Web services allow you to exchange information over HTTP using XML. When you want to find out the weather forecast, the current stock price, or the cost of a product on eBay, you can write a short script to gather that data in a format you can easily manipulate. From a developer’s perspective, it’s as if you’re calling a local function that returns a value.

Web services empowers your application with a straightforward idea that you, your team or even the whole your company cannot develop everything but can use lot of professional services for free or by paying some money. There is also the situation when you need data that your web application is not the one collecting those information. Web services, in this case, provide data collectors a mean to expand their business by selling data or by publishing data on other websites to drive more traffics or generate more purchases.

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After a week trying to embrace SilverStripe JS treeview, finally I had my friend send me a treeview written on Prototype and Scriptaculous, the TafelTree. There are a dozen of treeview control written in many different JS framework like ExtJS, jQuery, etc. but it takes me long time to find out an Protopye one. Good news for Prototype lovers. Anyway, when your project is stick with Protype and you don’t want to add jQuery just for a tree then this is a good news.

I used my old Image utilities class for a long time until today taking it seriously for an e-commerce website to resize administrative uploaded images. The library use GD2 PHP module with some calculation to resize images proportionally. Unfortunately, quality is very low for big images, those are more than 1200×1200 px.

Figured out that GD2 is not good in production environment for image processing, I turned to an ImagMagic solution. Very lucky for me I found Asido. This cool library though at its 0.0.0.1 version provides some cool features like watermark, flip, flop, resize and crop. Asido works with image processing library through its drivers. Currently, it support GD, ImageMagic (php_imagick.dll), MagicWand (php_magicwand.dll) and image magic shell. Read the rest of this entry »

Prado PHP framework is a really cool framework, especially for .NET programmers who are looking for solutions in PHP. Prado focus mainly in making things done than doing a single task smartly. But coder won’t have to worry about quality of their code as Prado classes are written so well already.

I’ve spent more than one year with Prado, seeing the community grows day by day and people who I am talking too most say Prado is good and somehow, better than Zend framework or widely use CakePHP, Code Igniter. Read the rest of this entry »

Speaking a language fluently is the key to leverage that language’s power. JavaScript has a long time being considered a difficult language to learn and use, making the Web user interface less interactive and sometimes, so boring. But in recent years, AJAX term has become so popular and many JS frameworks born to facilitate the power of JavaScript. Well-known JS frameworks which are the prominent on the web are Prototype, jQuery, Mootool, ExtJs and YUI. Read the rest of this entry »

After the first post, JSON Quick start, you know what JSON is and how useful it’s in AJAX applications. This is more about JSON with more examples and advanced usages. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve wanted to start an entry about writing Facebook applications  for long time but seem these days I am quite busy with my running projects. From Internet, I got some useful links for people begin with as Facebook developers.

These are very helpful pieces of information highly recommend for reading before you get too far into making your Facebook application.

• Basic Facebook Application Architecture
• How URLs Are Handled Within An Application
• Understanding Your Callback Page

The official documentation / developer site:

• Facebook Developers Site
• Facebook Developers Wiki

Other Facebook tutorials and how-to articles:

• Tucows - Getting Started With Facebook Application Development
• 10 Things That Would Have Been Nice to Know When Starting My Facebook Application
• Developing with the Facebook Platform and PHP

It is now ending of our lunar New Year eve and I start to write some first lessons in the learning PHP series. The fact is that Wordpress blog is not very good in content management and so the PHP lessons will be mixed up with other articles. However, I will try to create a Table of content in the Learn series page so you can track the flow easy.

What does PHP do ?

PHP can be used in three primary ways:

Server-side scripting

PHP was originally designed to create dynamic web content, and it is still best suited for that task. To generate HTML, you need the PHP parser and a web server to send the documents. PHP has also become popular for generating XML documents, graphics, Flash animations, PDF files, and more.

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Passing through PHPDevelopers.org, I found this worth to read article of how lousy a PHP coder standing out of the project team. The second sign is not very correct as sometimes I just need a Notepad or gedit or VIM but it is from Reinhold blog, I keep them all intact.

By Reinhold Weber

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Every time you start building a complete website with some modules and functionalities, you start thinking about the “structure” of your system or in other word, the framework you use through the system. For a PHP website, MVC is the most widely use framework or programming model where M is the Model which handles the logic of the website, V is view which presents information to your users and C is controller which collaborate Views and Models together. However, the MVC itself does not include the data access layer which actually does the data manipulation work within your system and without data, your system seems to be unreal.

PDO is a very useful and widely use PEAR library for data manipulation. It can work with most kind of DBMS (DataBase Management System) such as MySQL (of course), Microsoft SQL, etc. PDO stands for PHP Data Object, a powerful and fast data access method for developers who need to work with different types of DBMS, handle stored procedures, process transactions or passing params to queries.

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