On his blog today Jakub Zalas has posted a tutorial he's written up about using dependency injection in PHP with the Symfony2 dependency injection component (DIC).

Symfony's DependencyInjection component is a PHP implementation of a Service Container, or as others like to call it, a Dependency Injection Container (DIC). The component also provides useful tools for handling service definitions, like XML loaders or dumpers. If you want to learn more about the dependency injection or the dependency injection container, read an excellent series of articles on the subject by Fabien Potencier: What is Dependency Injection?

He walks you through the entire process - installing the needed libraries (the DIC, a config and class loader component and Buzz, a lightweight HTTP client). Code is included to show object creation the "usual way" and then creating the same types of objects in a dependency injection environment. Also included is a sample XML document describing the services for the container. He finishes the post with a GraphvizDumper-generated image for the container.

Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today that looks at working with the SQL Server Reporting Services SDK and PHP to automatically create some reports based on the date in your database.

In this post I'll dive into the SSRS SDK for PHP that was recently released by the Interoperability team here at Microsoft. [...] The documentation in the SDK is complete with explanations for the classes that make up the SDK, code examples, and a "hello world" example. However, in this post, I'll build a simple web page (code attached to this post) that renders the Sales report that I created last week.

He starts off with an overview of how all of the technology will fit together and some of the things you'll need to have before you can get started - a user with the right permissions and a connection to the server. The "SSRSReport" class in the SDK gives you quick access to load a report based on a named location. You can then use methods like "RenderAsHTML" to output it as HTML or one of other methods (like CSV, text, PDF, etc).

On the RIA Zone (a part of the DZone network) there's a new tutorial from Ryan Stewart about combining PHP with the Flash Collaboration Services (real-time collaboration and social capabilities via the LCCS) in the second part of his series (part one).

Another great way to integrate LCCS and PHP is with the REST APIs and the library that ships with the LCCS SDK. With those APIs we can perform a number of management functions including creating and deleting rooms, managing roles, and creating templates. These APIs make it very easy to create a customized, dynamic collaboration experience with PHP. You can create rooms on the fly for your users and get information about what kind of content is in those rooms. In this example we're going to create a basic room manager with PHP that will let us create, delete, and view information about specific rooms.

Code is included to use the AFCS PHP library to connect to the Services API and pass in the username and password directly from the user. The request is made and a token is passed back to the calling script. The XML description of the full Flex application is included in the tutorial.

Despite opinions from some of the PHP community, interoperability between PHP applications isn't is such a bad state - at least According to Aaron Wormus:

The fact of the matter is that it's not such a big deal. Porting a plugin from Wordpress to Serendipity is usually trivial, and as we see more web-services based plugins (stuff like the awesome askimet) the task becomes simpler and simpler.

Interoperability is overrated, the more you think of it the more complex it gets. As you start throwing in new factors into the equation (how will this interoperate with a java/c# application) you start to develop monsters like JSR 170 which solve a lot of problems on paper, but in reality are too unwieldy to be truly useful.

He even lists out some of his "steps to interoperability" to help speed things along (like "use as much abstract code as possible" and "use services").

On the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans talks about one of the presenters of the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo - Ben Ramsey. He asked Ben some questions about the conference and a talk that he'll be giving - "XML & Web Services with PHP (An Overview)".

Ben Ramsey will be speaking on "XML & Web Services with PHP (An Overview)" at the upcoming Zend/PHPConference and Expo. Since I hang out with Ben in the freenode.net #phpc channel I thought it would be cool to talk to him for a bit about his session.

They talk about why Ben is passionate about web services, the two popular protocols for using these services - SOAP and REST, and which one of them Ben prefers.

Davey Shafik has posted another update on his web services component he's working up for the Zend Framework, the Zend_Service_Server.

I have been working closely with Matthew Weier O'Phinney for the last week on bringing my Zend_Service_Server proposal to fruition.

There have been several changes, but the core has not moved too far. Matthew, Andi and I have decided that we will first implement the different server/client libraries.

He lists the libraries they'll need to tackle first and talks about an "exercise" he did to work up a JSON server component that works in a similar fashion.

To prepare the way for the upcoming PEAR book from Packt Publishing correctly, Stoyan Stefanov has posted this info about the book and where to find the latest details on it.

Here's the link to publisher's page dedicated to the PHP Programming with PEAR. Guess who wrote the chapter for MDB2? ;)

It's an honour to me to be in the company of the other authors, people who have done a lot for the PEAR community

He also mentions some of the topics that the book will contain, including accessing databases with MDB2, creating and parsing XML documents, and accessing web APIs. The book is coming out in September, so keep on the lookout for it at your local bookseller soon.

This week, Cal Evans is reporting live from this year's php/db|works conference in Toronto. Since today is "Tutorial Day", the schedule is a little lighter, and he makes to time to catch Rob Richards' talk on PHP and Advanced XML and Web Services.

Rob Richards is the author of Pro PHP XML and Web Services. He literally wrote the book on using PHP and XML together. At php|works, he is leading a tutorial on using XML in web services using the DOM extension.

If you ever get a chance to hear Rob do a presentation, let me warn you, it is not for the faint of heart. As I learned last night when I sat down with Rob to record an interview, Rob likes to speak on leading edge and advanced topics. This tutorial is an excellent example of that philosophy.

Cal talks more about the content of the talk - its simplicity despite the complex topic, how much info is jammed in, and the fact that it's not just one giant pitch for Rob's book.

Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.

My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2″ will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.

Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.

As all good sites must do, the ThinkingPHP blog is moving onward and upward in its focus, and according to this new post, that only means good things for PHPers.

You might have noticed that I changed the title of this blog to "ThinkingPHP and beyond" a couple days ago. I did that because currently I'm thinking a lot about where go with it. I definetly want to stay focused on PHP in general, but I feel like I (and a lot of other php developers) actually work with a lot more technologies then "just" php. So I'd like to talk about that as well.

Some of the other topics Felix is considering talking about include PHP coding practices, web standards/usability/accessibility, web services, and agile development topics. Keep an eye out here for more to come from this great blog - we'll always post the latest.