PHP Programming with PEAR: XML, Data, Dates, Web Services, and Web APIs - Brossura

Stoyan Stefanov is a Yahoo! web developer, Zend Certified Engineer, book author, and contributor to the international PHP community. He talks regularly about JavaScript, PHP, and other web development topics at conferences and his blog www.phpied.com and also runs a number of other sites, including JSPatterns.com - a site dedicated to exploring JavaScript patterns. Stoyan is the engineering lead of Yahoo's performance optimization tool 'YSlow', as well as other open-source tools and 'PEAR' libraries.

Chapter 1 shows you how to access databases with the MDB2 package. You will learn:

• Connecting to the database, and instantiate objects
• Executing queries and fetching data
• MDB2 SQL abstraction; sequences, replace queries, sub-select support, prepared statements
• Using MDB2 modules
• Extending MDB2 to provide custom fetch and result classes, iterators, and modules

Chapter 2 explains how to use PEAR packages to display data . It teaches you:

• Creating powerful tables of data easily with the HTML_Table package
• Advanced table formatting with HTML_Table_Matrix
• Creating Excel spreadsheets dynamically with Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
• Adding formatting to these spreadsheets including colors, patterns, formulae and number formatting
• Creating flexible, sortable grids of data with Structures_DataGrid
• Adding columns to the grid, control paging, select data sources, and renderers
• Using File_PDF to create PDF documents on the fly

Chapter 3 covers the usage of PEAR packages to work with XML and stresses on:

• Creating XML documents with XML_Util, XML_Fastcreate
• Transforming PHP objects to XML format with XML_Serializer
• Creating Mozilla applications with XML_XUL
• Parsing XML with XML_Parser
• Processing XML documents to PHP objects with XML_Unserializer
• Parsing RSS with XML_RSS

Chapter 4 is an extensive tutorial on working with web services and Web API's using PEAR packages. We cover the following topics:

• Consuming web services
• Consuming XML-RPC-based web services
• Accessing the Google API
• Searching blog entries with Services_Technorati
• Accessing the Amazon web service
• Accessing the Yahoo API
• Offering XML-RPC-based web services
• Offering SOAP-based web services
• Offering REST-based services using XML_Serializer

Chapter 5 covers PEAR's date and time functions using the PEAR::Calendar and PEAR::Date packages such as:

• Creating, manipulating, and comparing Date objects
• Data_Span arithmetic
• Handling timezones with Date_Timezone
• Keeping track of public holidays with Date_Holiday
• Using the Calendar class to display an HTML calendar