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

I'll be speaking at two more conferences this fall. First is the German "Internet World" in Munich in October, where I'll be giving "PHP for High-End applications", a talk that focusses on PHP used for high traffic sites that are used to really make some money.
Later on in November, I'll visit the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt to give two talks. One will be about developing a PHP-based server that stores session data in a centralized spot, the other one is about documenting your code and tools that help you in extracting this documentation.

About 6 months ago, I started a wrapper for the eBay webservice and created a draft in Pepr.
As I realized that eBay already is promoting a PHP package for accessing their API, I put this project on hold and worked on my other projects. But after some coverage of the project by Harry Fuecks and the PHP Magazine Adam Trachtenberg, technical evangelist at eBay, contacted me and asked me to update the project to implement eBay's new authentication method.
After we exchanged some mails, Adam told me that there's no official eBay package for PHP yet and so I started working on this again.
This was about 10 days ago, and I made huge progress already. I implemented 50 of the available API calls and now only some of the seldomly used methods are left to implement. The project makes heavy use of PHP5's new OO-features like overloading (methods are loaded on demand) and SPL's iterators. This allows you to work with eBay entities, like they were some native PHP objects, available on your system. Adam, who already saw some of my examples, was absolutely amazed, how easy it is to work with the complex API.
But enough of the talk and let's take a look at some examples:

<?PHP
// get information about a user
$user = $ebay->GetUser('superman-74');
// display user ID
echo $user->UserId;

// display all user data
print_r($user->toArray());

// get feedback for the user
$feedback = $user->getFeedback(Services_Ebay::FEEDBACK_BRIEF);
foreach ($feedback as $entry) {
echo $entry;
}
?>

All these return values are objects, that may also be used in foreach() loops or echo'd to the user, overloading will take care of how they are handled.

Adding a new item is also easy as baking cake:

<?PHP
$item = Services_Ebay::loadModel('Item');
$item->Category = 57882;
$item->Title = 'Supergirl\'s cape';
$item->Description = 'Another test item';
$item->Location = 'At my home';
$item->MinimumBid = '1000.0';
$item->VisaMaster = 1;

// Add the item
$result = $ebay->AddItem($item);
?>

If you realised that there's a mistake in the recently added item, just change it and send it back to eBay:

<?PHP
$item = $ebay->GetItem('ItemId');
$item->Title = 'The new title';
$ebay->ReviseItem($item);
?>

Most methods can be either called on the Services_Ebay object or on the model directly:

<?PHP
$item = $ebay->GetItem('ItemId');
$item->Title = 'The new title';
$item->Revise();
?>

When calling a method, you may either pass scalar parameters in the parameter order defined in the call object itself or you pass an associative array, using the names specified in the official API documentation. This keeps Services_Ebay simple for all users, while offering the full, complex functionality for the users who want to use advanced features of the API.

Services_Ebay already provides Calls and Models for working with users, items, searchresults, feedback, transactions, feedback, MyEbay, etc.

All code and a lot of examples are available in my CVS, there you can see all methods that have been implemented at a glance.

I'll probably start a real PEAR proposal next week, so this can be included in PEAR as fast as possible.

Last friday, I had my last day at my former employer, Metrix Internet Design GmbH. After nearly five years, I decided, that it was time for something new and I took an offer from 1&1, Europe's largest Webhosting company, which has branches in the US, UK and France and is a member of United Internet.
That means, only one of the pat team is left at Metrix, as gERD left last May to go to Australia (those of you who understand German, may read his blog at oz.exit0.net). But Sebastian already is packing his things and will be leaving for France (as he's been living there nearly his whole life and found the love of his life there) in mid-September to work as a freelancer. If you are looking for someone to support your company, you may reach him at argh[at]php-tools[dot]net. He is not only an excellent PHP developer, but also a great designer (he designed all our sites plus a lot of other websites) and an HTML and Javascript expert. He is currently working on his site http://sebastian.mordziol.de (sorry all texts are French)

But that we are spread around the world, does not mean that we are stopping our open-source efforts. Sebastian will soon release the first versions of patForms and patBBCode and I'm heavily working on some PEAR/pecl stuff as well as moving patTemplate3 towards a stable release. So, "pat's not dead!"

Today, Carsten left for BRB. We had a lot of fun, while he was staying with us in Karslruhe and the future will probably see releases of ext/id3, Services_Ebay and patPortal, as we have been working on these projects.
I'll post more information on these projects during the next days.

The second beta version of the completely recoded patTemplate 3.0.0 is now available. This is supposed to be the last beta release before 3.0.0 stable and only bugs will be fixed until 3.0.0 is released. If you are using patTemplate, please test this release.

A list of changes since beta1 is available in the changelog, if you never used 3.0.0, you will find a summary of all new features in the patTemplate 3.0.0 overview.

Go to the download page.

Today a new package has been released at pear.php.net, which helps you calculating holidays. Date_Holidays has been developed by Carsten Lucke, a friend of mine is a driver-based package that provides holiday calculation rules for different religions and countries.
Using the package is quite easy:
<?php
require_once 'Date/Holidays.php';
$germany = &Date_Holidays::factory('Germany', 2005, 'en_EN');
// I wonder when the easter bunny will be visiting us next year
$easter = $germany->getHoliday('easter', 'de_DE');

// Will my birthday be a holiday?
if ($germany->isHoliday('2005-05-12') {
echo "Is a holiday\n";
}
?>

Harry Fuecks already thinks of combining this with PEAR::Calendar.

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Thanks für your support,

Stephan

I finally managed to upload the materials for the "PEAR for the masses" talk I gave at the OSCON. You may download it in Powerpoint format from our presentation page.