In this recent post to the Duckout blog, they show you how to hook your PHP-based (and database driven) application into the Google Charting API for chart/graph generation.

I think, whenever we see a chart in a magazine, in books or applications our brain say's to us Yeepie!!! Don't read these stupid texts or tables! Just look at the green or yellow line and hope that they are above the other lines or hope that your opinion is the biggest part of the pie¯. This saves us a lot of work and in my opinion we should concentrate on drawing beautiful colorized pie charts, instead of writing long boring articles. But the question is: ¯How do I draw these beautiful colorized pie charts? The simple answer is: you don't have to, because google will draw them for you and you just have to tell them what to draw via the google charts api.

The sample application is a "breakfast rating" tool that logs the results to a MySQL database via PDO calls. The results are then extracted and formated as JSON to be compatible with the Google Charts API data handling. Some sample Javascript is included showing how to call the Charts API with your data and get back a simple line graphing of the data from the database. You can see the application in action here for reference.

Dave Gardner has put together a post about some work he did with the Joind.in API (an event feedback site) to apply collective intelligence to the results of the PHP UK Conference.

The term "collective intelligence" refers to intelligence that emerges from the collaboration of a group. In this case, we can leverage the data within joind.in and make "intelligent" recommendations. This post looks at building a simple recommendation engine using the data from joind.in. You can download the entire source code here (gzipped) or view via PasteBin here and try it out for yourself.

His code connects to the Joind.in API and fetches the event's talk information and the comments for each. His "calculatePearson" function then takes in two users and the set of ratings to figure out how similar their preferences are. There's also a bit of code that approaches it from a different angle - providing recommendations for users based on their own comments.

On the NETTUTS.com site there's new tutorial showing you how to combine the power of PHP and jQuery to create a quick and easy star rating system for your web application.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to build a rating system with AJAX, PHP, and jQuery. Votes will be recorded and updated in real-time with the magic of AJAX, and we'll also leverage the power of PHP so that you don't even need a database!

The Ajax portion of the script is handled by a "$.post" request made from jQuery to the PHP backend when a star is clicked. Once the message is sent to the PHP backend, the information is serialized and pushed into a text file. This method can easily be modified to work with a database too.

ParanoidFerret.com is back with another Flex and PHP article today and this time, some other friends are joining in - JSON and MySQL.

To follow-up on the Flex and PHP tutorial we did earlier I thought it would be nice to do a complete tutorial on php, mysql, flex, and json. This tutorial should show a decent way to send data in a database to and from flex to php using json. I will explain this in more detail in just a moment.

Included in the tutorial is a sample of the end result and all of the code you'll need - the database setup, the PHP code to connect to it and pass along the JSON message content, and the Flex/code XML to handle the creation of the requests and update the data in the app according to the response.

Sometimes, when you're building an application, simpler is better. At least, that's how Greg Bulmash approached it in his new post about creating a simple rating script for your site with PHP and MySQL.

There are lots of pre-packaged scripts out there to do almost anything you want, but in my experience a lot of them either do too much or don't do enough. Finding that Goldilocks style of "just right" takes a lot of searching and experimenting, or just plain hacking of existing scripts. But for simple functions, writing your own script that does exactly what you want can often be quicker and more satisfying.

He goes through what a rating system is and can be used for before getting to the code (as well as other things that could be tacked on at the end to make it a bit more complex). Then, it's on to the code - first the database layout, then the script to store the rating the visitor gave the item, and the script that shows the averaged results.

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 his blog today, Stoyan Stefanov shows how to use a PEAR package - PEAR::Services_Amazon - to "keep an eye on" Amazon's stats for a book.

I wanted to have a page that shows the books I've written, together with their Amazon sales rank and the average customer rating and number of reviews. It's really easy. I took one example out of the PEAR book and slightly modified it.

The script needs to few things to get up and running, so he points out those (an AWS id, the PEAR pacakge) and the simple path the application will take to grab the information (request/response). Then it's on to the actual PHP code - all 60 lines of it, including the HTML for the output.

It makes the request with the Services_Amazon package for the given item numbers (he happened to have already) and pulls the results back, looping through them displaying sales rank, title, author, the average rating, and the number of total customer reviews - all in a handy unordered list.

As PHP Magazine notes today, PHP has come in fifth (again) on the TIOBE Programming Community index.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

Those higher on the list are Java, C, Visual Basic, and C++, though C++ seems to be fading and Visual Basic growing by leaps and bounds. In the long term trends they record, PHP is showing a rising trend, quite a bit up from even just February of this year.

On TechEnclave.com today, there's a new review of the latest version of phpBB, Olympus. In it, Safin take a look at the features, installation, the management setup, and much more.

Finally the much awaited PHPBB Olympus is out as a public beta. In this review i am gonna list my experiences as i test fire the new beta.

Ok starting with a bit of history. I first tried phpbb 2 years back and i didn't like it at all. Now with Olympus i reckon we have some real good competetion. It might still not face up feature to feature with vbulletin, but its no pushover either. Considering its free and considering that it enjoys the support of an extensive modding community, i see great things happening with olympus.

They cover the normal flow of a user first installing the package:

• installation (of course)
• configuration
• the user control panel
• the overview and forum management sections
• user management
• attachment control
• styling options
• maintenance/system options
• viewing the forums/threads

Quite an exhaustive list, and for each item there's a brief bit of opinion by the reviewer on how good it was accomplished and a rating (out of ten) at the bottom of each page.

In php|architect's ART respository today, there's a new article from Marco Tabini himself about the creation of an Ajax rating system for your site.

He explains the concept behind the system before ever getting into any code - a visual representation of the rating users are giving a particular article/posting. With that out of the way, he gets into the HTML first, explaining how the table is laid out before giving the code to pull together the images and form one seamless one representing the correct rating. He also demonstrates the use of a "secret hash" to protect the script against abuse.

Next up, he creates the PHP/SQL backend to handle the Ajax requests coming back in from the page, and setting a cookie to protect (somewhat) against more than one vote. Finally, he gives the Javascript you'll need to create the Ajax connection and relay the JSON message back to the server on the rating the user chose.

Of course, the code is available for download as well.