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

Today, I released the first public version of the PHP5-package Services_Ebay, which provides a very easy way to access the eBay XML API with PHP5.
Although the package is still in devel state, it supports about 50 of the 70 API calls that the eBay web service offers. Furthermore it adds model classes for eBay users, items, feedback, categories, etc. that helps you working with the eBay data. By making use of PHP5's new OO-features, you may access properties of eBay items as if they were native PHP data structures. The easiest way to demonstrate this, is a tiny example. The following code snippet fetches an eBay item:
<?php
require_once 'Services/Ebay.php';

$session = Services_Ebay::getSession($devId, $appId, $certId);
$session->setToken($token);
$ebay = new Services_Ebay($session);

$item = $ebay->GetItem(4501333179);

echo 'User-Id of the seller: '.$item->Seller->UserId;
print_r($item->toArray());
?>
If you are the seller of the item, you may revise the item and send it back to eBay using the following code:
<?php
$item->Title = 'The new item title';
$item->ReviseItem();
?>
Working with other entities, like users or categories, is also extremely easy:
<?php
$supes = $ebay->GetUser('superman-74');
$feedback = $supes->getFeedback( Services_Ebay::FEEDBACK_VERBOSE, 1, 10 );
foreach ($feedback as $entry) {
echo 'Feedback for '.$feedback->ItemNumber."\n";
echo $feedback;
echo "\n";
}
?>
All models provide are using methods like __call(), __get() and __toString() so they can be used in several ways.

The Services_Ebay class is loading the API calls on demand and thus reduces the code that needs to be parsed. Each API call may be used in three ways:

1. Use it with the Services_Ebay class and pass arguments like you would pass them to a standard PHP function (you need to pass only the most important parameters).
2. Use it with the Servcies_Ebay class and pass arguments as an associative array (needed, when sending complex queries)
3. Instantiate the object on its own, pass arguments to the constructor.

Furthermore, the API calls are able to describe their parameter list by calling $call->describeCall();

To use the package, you will need to register as an eBay developer at http://developer.ebay.com and then create an authentication token from the token generation tool at the developer site.

More information about Services_Ebay and the eBay XML API can be found in the PEAR proposal and the eBay developer site.

Heise, a German publisher that is most famous for its German magazines c't and iX, as well as a great news feed, decided to start an international edition of the iX magazine.
iX focusses on software development and programming languages and published some interesting articles on PHP and XML during the last years. The english version will be available as PDF and the first issue can be downloaded free of charge.
Topics include SQL, XML schema as well as the influence of a doctype on the browser.
As this issue is free, I recommend reading it, the German version is always worth its money.

I'm back from attending the PHP-World Conference in Munich, Germany, where I presented a case-study of my daily work at 1&1 Internet AG.
I had a lot of fun during the conference and our meeting with some of the guys of MayFlower/ThinkPHP.
Christians talk on security was entertaining as always, probably the most funny talk I ever attended ("Sicherheit hat Priorität"). Toby gave an introduction to PEAR and Lukas did an extremely interesting session on database abstraction, including MDB2 and PDO.
Furthermore we had a PHP5 talk by Zeev, a web services talk by Tobias Hauser and a talk on optimising your sites for search engines (or better, Google).
If you did not attend the conference, make sure to add it to your calendar for next year, is it is worth a visit.

We had some problems with our server (it was completely down, actuall) during the last four or five days. But now most of our sites (and email access) are working again.
Please do not expect all parts of our site to be fully working, we still need to adjust some configuration files on our server.
We apologize for any inconvinience this has caused you.