The PHP Grind

KillerPHP.com: Will Ruby kill PHP?

In his latest post today, Stefan Mischook asks the question every PHP developer (and company looking to invest in the language) out there is wondering - will Ruby kill PHP?

With the recent rise in popularity of the Ruby programming language (largely driven by the excellent but not perfect web framework called Rails), I’ve noticed a little fear in the air…fear on the part of some people in the PHP community.

Will Ruby kill PHP? The short answer is: no.

He takes the reader on a trip through his reasoning - things like “Ruby is elegant, but not complex” and “Java nerds love Ruby”. But, one of the things that is talked most about for Ruby (everything’s an object) is the same reason why PHPers and those looking for a quick, powerful, easy-to-use language will still stick with PHP.

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An Introduction to Simulating the Model-View-Controller Schema in PHP

Would you like to learn how to simulate an MVC-based system with PHP If so you ve come to the right place. This is the first article in a three-part series that will show you how to build this schema in PHP by constructing a few classes that represent what is needed….

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InformBank.com: How to create Microsoft Office documents on the fly using PHP

In this new tutorial from InformBank posted today, they show how to use PHP (and a few handy tricks) to create Microsoft Office documents on the fly.

Sometimes you have to generate some MS Office document for the users of your website using dynamic data. For example, few days ago, I had to generate some Excel reports using data from some tables in MySQL. I knew about the COM but it has a lot of disadvantages, including Windows-only platform and not very high speed. CSV is much easier and faster but you can’t format the cells to make them better-looking. The method I’ve never thought about before was using HTML.

So here came the inspiration and after some research and experiments I wrote this tutorial for all of you who are looking how to create Office documents on the fly using PHP. Of course, I included the COM methods and some methods to create other MS Office documents like DOC and PPT, to make this tutorial as full and as useful as possible.

The tutorial starts with the creation of documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) with the COM functionality (the standby method PHP has had for a while). Of course, it also requires the script to be running on Windows to work. So, what’s the other option? As he goes on to explain, it’s something as simple as HTML.

He includes two examples of alternate mathods, showing hhow to use HTML or a CSV file to create a custom Excel document. He also throws in some code to help you stream out the resulting document as a zip file to the browser.

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Zend Developer Zone: 30 Minutes with Adam Tracthenberg

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans shares another interview he did at this year’s OSCON in Oregon, this time with Adam Tracthenberg.

Adam is the senior manager of Platform Evangelism at eBay. His job is to communicate to developers all the cool things possible with eBay’s web services. We sat for a half-hour to discuss PHP, eBay, where things are and where they are going. Here’s what he had to say.

They talk about how Adam got into both PHP and made his way to eBay, a glimpse into the eBay web services API, some talk about Adam’s book, and what he sees for the future of PHP and its community.

And, of course, what would an interview be without a “fun” question - Cal asks Adam about his favorite technology right now, but you’ll have to check out the interview for the answer to that question.

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DevShed: An Introduction to Simulating the Model-View-Controller Schema in PHP

So, you’ve been hearing more and more about all of the PHP frameworks that are available (CakePHP, Zend Framework, etc) but feel left wondering what really powers them behind the scenes (what is MVC anyway?). Well, this new article from DevShed might help to shed some light on things.

Would you like to learn how to simulate an MVC-based system with PHP? If so, you’ve come to the right place. This is the first article in a three-part series that will show you how to build this schema in PHP by constructing a few classes that represent what is needed.

They start off introducing the Model/View/Controller style of development, showing it as a cleaner alternative for web site development. From there, they break out into the different parts of an application - first a look at the controller to handle the requests, then a basic model class to perform the logic, and then the view to show the results of the script on the page. Their simple application allows for some string manipulation (uppercase, lowercase, reversing, etc).

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