Linde002::PHP

The chatter about PHP’s SPL has been picking up recently which is a good thing. SPL has been available for quite some time and a lot of people still don’t know about the awesome features it brings to the table. The problem I have however is that a lot of examples about the iterator interface don’t show off the power that it brings to the table.

For our example we are going to take a look at a simplified version of my ISBNDB wrapper which uses this technique to transparantly page the results received from the webservice. (more…)

I was working on indexing my bookcollection this weekend and while looking at the stacks of books I had lying around I decided I wasn’t, under any circumstance, going to enter all the data from those books (ISBN/ISBN13, Author, Title, Summary, Publisher, etc) by hand.

So after googling around a bit I found ISBNDB.com which is, in essence, google for books. They crawl the internet searching for bookrelated data and then indexing it themselves. They really do store alot of information about books and cross index that so you can technically search for the categories an author fits in and then search other authors that fit in those same categories.

The best part is though, that they publish all this information through a free webservice. So I wrote a wrapper for this webservice that exposes all the methods and results used that can be used in PHP. If you are interested you can download it here. Documentation here.

Code after the jump:
(more…)

I was working on a small webapp a couple of months ago that would help my girlfriend manage her research data on horses. Amongst her wishes was that she would be able to view the selected horse’s family tree.

Now this is a specific wish that contains two generic problems.

• Retrieving hierarchical data from flat dataset
• Representing hierarchial / genealogical data in a browser

More info after the jump:
(more…)

So I recently started another assignment for my employer which entails a big webapp for the government (queue black helicopters). As you would expect for government work the office is based in The Hague, which means another x weeks of hotels. Luckily for me, instead of a industrial/commercial area without a lot going on like my last assignment this is in a big city. And even luckier, The Hague is near the sea. So after a long day of cursing at technology idiosyncrasies I left promptly at 4P.M to work on my tan.

After the jump you can see the life in IT isn’t always that bad.

(more…)