Author: Nick Hodge

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.