Entries by Kevin Vaughan

First off, if you haven't checked out Zend Framework, the first official release came out earlier this week. It takes a little bit to get around and learn the structure if you haven't seen it before, and probably a little bit longer still if you aren't familiar with things like design patterns, but this is the first really solid effort towards a framework for PHP 5.

Now, you've spent some time reading through the framework site, the documentation, whatever, and you're ready to get started. But the default link structure is not very search engine friendly and you want to dig into some different routing. What to do? Try out this content path router route, based on the other routes provided within the Zend Framework. This router will match all URL structures that end in either the Uri delimiter (/) or the content extension (default .html) (( but not /.html, )). The page and path will be set as request parameters so that your controller can determine if that particular page is supposed to exist based on whatever logic or business rules you decide.

A couple of weekends ago the shortcomings of some of the currently available wsdl2php solutions reared their head as I worked with a few different WSDLs that were handled less than gracefully. Out of this came WSDLInterpreter (google code project, package download), a wsdl2php class generator that takes a different approach to parsing WSDLs. Other wsdl2php solutions try to parse the WSDL into complex array structures before generating the classes, and often run into typing and namespace issues. They also don't handle function overloading very well, among a number of other problems. To solve this, WSDLInterpreter instead uses the power of XSL to parse the complex WSDL structure and create valid PHP5 classes. This is just an alpha version, but feel free to use it and let me know if you run into any problems.

Download WSDLInterpreter v1.0.0-alpha Now

With all of the ongoing chaos in the middle east:

• al-Qaida launching most potent strikes in Afghanistan since 2001


• Iraqi government thus far failing to setup a structure that can maintain its own people and stability


• Iran still chanting death to America and thumbing its nose to Britain as well


• Hamas, Fatah, Abbas, West Bank, Gaza Strip, Civil War (there is a Billy Joel song coming in here somewhere)


• the list goes on and on...

It hits a bit closer to home to see that the latest 2007 DoD report on stability and security in Iraq (June 2007) shows the Iraqi people with an overall confidence rating of 58% that the Iraqi government can improve the situation there. Compare that with our own national confidence in Bush for that same time frame, 38%. This is under constant rolling blackouts and threat of death.

What do you do to help bring everyone out of a massive quagmire of such large proportions that is the middle east?

It is going to be more of an effort to make the time putting the pages I had back up, but I've got some art back up, so that's a start.

If you've ever worked on a help desk or helped that one neighbor out with a problem with a virus scanner (for the 700th time), then you know that sometimes, it just takes a little extra explaining.

Through a combination of events - some mistakenly executed by me, some by twist of fate, some unavoidable - the entries and pages I had up are gone. I'll be adding them all back over the next week or so, hopefully the upcoming long weekend will afford some time.