On the Microsoft adCenter website, Walter Poupore has made a few posts to his blog about integrating PHP with various parts of the adCenter technology. Topics include:

• How to Check the Status of an Ad Group in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Keywords in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ads in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ad Groups in PHP (V5)

Check out his blog listing for more.

On his blog, Andreas Gohr has posted about various charting applications on the web (in his search for a way to show off the stats for DokuWiki) and looking specifically at the Google Charts.

Because such [popularity] data is much better to comprehend when accompanied by some nice graphs, I had a look at the Google Chart API today.

He also mentions three wrapper libraries that help your apps interface with the Charts API. Of course, he also includes some graphs of the popularity stats showing things like web server usage and PHP versions.

The PHPBuilder.com site has a new tutorial showing you how to interface PHP with Adobe's Flex functionality and to use remoting to let them "talk".

They dive right in, throwing download links at you and working through setup steps to get your environment up and running. With that out of the way, they show how to get the demo set up that uses their weborb framework.

The end result of the article is a simple Flex/PHP application that pulls information from the database and pushes it into a datagraid for display.

Lukas Smith is "pre-announcing" the effort he and several other core PHP developers have put together to try and help the PHP language become that much more solid - TestFest.

I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

They're also looking for developers to help with the web interface they'll need (the "simple back-end" that the moderators can use to handle the incoming test submissions). Complete information about the event can be found on its wiki page.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Andreas Uhsemann has posted about a project that he and fellow Mayflower Barcampers came up with that they thought could be useful (and interesting) to work on - a PHP extension to interface with the Skype communication tool.

At the Mayflower Barcamp a few weeks ago we had a very interesting and promising project: Develop a PHP extension for communication with Skype. Actually this project was a merge between two projects: One was to "develop a PHP extension" - five out of six project members never had written any PHP extension or did any PHP core development before. The other project was the Skype extension, with the goal to have a new PHP function that could send a chat message to a given Skype profile.

As they worked on it, they realized that it was really D-Bus (the message bus system) they needed to interface with, not Skype directly. They include some of the code they used to make the connection - creating the message, setting a few parameters and "send and block" the message out to the D-Bus connection waiting. They've even put the code up on a public CVS repository (on thinkforge.org) if you'd like to download and play with it yourself.

On the phpRiot blog, Quentin Zervaas has posted a quick tutorial about using the Iterator interface (part of the Standard PHP Library) together with Smarty to loop through some objects:

The PHP 5 Iterator interface is very useful for defining custom behaviour for looping over objects, however I just noticed that looping over such objects in Smarty will not work correctly. Smarty will in fact cast an object back to an array.

He includes code examples of his problem to illustrate and shows how he got around the problem - a getData() function he defined that just returns the array from the object.

Ben Ramsey has recently blogged about some of the research and bit of development that he's done to add "more correct" functionality to the Zend Framework for working with RESTful interfaces - proper PUT and DELETE support.

I've recently been wrapped up in an effort to design and implement a RESTful API using the Atom Protocol for a project at work. We are using the Zend Framework as the underlying framework for the project, so, in order to follow the Atom Protocol, I needed to support the HTTP methods PUT and DELETE

Since the Zend Framework has been playing such a prominent role in the development, he's been digging into the Zend_Rest_Server component code and isn't too happy about its support for PUT and DELETE. As a result, he's proposed methods that might help resolve things such as isGet, isDelete, isOptions and getEntityBody. He' even created a patch to make the needed changes.

Mike Gauthier has created a PEAR-based implementation for the popular Akismet spam filtering system that he's added to the site:

I'd like to let you know about a new PHP 5 implementation of the Akismet REST API. The package, Services_Akismet is MIT licensed and distributed through the official PEAR channel at http://pear.php.net/package/Services_Akismet.

Hopefully this will make it even easier for third-party PHP projects to use Akismet spam tools. The code is well documented and should "just work" on any PHP 5.2.1+ system.

It's currently in its alpha stage and was derived from the miPHP Akismet class written by Bret Kuhns.

On the PHP in Action blog today, there's a quick new post that talks about not only using the Smarty templating system but also a method for testing it to check for any kind of possible failure.

As I mentioned in my blog post on Paparrazzi testing, Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin) has discussed how to test web templates or server pages. Since I'm currently working with Smarty templates, I wanted a simple way to run tests on them without needing to deal with a web server and the page navigation in a full web application.

Thankfully, he's found a nice, simple method for running tests against the Smarty engine (and includes that in the post - an interface to Smarty and the example test case to run against it).

Evan Sims has official released his first version of a library he's worked up to interface PHP with the GameFly.com video game rental service:

I'm releasing libGameFly, a PHP class for interacting with GameFly.com - the video game rental service. At the moment it's very simple, just allowing you to expose your GameFly queue as a native PHP class and doing... well, whatever the hell you want with it.

It works with some of the feed functionality (RSS/APIs) to grab data about users' accounts. You can download the code here from the project's Google Code page.