php[architect]

by Ilia Alshanetsky

One of the most common errors encountered on the net is the dreaded “404”, which indicates that the requested page is not found. To make things worse, this error has so many potential causes that it is virtually impossible to completely eliminate all of them. In this article, Ilia Alshanetsky reviews some of the preventative steps that can be used to avoid 404s and, in the instances where they cannot be avoided, handle them as gracefully as possible.

by George Schlossnagle

In the second installment of his three-part series on regular expressions, George Schlossnagle dives deeper into the realm of regex, exploring more exotic (and much more powerful) techniques, such as comments, assertions, greediness and much, much more.

by Alessandro Sfondrini

If you've been reading the last few issues of php|a, you already how to use SOAP and PHP together to write a client able to communicate with a Web Service. What if you wanted to create your own web service? In this article, Alessandro Sfondrini looks at how you can accomplish this, both on your own and aided by useful tools, such as the NuSOAP library.

by Marco Tabini

PDF files are notoriously complex to decipher. Or are they? In this article, Marco Tabini tries to sort through the 1,000-plus page Adobe PDF documentation to provide you with the skinny on how a PDF file is structured and how you can go about reading or modifying it.

by John Coggeshall

Internationalization is one of those topics that no one really wants to deal with. Yet, being able to present contents to users in their own locale is an important aspect of every modern website. In this article, author John Coggeshall describes his own efforts at creating a version of the Smarty Templating Engine capable of supporting data in multiple languages—and all the code is included!

by Marco Tabini

Just last month, Zend Technologies released the Zend WinEnabler, a product that finally makes Windows and IIS a stable platform for PHP. The introduction of this new product has potentially far-reaching implications for the world of PHP development—therefore, we could hardly resist, and immediately ran to our phone for this exclusive interview with Zend's Rinat Gersch about what the WinEnabler means and where it will take us.