Ruby on Rails & CakePHP
Rapid Application Development from Ruby to PHP

By Fabio Cevasco

This article is an attempt to port a famous Ruby on Rails tutorial to PHP using an emerging PHP MVC framework, CakePHP. CakePHP was inspired by Rails’ philosophy of Rapid Application Development. It implements a lot of the features and concepts that made Ruby on Rails popular in a very short time. Although Ruby’s syntax and way of doing things is known to be much more elegant than other programming languages, there is yet hope for PHP to get more organized and effi cient. This tutorial will follow its Rails counterpart step-by-step, covering the essential steps to create a simple, yet fully functional, web application. [Read More]

Now Playing RSS 2.0 (Starring PHP 5)
Building an RSS Feed with PHP 5 Classes

By Nathan A. Good

If you’ve been surfing many news or blog sites, you’ve probably come across an RSS icon somewhere on the screen. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is an XML document format that provides the ability for sites to easily broadcast summaries of their content. News sites find it handy to be able to publish the headlines of their top or most recent news stories, and blog sites find the format useful to publish titles and descriptions of the latest posts. Today, there are a number of applications with the ability to read RSS feeds (or RSS XML documents) and a growing number of web browsers that have built-in RSS support. The purpose of this article is to introduce the RSS 2.0 specification, and to demonstrate how to build a set of classes that build RSS feeds.[Read More]

Freelancer’s Corner
Gaining New Clients and Keeping the Old Ones

By Elizabeth Naramore

Coders are not necessarily known for their marketing and sales savvy so this article will aid those freelancers that need help with that portion of their business. If you don’t have new clients coming in, or if you can’t keep the current clients you already have, your business won’t do very well, and it certainly won’t provide you with the level of success and income that you need to support you and your family. [Read More]

Dive Deeper Into PEAR::MDB2
Leverage MDB2 Flexibility for your Custom Needs

By Stoyan Stefanov

This article is a sequel to the parallel introduction to the PEAR::DB and PEAR::MDB2 database abstraction packages published in the previous issue (Issue 06.2006) of International PHP Magazine. Now we dive deeper into MDB2, exploring some of the more advanced and esoteric functionality it has to offer and the different ways to customize MDB2 to do exactly what you want it to. The approach of this article is highly practical, providing you with short examples that demonstrate different features.[Read More]

Winbinder for Fun and Fortune
Creating a GUI Appication with PHP and Windows

By Aaron Wormus with Rubem Pechansky

Are you looking for a way to use the PHP code and the knowledge you’ve built up over the years to create a clientside Windows based application or game? This article introduces you to Winbinder, the first native Windows toolkit for PHP, and provides concrete examples for how you can use PHP to build everything from a simple five-line example script to a full-fledged commercial application. [Read More]

AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications
From the Packt Stable

By Stoyan Stefanov

This book is a practical introduction to creating more responsive web pages using Ajax with PHP and MySQL on the server side. Every chapter is a solution to a problem (such as creating a chat application or auto-complete input fields) and goes through defining the problem, providing the solution and then explaining it, accenting on the most interesting parts of the code.[Read More]