Tony Freixas continues his introductory look at "booting" a PHP script with part two of his series (here's part one) looking at using libraries.

In the good old days, if you wanted to create re-usable code, you would create a library of related functions or objects. Now, the excitement is all around frameworks. Everyone has one. What is the difference between the two?

He compares a library and a framework, pointing out key differences like how they fit with the application (controlled by or controlling) and dependencies they require. He rounds out his boot sequence, adding a few new parts to the structure of his example application.

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.

On the Make Me Pulse blog, there's a look at PHP6's support of Unicode in the SPL (Standard PHP Library) TextIterator handler.

I've just install the last version of PHP6 dev and I've decided to test the famous new feature, the PHP Unicode Support. I will not explain new things about PHP6 or Unicode or TextIterator, it's just my discoveries test on this features.

He steps through the process he followed - enabling Unicode support, testing various output methods (including just an echo and using the TextIterator) as well as some of the manipulation methods (next/first/current) that can be used to get certain characters out of a string.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook compares two of the popular component libraries out there - PEAR and the Zend Framework (yes, it can be considered a grouping of components too).

Now that the Zend Framework is ready for 'prime time', I've been considering the Pear framework with regards to how it now fits in the PHP world.

He suggests that not could both be considered component libraries, but might also both be frameworks (based on a definition that a framework is a "consistent set of components that are designed to work together in a unified manner"). He also asks about the need for something like PEAR now that the Zend Framework has come along, getting Jonathan Lebensold's opinion too.

As both the Zend Developer Zone and Ajaxian point out, there's been two new projects based on the Ext JS user interface widget system adapted for PHP - PHP-Ext and ExtPHP.

PHP-Ext is an open source widget library written for PHP 4 and 5 to empower the UI Layer. It is based on Ext JS javascript widgets which provide a standard and powerful API to build Rich Internet Applications. It basically works as a convenient wrapper for the Ext JS Javascript Objects.

And from the ExtPHP site:

I needed to be the one person who would have to wrestle JavaScript when problems happened. I therefore needed a way to insulate them from the gory details, which is why I created ExtPHP. As you may have guessed from subtle hints, such as this entry's 12-feet tall header, ExtPHP creates a PHP wrapper for ExtJS.

The Ajaxian post also includes code examples for each of them, one showing form construction and the other a tabbed interface.

Matthew Turland has been working on a project based on an idea he and Ben Ramsey thought up - a wrapper around the libircclient libraries to make IRC interface simple. As a result, Matthew turned it into a more practical application - you can call her Phergie.

I had toyed with some previous iterations of Phergie, some Python-based and later some PHP-based, before I finally got an API design I was happy with.

The source for the bot can be downloaded from its subversion repository and you can find out more about it on its Trac site. Also, if you feel like chatting about it, you can head over to the #phergie channel on the Freenode IRC network.

The Builder.com.au website has a new tutorial posted today that looks at the dynamic creation of a web standard (PDF files) inside of a PHP script.

An alternative way of generating PDF files with PHP is using FPDF, a free PHP class containing a number of functions for creating and manipulating PDFs. The key word here is free. You are free to download and use this class or customise it to fit your needs. In addition to being free, it's also simpler to use than PDFlib. The PDFlib needs to be installed as an extension in your PHP package, whereas FPDF can just be included in your PHP script and it's ready to use

They show how to use the FPDF library to make some simple files - setting the title, author, adding images and text, etc. There's even a little bit there at the end about adding new pages to make more complex documents simple.

As Ed Finkler points out there's a new article posted (written by him) on the C7Y site (from php|architect) talking about his Inspekt library - an introduction to the filtering library showing how to help make your applications safer.

Inspekt is a library for PHP4 and PHP5 that aims to make safe input handing easier, and unsafe actions more difficult. Inspekt establishes a new development approach by wrapping input within "cage" objects, and requiring the developer to use validation and filtering methods to test and manipulate the input data. This article provides a brief introduction to Inspekt and its capabilities.

The article covers all of the basics - what the library can do for you, how it integrates into your application and how it helps to protect you from potential problems with the data in your superglobals ($_GET, $_POST, $_REQUEST, etc).

Hasin Hayder had been working with the Facebook API and stumbled across a bug in an application they had created for the social networking site:

The method which we used to count number of friends of a specific user who has added that application was returning 1 when there is no friend actually installed it.

He gives the SQL query and the PHP code he was originally using to find out the number of users for the application. The problem came from the fact that the returning value wasn't an array - it was a string. The corrected code (that checks for array-ness) is also included.

On the Make Me Pulse blog, Antoine Ughetto shares a method he came up with to recurse through an array using the SPL method - the RecursiveArrayIterator method.

When we have a multidimensional array we have to make some recursives function to parse it. A simple way to get the keys and the value of this type of array is to use the SPL library of PHP.

A code example is included, parsing through a recursive array to output each of the key/value pairs it contains (and using only about five or six lines of code to do it).