a programmer's best friend :: Entries from June 2004

One of my favourite new features of PHP5 are the object overloading capabilities. These allow you to specify for any of your objects how they should look like as a string. By adding four lines of code to patTemplate, the follwing example is possible:

<?PHP
require_once 'patTemplate.php';
$tmpl = new patTemplate();
$tmpl->readTemplatesFromInput( 'anyTemplate.tmpl' );
$tmpl->addVar( 'page', 'foo', 'bar' );
echo $tmpl;
?>

This will display the rendered template to the browser. I guess this will open a lot of new possibilities for your PHP applications.

As Carsten is quite busy at the moment, I decided I'd write some documentation for our id3 extension, available through PECL. I already committed it to the phpdoc CVS tree and am now waiting for the manual to rebuild, which may take some time. If you need the documentation before php.net is rebuilt, you may read it at http://pecl.php-tools.net/phpdoc/ref.id3.html.

If you are using our tools or PEAR packages and suddenly are stuck, we provide another way to get in touch with us. You may reach us now via instant messaging, specifically via Jabber. Jabber is the OSS equivalent of tools like ICQ or AIM. It uses a set of streaming XML protocols, that can be easily extended using namespaces.
To communicate with us using Jabber, you will need a Jabber client. A list of all available Jabber clients for various platforms can be found at the Jabber website. You will then have to create a new account and register with our Jabber server. If your client asks for a servername, please use jabber.php-tools.net. To send a message to one of us, add us to your roster list. These are our jabber ids:

• schst@jabber.php-tools.net
• argh@jabber.php-tools.net
• gerd@jabber.php-tools.net

Be aware, that these are no email adresses but Jabber-Ids. You can probably also reach pat's friend Carsten at luckec@jabber.php-tools.net. Carsten is helping me with my pecl extension id3 and recently proposed Date_Holidays in PEAR, which is a by-product of his internship at the company I'm currently working for.
So we hope to meet some of pat's users some time soon!

I just returned from the LinuxTag, where John Coggeshall did a session on his tidy extension which enables you to clean up your HMTL documents with three lines of code.
John showcased an output filter for Smarty (and outed himself as a Smarty fan), so I decided that patTemplate should get one, too.
So if you are using the latest patTemplate version from CVS, you may tidy up our pages before they are sent to the browser with the following lines of code:

$tmpl = &new patTemplate();
$tmpl->setRoot( 'templates' );

$options = array(
'output-xhtml' => true,
'clean' => true
);
$tmpl->applyOutputFilter( 'Tidy', $options );

$tmpl->readTemplatesFromInput( 'example_filter_output_tidy.tmpl' );

$tmpl->displayParsedTemplate();
?>

If you are using PHP4, you will need to install ext/tidy first.

Thanks to John for this great extension to PHP.

This weekend, a new PHP-extension got published in pecl. id3 allows you to extract information from MP3 files. These tags contain the artist, song title, album name and genre id. id3 provides not only functions for obtaining this information, but also functions to update existing MP3 files and translate the numeric genre ids to human-readable genre names like "Rock'n'Roll" or "Blues".
id3 has been tested with PHP5 on Unix and still experiences some problems with older versions of PHP-versions, which will be fixed in future releases. You can install the extension using the PEAR installaer by typing:

$ pear install id3

To extract information from any file just use:

<?PHP
$tag = id3_get_tag('/path/to/foo.mp3');
var_dump($tag);
?>

More examples can be found in the CVS repository.

Ever wanted to work with the top PHP developers? Then now's your chance! ThinkPHP (co-founded by the chief editor of the German PHP Magazin Björn Schotte) is looking for PHP developers that are also able to create client-side applications using Javascript, HTML and XUL. You get to work with PHP developers like Sascha Schuman, Pierre-Alain Joye, Ulf Wendel, Hartmut Holzgraefe and others while developing large-scale web applications. You should be located in the area of Munich/Germany or willing to move there if you'd like to apply for the job. Furthermore Björn told me it's helpful if you carry the spirit of open source software in your soul.
If your interested do not hesitate and contact ThinkPHP at info@mayflower.de or take a look at their website. I'd surely apply for I job, If Munich wouldn't be too far away for me

The latest issue of php|architect features an article on XUL, Mozilla XML dialect for creating graphical user interfaces. Besides the basics of XUL and how PHP can be used to create XUL applications, Jonathan Protzenko provides in in-depth view on my PEAR package XML_XUL. This is great as I did not write any end-user documentation on the package and the article helps you get started.
As the article is not available online, I recommend you to buy the issue, which is available in a PDF and printed version.
I wrote a similar article for the German PHP Magazin some time ago, which will hopefully be published in the next issue in mid-July.
The international php magazine also features an article on XUL, by my favourite blogger Harry Fuecks. Seems XUL finally gets the attention it deserves.

Today the voting for PEAR's new QA team has been finished. 23 PEAR developers took part in the voting process which allowed them to vote for up to seven developers, they would like to be part of the core team for quality assurance. The core members will have karma to pull releases and fix issues any package may have and will coordinate all QA discussions and actions. Of course everybody is encouraged to join QA and help improving PEAR's quality. A full explanation of how the QA will will work, can be found in the RFC.
Davey announced the vote summary on the pear-dev and pear-qa lists this morning. The initial members are:

• Lukas Smith
• Klaus Guenther
• Davey Shafik
• David Costa
• Stephan Schmidt
• Tobias Schlitt
• Arnaud Limbourg

Stefan Neufeind received the same amount of votes as Arnaud, and after a short discussion Stefan and Arnaud decided that Arnaud should be part of the team.

Thanks to all developers who voted for me for their trust.

Today I stumbled across a short tutorial on builder.com, which explains how to use one of my PEAR packages, XML_Statistics. This package allows you to extract various kinds of statistical information from an XML string or file.
In addition to the tutorial, there's also online documentation available.

Earlier today I proposed a new extension id3 to pecl. The extension is able to read (and update) information stored in an ID3-tag. These are used in MP3 files to store information about the title, artist, etc. Sourcecode currently still is in php-tools.net CVS, but will imported to pecl this week.
I plan to do a first release later this week or early next week, as I'm currently doing some restructuring togther with Carsten Lucke.
With this extension, pat finally has the first C-extension for PHP.

I'm still adding new features iin patTemplate 3.0. The next release will allow you to specify a limit parameter for templates that defines how often you need them to be repeated. That means, the designer may decide if he preferes to only display 5 of the news entries the developer added to the template.
Furthermore I implemented a new 'chunk' feature, which allows the designer to build a table from a list. The designer may define, how often a template is repeated, before the container template is repeated and the process starts again.
Both features are still experimental, but will be available in the next beta.