs to use the TLS protocol.