php[architect]

by Bård Farstad

You have probably already heard about OpenOffice, the Open Source Office suite that is now used by millions of people worldwide. One of the key points in OpenOffice’s mission is that its file formats are saved so that they can be accessible to anyone. In this article, CMS expert Bård Farstard will look into the OOo XML storage format to see if it’s really as open as they claim and show you how you can manipulate OpenOffice files from within your PHP applications.

by Chung Leong

In human languages, the meaning of words tends to change over time. The word “porcelain” traces its root to “porcus”—Latin for pig. Functions in PHP also have a way of acquiring capabilities beyond what their names suggest. Once upon a time, the “f” in [fopen()] had stood for “file.” Nowadays, [fopen()] can open many other things. Join Cheung W. Leong as he guides you through the creation of a system that takes advantage of PHP's stream functionality to create ZIP files on-the-fly.

by Tony Leake

Many of you have probably tried out PHP-GTK to build simple applications. Cod-ing a complex window program can be a time-consuming and error-prone task. However, using the Glade GUI builder can simplify the task and make window building fun again. Author Tony Leake shows you how in this in-depth tutorial.

by Paul Cowles

If you spend any amount of time following the latest technology trends, you are undoubtedly familiar with RSS and the "Semantic Web", which have enabled a new way of consuming Web content based upon standards for exchanging syndication information. By exposing Web content as machine readable data, new services have been created that were previously impossible to build. This article will take you beyond RSS and explain what semantic data is, why it is important, and how you can expose your Web application data semantically using the open source RDF API for PHP. Code samples will be provided for creating and integrating FOAF, RSS and Geo-graphic semantic data.

by Sérgio Machado

Template engines are a “must use” in simple to complex web applications because they provide a way to separate presentation from logic. This makes this kind of software simple to manage and fast to develop. Template engines, however, can also be a performance bottleneck. In this great article, Sérgio Machado shows you how to build a template system with the following features in mind (in order of importance): lightweight (performance and ease of use), support for operations and functions for data manipulation (power and control to the developer) and simplicity.

by Geoffrey Mondoux

As the communication era continues to grow, the need and desire to link many different systems and environments together increases. This article by Geoffrey Mondoux is designed to show you how to link different types of databases safely, how to establish meaningful connections to read, write, and understand the wealth of information held in them.