Just a few people know that Google have a built-in currencies calculator. (Just type 100$ in euros in Google search box if you want to test it) This calculator works very well, so what about using PHP and cURL and get this functionnality in your own web app?

The script makes a cURL request over to the Google API's calculator feature and passes in the amount to convert and the codes for the "to" and "from" (like USA, CAD or EUR). You'll need cURL support in your PHP installation to use the script, but it wouldn't be all that difficult to modify it to use a basic socket connection too.

If you develop Web applications that have an international target audience, then you have to take internationalization into account'"a process that includes avoiding date/time or currency confusions and delivering all text pertinent to the user interface in the user's preferred language. Applications that can grow international traffic and improve revenue must respect their clients' needs.

They use the I18N PEAR package to handle most of the hard work and include the howto on grabbing the package, the structure and how to use it to get a country name from a code, work with the translation of numbers, currency and changing up date/time strings.

I did a quick check on what PHP classes are available for the purpose. There's really not a whole lot out there. There's a PEAR class along the lines I need, but it's released under the PHP License and, not to be too argumentative, I prefer non-PEAR solutions where the end-user may have no access to update PEAR.

So since the project is planned to use the Zend Framework, I shot off a mail to the Framework's fw-general mailing list to see if it would be a worthwhile contribution.

He sees that someone else had already opened a proposal for the same idea and decided to join with that group to work up the module. He also links to his original proposal and gives a brief overview of the goals of the package.