a programmer's best friend :: Entries from June 2005

Just in time for the LinuxTag 2005 O'Reilly Germany released the "PHP5 Kochbuch". This is a new edition of the translation of the original PHP cookbook by Adam Trachtenberg and David Sklar.
For the new revision which now completely focusses on PHP5 I contributed four chapters: XML, Webservices, PEAR and "PHP on the commandline".

These chapters deal with all new features of PHP5 like the new DOM, XSL and SOAP extensions, but also with some features that will only be included in PHP 5.1 like xmlReader and xmlWriter and even the brand-new XML-RPCi extension in PECL. Through all my chapters I'm also making constant use of PEAR packages like Net_Server, XML_Serializer, XML_RPC or Services_Ebay. The PEAR chapter itself even deals with PEAR 1.4.0 and explains you how to set-up a channel server. If you read the book, I'm happy to receive any feedback on my work.

Although the Call-for-Papers for the International PHP Conference 2005 in Frankfurt has just been anounced I won't be submitting any sessions this year. But of course neither the conference nor the organizers are responsible (the conference has been great all the past years), but at the time the conference takes place, I'll be in my honeymoon on Hawaii after getting married in Las Vegas in the first week of November. I bet, this experience will sure beat another PHP conference, although I won't be able to meet all of the PHP folks I regularly meet there like Christian, Toby, Aaron as well as a whole bunch of PEAR-developers.
For the same reasons I did not propose any sessions for any of the upcoming conferences, I'll hopefully ba back, next year (At least, I do not plan to getting married again...)

I just released HTTP_Cache 0.1.0 through our own PEAR-Channel at pear.php-tools.net. I proposed this package via PEPr some time ago, but because some of the functionality already is available in the packages HTTP_Header and HTTP_Download I never initiated the call for votes. But still I think this small package is quite useful when you need HTTP-Caching using ETag. As it supplies a handler for PHP's output buffering all you need to add to your scripts are two lines of code:
require_once 'HTTP/Cache.php';
$cache = &new HTTP_Cache(array('auto' => true));

echo "You now may send any data to the browser";
If a user now requests this page twice, it will be only sent to the browser once, unless the output has changed in the meantime.

If you are using PEAR 1.4 installing the package is nearly as easy as installing a package from PEAR:
$ pear channel-discover pear.php-tools.net
$ pear install pat/HTTP_Cache
The package will be get installed in the PEAR directory of you server and you can instantly start to use it.