VT’s Tech Blog

Here’s an excellent article from Dennis Pallett at PHPit on how to implement an XML-RPC server and client using PHP.

“XML-RPC web services are commonly included with blogging tools (such as WordPress) and content management systems, but many other websites benefit from having a public web service, especially web sites that serve data, for example a weather website.

Although PHP comes with inbuilt XML-RPC functionality, we won’t be using it in this tutorial, and instead we’ll opt for the excellent XML-RPC Library by Simon Willison, available at http://scripts.incutio.com/xmlrpc/. This library includes both the ability to create a XML-RPC server and client, which is exactly what we need.”

Link: PHPit – Totally PHP » An introduction to XML-RPC in PHP

Here are a few XML parsing tutorials from kirupa.com. Kirupa.com is a cool place to check out tutorials on Flash and PHP.

” If you are looking at this tutorial then you probably have a good idea in your head about what XML is and what you can do with it. However, for those of you that stumbled across this tutorial on accident and are interested in learning more, I will briefly explain what XML is and what it is used for.”
Link to this tutorial: XML Parsing using PHP {Easy}

“ Ok, since I already went over the basics for formatting XML data and the basics of PHP/XML parsing I’m just going to jump right into the XML and PHP without much of an explanation. For this project I decided to create a mock-news headline parser. Basically, we have our XML file that has news headlines and a brief description of the story.”
Link to this tutorial: XML Parsing using PHP {Intermediate}

“ This tutorial will show you how to take data that is stored in your mySQL database and easily turn it into XML. From there you can use the XML however you wish. This is useful for blogs, shoutboxes, guestbooks, or even larger things such as back-end CMS (content management systems) for your site or sites. While writing this tutorial I am making the assumption that if you are looking at this tutorial then you already have a decent grasp of some of the basics of PHP and also that you know basic XML syntax rules.”
Link to this tutorial: Output mySQL data as XML with PHP

Before actually deciding upon any web design, a lot of web design consulting needs to be done. Ideally this should be done alongwith web development consulting. This is because while thinking over a web site design, a lot of things need to be taken into consideration, like getting a dedicated hosting service, that would provide colocation hosting as well.

This lab series is not a tutorial on writing PHP programs or scripting dynamic Web pages. Rather its intent is to demonstrate how you can use PHP to separate the different elements that make up a well designed and valid Web page into their component parts and have these parts adapt in certain powerful ways. These components correlate almost exactly with the modular design of XHTML itself. Any number of other Open Source languages such as Perl or Python could be used to achieve the same goal. Or commercial ones certainly, but let’s not go there.
Link: Building Modular XHTML Web Pages with PHP – loadaverageZero

Here’s an interesting blog about Microformats. That’s a new term for some of the old stuff on the net. RSS for example is a microformat. The Microformat site (www.microformats.org) defines Microformats as:
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog:
Microformats are XML schemas for small things like address cards, calendar entries and even wiki or blog entries. If everyone uses the same format, integrating information across multiple systems becomes very easy.

Link : Innovation Creators: Microformats are the Nano Technology of Web 2.0