The PHP Grind

David Coallier has posted his look at the namespace support that will be included with PHP6, specifically some examples of their basic usage and things to look out for when using them in your applications.

Well, PHP has namespaces now! Time to start educating people on that long awaited feature and for the people that already do know namespaces from C++, you also need to read this, it’s simple, but will give you the basic syntax.

He starts with things like “what is a namespace?” or “what are they used for?” before getting into the syntax. The next step up is explaining how they work - he uses an example project, ProjectOne, with its namespace definition and an example script (invoke.php) that uses this class (including the new “import” keyword and the double-colon namespace separator).

A new introductory tutorial over on DevArticles looks to help you get acquainted with Ajax through its use in both PHP and JSP:

This is a two-part article. In these two parts I’ll try to describe what AJAX is, and how to use AJAX in PHP and JSP. Later we will use some advanced JSP tag libraries to make cool AJAX-based web applications.

This first part looks at the basics of the connection - the XMLHttpRequest object and a simple example putting it to use grabbing the latest date from a background PHP or JSP script (complete with screenshots of the end result).

The Zend Developer Zone has announced a new contest today to give away a pass to this year’s Zend/PHP Conference & Expo (happening the first week in October in San Francisco, CA).

Here’s the contest. [Below]you will see a Flash player queued up to play a 30 second commercial for ZendCon. Near the end of the video is a panel that says “and of course…” I’m looking for the best, ZendCon related answer to the answer to the panel, “and of course…” (you will understand after you’ve watched it) Witty, poignant, silly, creative, none of these describe the ones I was able to come up with, so let’s see you try.

The one submission that takes the cake will win first prize, the ticket to ZendCon and five runners up will receive a free license for a copy of Zend Studio. Entering is easy - submit your entry by sending an email off to contest@zend.com

PHPBuilder.com has a new tutorial posted today with a look at the easy creation of dynamic XML with the data from a database.

In this article I will show how to generate dynamic XML documents with Object-Oriented PHP. Before I get started, let’s get right to the heart of this functionality. Although the code may look fancy, being packaged up inside objects and inheritance, the key elements of this functionality rest in the the mysql_list_fields() and mysql_num_fields() functions.

The XML is built manually with the tags assigned to a string as they are built. The information is from a simple query to select all from a user-defined table and is output with a UTF-8 character encoding. They also include a Javascript (download) that helps in making an XMLHttpRequest connection to fetch the XML you’ve created and pull it in.

The Zend Developer Zone has a bonus episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series posted, a different sort of episode - it’s a video podcast as hosted by Davey Shafik and covering the combination of Ajax and PHP (and debugging all along the way).

Davey is a full time PHP Developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. An avid author for both magazines and books author, Davey keeps his mind sharp by trying to tackle problems from a unique perspective. Today Davey is going to show us how to debug Ajax applications using Firebug and the Zend Developer toolbar.

You can grab the video [mov] directly from the ZDZ site or subscribe to their feed to get this and other great podcasts.

DevShed continues its look at using the GD graphics library in PHP with the second part of the tutorial series, this time focusing on the creation of images from existing images (and their streams).

As I stated at the end of the previous article of this series, the GD extension comes packaged with many other useful functions, which indeed deserve a close and detailed look. Thus, in this second tutorial I’ll show you how to create different types of image streams from existing graphics, but in this case limiting the process to building GIF, JPG and PNG images.

They work through each of the types (GIF, JPG and PNG) creating an new one from a previous “clouds” image of the same type (a GIF out of a GIF, a JPG from a JPG, etc).

As posted by Terry Chay:

The PHP 10.0 Blog has the quick and dirty version posted today of the full namespaces readme that’s been posted about the upcoming namespace support in PHP.

We now have an implementation of namespaces in PHP 6 HEAD, so here’s a short FAQ about how they work for those that are too laz^H^H^Hbusy to read the whole README.namespaces.

It’s an FAQ sort of list (quick questions and answers) with eleven questions that give an overview of what will be supported. This includes why they’ve been implemented, what some of the syntax is and looks like and how they can be used in files.

Also note namespaces are still work in progress, so it may happen it would be changed a lot when it’s released.