Martin de Keijzer

Fairly small post I’d like to share:

Today I came accross an issue where I wanted to make use of the SimpleXMLIterator (from the SPL) with an HTML string. After giving it some thought I came up with the following solution:


function simplexmliterator_load_htmlstring($htmlString){
$DOMDoc = new DOMDocument('1.0');
$DOMDoc->loadHTML($htmlString);

return $sxmlIterator;
}




The function takes a string as an argument and passes it to the PHP DOMDocument extension, which turns the DOM into valid XML. This valid XML gets imported into the SimpleXMLIterator and returned back to your code.

Yesterday another phpBenelux meeting about a rather controversional subject; PHP & Microsoft technologies.

The meeting started around 07:00PM at the top-floor of the glass Real Dolmen building. Unfortunatly not many of the community members showed up as this was a wonderful oppertunity to get an update on Microsoft’s effort to support the open source community.

The first presentation (by Maarten Balliauw and Kevin Dockx) was aimed at using Silverlight and how to combine this with PHP. The presentation caught my attention due to seeing the features of Silverlight (/ Moonlight for linux based OS’s). On the other hand I did not see what this had to do with PHP, the only type of connection was a service based one (SOAP/JSON/XML/REST etc..) which we all know and love. Ofcourse the connection was made using Zend_Soap from the also very well beloved Zend Framework.
To manage connections and on which transportation protocols they should run, a Silverlight developer can make use of the Windows Communication Foundation.
An example of a beer-order-application in a cafe was used during the presentation, the concept was straightforward; a customer orders a beer and the bartender gets the order on screen.
The frontend was completely build using MXML with C# code behind it to make it all work. MXML could be seen as the equivanlent of Adobe Flex, C# can be seen as the equivalent of ActionScript 3 (for all the flash-minded people).
It was quite funny how easily a developer could place a button in a button and change it’s properties (not the best example, but it is possible..) using nested MXML tags. When looking at the internal structure of the button tag we could see that it is also build up using other MXML tags (Squares, Labels etc etc).
The Microsoft minded people were also in for a surprise, they brought up wonderful design patterns and solutions like for Observers, Singletons etc etc…. Untill Michaelangelo van Dam interfered and told them that the PHP SPL library recently also added these features (Observer php-example), a conclusion was quickly made; PHP has grown up.

For developing the front end several tools are available; Visual Studio, Microsoft Blend or even Eclipse4SL

The second presentation (by Katrien De Graeve) was aimed at what Microsoft is doing to support the PHP community. To me the most appealing were;
- Every PHP release should be considered stable for Windows before releasing.
- FastCGI for IIS 7 (it always was a choice between ISAPI or CGI installation. ISAPI was seen as unstable while CGI was quite slow, fast-CGI will solve the latter)
- Native MS SQL driver; the equivalent of the mysql_* driver, but used for MS SQL
- Application layer for Windows Azure (pricing for the Azure platform in europe will be available soon).

Windows Azure was quickly demo’ed, very interesting to see the possibility to deploy applications, and also very good to see that Microsoft is cooperating in Simple Cloud for cloud computing management.

At the end one copy of Windows 7 Ultimate was raffled, and I got lucky

Thanks to everyone for another great meeting, this is what keeps us developers up to speed on all the great technologies available, and I would like to encourage everyone to attend as many as possible and join the community!

On May 30 I have attended the PHP Vikinger event in Leuven. The event was an unconference meaning that it had an open program and anyone who stood up could speak out. This is a very fresh and interesting approach for getting the best talks.

I arrived at Cafe Sport on the martelarenplein in Leuven at 09:15 and all was still dark. So I started checking if I wasn’t there on the wrong day. But while I was checking the first people came walking in and the cafe was opened.

At 10:00 we were all setup and ready to inventorize all the subjects people wanted to talk about. After that we all voted (by raising hand) on which speeches we would like to here, the list after this voting looked as following:
Nooku 5
XSLT 8
PCRE 5
CLI & PCNTL 9
Dependancy Injection 13
Eclipse PDT 7
MVC 7
APM 20
Testfest 7
Run-tests 3
PDM 18
Search 10
PHPillow 12

Some people still had to prepare their talks so we worked through the list by readyness and interest.

10:30 CLI & PCNTL
The first presentation was given by Thijs Feryn about CLI & PCNTL, he shortned the presentation quite some bits because the set time for each presentation would be approximatley 1,5 hour. The main focus was on how to utilize PHP as a command line tool for things which would normally be put in a cron using wget or lynx which is a bad pratice (I know because I found out the hard way….). The presentation is the one below:

11:15 XSLT Templating

The next session was all about XSLT templating by Thomas Weinert, how clean and dynamic things can get by using XSLT as a weapon of choice. Although I voted for this session it still felt as a bridge too far. Maybe this is also due to the complexity and my non-interest for front end work. I do think there will be advantages (because I had just seen them), but SMARTY still works great for me. Maybe I’ll just dig into this subject once more when I have some time for it.

12:10 Testfest results

Just before lunch got served we had a small presentation by Zoe Slattery, she gave some insight on how bad the code coverage was in the past and how PHP is improving on covering it’s code by the community. She also summed up some ups and downs from previous Testfest events given by local PHP communities.

12:30 LUNCH!

Had a great lunch (a smos martino to live up to my name) and talked to some great people about the added value of XSLT and project development cycles. I also met up with someone who went to the same school as I did back in 1999. We just never been in the same class (as in classroom, and classmates, not an instantiatable class).

13:45 Search
The first session after lunch was given by Derick Rethans and was about search, an interesting talk about tokenizing and working with different languages. This is something I usually don’t pay enough attention to. I still work by searching in the most simple ways. So it works, but isn’t intuitive. I’m deffinitly going to look into this further.

14:30 APM
The next session also made all my senses tingle, it was given by Patrick Allaert about his new extension called APM (Alternative PHP Monitor). It should become the Zend Platform killer for debugging and monitoring applications on production servers. It’s main focus is on performance and usage. Keep an eye open for this project via http://code.google.com/p/peclapm/ I have a feeling this is going to be HUGE.

15:15 Break
At 15:15 we went outside for some time for a break. After looking together with Cal Evans how a bunch of belgian cyclists jammed up the traffic (while they held an event for getting enthousiasm for cycling) I went back inside to process some of the info I just took to me.

15:45 PDM
The following session was about the PDM (to continue on the acronyms) which stands for the PHP Developers Meeting. Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar gave us some insight on what PHP 5.3′s status is and what is upcoming for PHP 5.4 or 6 (it’s still uncertain if 5.4 is going to be 6 or not, it depends on the development time).

16:25 PHPillow

The final session by Kore Nordmann was about PHPillow a wrapper for CouchDB, the session started off by giving more insight about what CouchDB is and ended in what PHPillow can do to ease the tasks of maintaining the CouchDB. You can view the complete presentation at http://kore-nordmann.de/talks/09_05_phpillow_couchdb.pdf

I’ll try to find some time to expand my report a bit, but as I am very busy this week I cannot make any promises. I would like to thank everyone for the great day at PHP Vikinger, I’ve seen and learned a whole lot again on this day.