Archive for January 11th, 2008
PHP Developer - January 11th, 2008
Mike Naberezny has posted about the latest release he’s made - a 1.0 released too - of the Horde/Yaml library for working with YAML files/information inside of PHP.
This is the package’s first stable release. Chuck Hagenbuch started the library as an adaptation of Spyc around six months ago. Since then, he and I have been quietly using and improving it. Along the way, we fixed many issues, added support for pecl/syck, and wrote a test suite with PHPUnit.
You can find the latest download of the package over on the Horde PEAR channel and you can find out more about the YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language) spec over on the Yaml.org website.
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PHP Developer - January 11th, 2008
Daniel Crook points out the next meeting of the New York PHP Group where Dan Gisolfi will be talking about some of the latest things that IBM has been up to in the mashup arena.
Centered around the concept of “situational applications,” IBM’s work with mashups targets a growing trend in Web site development. […] IT specialists should embrace the model as a foothold for PHP in the enterprise.
Some of Dan’s presentation is outlined as well - a demo of IBM’s Mashup Starter Kit, a look at best practices, and talk on the collaboration of IBM with Zend and ProgrammableWeb. If you’re wanting to attend, be sure you RSVP as soon as possible (before the 21st @ 3pm) to reserve your spot.
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PHP Developer - January 11th, 2008
As Paul Jones mentions, there’s a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.
He points out Hasin Hayder’s post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there “is no need to use an external template engine like smarty”.
Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a “echo” does the thing much better.
Judging by the responses to both Hasin’s post and Paul’s post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).
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PHP Developer - January 11th, 2008
Mikko Koppanen has another image tutorial posted to his blog today - this time the focus is on padding a thumbnail with the color of your choice automatically.
Today’s example originates from a question asked by a user. How do I thumbnail the image inside given dimensions proportionally and fill the “blank” areas with a color? Well, the answer is here.
His code pulls in the source image, generates a thumbnail from it and makes a new image (the background) that’s a bit bigger than the thumbnail. From there, the thumbnail is laid on top and the whole thing is output as another PNG. An example of the input and output image is included.
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PHP Developer - January 11th, 2008
Richard Lord has a quick post about a handy library that can help with the creation of AVM2 swf files from inside of PHP.
It creates the number formats used in AVM2 swfs, as described here. I created these functions for the SWX project and am releasing the code under the MIT license so it can be used in other projects too.
You can download the file directly from his blog. You can find out more about the native data format (SWX) for Flash on the SWX Format website.
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