Code Experiments in PHP

The other day I was about to integrate an RSS feed onto a web page using jQuery.

To ease the way in which jQuery accessed the feed, I decided to write a quick fopen proxy, and then I figured… hey, why not convert this to JSON while I’m at it?

I did a quick search for “convert rss to json with php”, and turned up a bunch of stuff that wasn’t what I was looking for. So I opted out of the lazy web approach and decided to think for a moment… aha, this is much easier!

$json = json_encode(simplexml_load_string($rss));

Wow. Who says you can’t do useful stuff with PHP in one single line??

I just posted this to StackOverflow in response to a question about PHP sockets:

Actually it is my experience that PHP5 sockets are quite good. They are written in C and built-in to the PHP5 binary, so they would run quickly, as opposed to being implemented in PHP itself.

Check out nanoweb and nanoserv:

http://nanoweb.si.kz/

http://nanoserv.si.kz/

The author has done an impressive job of putting PHP sockets to work, building a highly capable pure-PHP webserver with nanoweb, and a complete server daemon framework for PHP 5.1+ with nanoserv.

Looking through the nanoserv documentation and code base may give you more confidence in PHP sockets.

Just spreading the good news - the two PHP projects I work on the most, Nexista (a web application development framework) and PBooks (an open source accounting web app) are now hosted at Github.

In the process, I went through PBooks and made sure the code is totally up-to-date. I've still got some organizing to do, but its a big step forward.

In the several months I've been using Git, I'm really amazed by how useful it is!

I'm glad to see another Sinatra port! This time to PHP, which is good, because PHP has really good Ming support.

I've cloned the tree to Docunext Mirrors:

• http://www.mirrors.docunext.com/cgit.cgi/fitzgerald/tree/

<?php

echo "Hello World!";

?>