PHP Week

Holiday nearly over, still more programming left undone. For those interested in creating dynamic web sites, let me give a little plug to PHP After coding most of the week, I�ve found this programming language extremely productive. About the only thing that I miss is a development environment with a debugger (but I do know that they are out there for PHP)
The last languages/environments I felt this positive about were: Java in WebObjects and an obscure language called VICOMscript which was a part of a terminal emulation/front end development package called VICOM Pro
For those who are not interested in programming, I will be returning to write some more guides on Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat in coming weeks.

Holidays with MySQL

Ahh, holidays. The perfect time to sit down and cut some code. A strange hobby, yes!
This entry is coming from a MySQL database, but entered in a slightly different way. I’ve written a small VB (AppleScript once the AppleScript studio ships) application that permits insertion of records via SOAP and PHP. After much frustration with the MSSOAP toolkit – all nice when doing simple work, but fails when working with structs or arrays – you�ve go to do its hard work! I swapped to pocketSOAP and churned out code faster. It also created a class from my WSDL automatically. The SOAP tracing and debug tools also help.
The vision is being able to enter blog entries from work (behind a firewall) easily. I think I am almost there. Somepeople go travelling on their holidays – what a waste 🙂

SVGZone

The short tutorial on SVG intro at Adobe web site. (in the SVG Zone)

The Pacific Area Newspaper Publisher s Association Technical Advisory Committee (PANPA TAG) has recently published their PANPASpecs (PDF Guidelines for Newspaper Advertising Delivery)

I have been spending time with PHP and MySQL — and I am nearly ready to install my own content management system for the front page. Crash course in configuring Server-Side-Includes for Apache as well as a slide side slip into Python.

XMLRPC, PHP, AppleScript

Completed some very small example projects using XML-RPC. Clients in Visual Basic, PHP and AppleScript – and a server in PHP

As a part of the next roadshow these examples will be shown to all and sundry — I will also post the code here for perusal. MySQL is a part of this project as well. I have it installed under MacOS X 10.1 and Windows 2000.

PHP, whilst an excellent scripting language for server-side HTML scripts, I can understand why it is easy to mix up your presentation (HTML) with code (PHP) and loose track of your project. Even with objects and external include files, it lacks the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm that is required for good OO and maintainability. Maybe its time to brush up on the Java skills?

XMLRPC, SOAP

Time to try out XML-RPC as an alternative to SOAP Spec. Its not that its too difficult, its just that getting two different clients to operate to the same server the same way seems… harder than it should be. Also, the PHP class that I am using has little to no documentation.
11.30pm: I am amazed at how fast you can get stuff working with XMLRPC as compared to SOAP. There is an added level of complexity in the SOAP protocol that gets in the way of doing simple client-server communications.
Spent today with a collegue, Aaron, at Agfa. Aaron tested out printing high quality artwork from Illustrator 10 and InDesign 2.0. Specifically looking at transparency effects and spot colours. We successfully RIPped the files to PDF (using the Normaliser) and separated them to 7-plates (on purpose). Even the in-RIP trapping engine successfully trapped the files.

SOAP, AppleScript, PHP4

Wow. Have been spending time with SOAP Spec as a mechanism for transport of client-server messages over the net. And it works as advertised

After using AppleScript on MacOS X to communicate to a server, I added a PHP4 SOAP implementation of both a client and server to this web server. Just to make life interesting, after installing the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 2.0, I can now get data from the server. The next step is adding a database to the back end; and get some stuff persisting and being useful!

The ease of programming in PHP also surprised me. Even got the object orientation and correctly factored my code. The ultimate strategy is to place as much of the content on this site into a database and dynamically generate anything – this site, navigation or a for-print document. Well, that s the wish anyway. Presently, I use Radio Userland as a weblog tool after transitioning from Blogger. But I d prefer to roll my own. The next step in the process is understanding MySQL

The service provider we use for this site is JumpLine — these guys are extremely helpful — and nothing has been too much trouble.

Trip to US

Back from the US, so much to talk about.

As you have read or seen, Adobe announced new versions of Adobe Illustrator (now version 10) and InDesign (now version 2). To me, InDesign is the most exciting. I have been doing tests to various RIPs of output, experimenting with Spot colours and transparency. It rocks, and will change publishing more than any other application since QuarkXpress 3.32

Something non-Adobe related. I have recently taken possession of a Titanium PowerBook G4 with MacOS X 10.1 installed. At Seybold I saw AppleScript Studio: a good mind meld between NeXT s excellent developer tools (now incarnate in Cocoa) and AppleScript. The more customers Apple get using these tools, the better future for the company. This is a developer s dream operating system. I’ve installed PHP and also purchased ScriptDebugger to do more in the scripting realm.