With PHP's younger cousin PHP-GTK's recent step to maturity with the 2.0 stable release it is a good time to give this project some more attention. In this article I will show you how to create a re-usable IPv4 Entry widget using PHP-GTK's excellent OO structure.

The end result is an interface that lets the user input an IP in a familiar way (blocks of three, automatically advancing to the next block). They talk about the code first, describing how all of the parts fit together before giving you an easily cut-and-pastable block of code (the class) that creates the widget.

The problem I was having was actually judging whether or not it would be worth my time following their tweets. I mean, I follow someone that is really respected in a certain field, only to find out that they tweet about their new puppy they just got more than anything. So I made a PHP script that generates a "Twitter Tag Cloud." Using this, you can generate your own Twitter tag cloud to put on your personal site to display the top keywords that you have been tweeting about.

You can either check out an example of the cloud through the form in the post, use his REST service to get the keywords for a user or you can download his code and try it out for yourself.

Today I will look at the Countable interface, it has a single function that needs to be implemented: count(), by implementing this you can ensure that there is a count() function ready to use on any given class that implements it. The Countable interface is used in other places in the SPL as well: the ArrayIterator and ArrayObject classes implements this interface ( and SqliteResult if present ).

In his code examples he shows simple methods for returning the count() of a property, but notes that the real power of it comes in the ability to manipulate the number returned from the call based on other parameters (or filtering).

This is a demonstration of a very fast and easy way to build AJAX-type applications where communications between JavaScript on the client side and PHP5 on the server side is ideal. This library makes development of such systems fast and very simple.

In his example he shows how to create the PHP and Javascript functions that let the service talk back and forth. He defines a simple "Hello World" style application to show how it would be structured. He also includes a bit of more complex that has other functionality - getting a value out of an array and returning a property/private variable from the backend class.

Webgrind, the web frontend to Xdebug has been updated to version 0.7 with a few new features like: Support for directly loading a report through hash in url, Visual breakdowns of internal, class and procedural functions and calls to include/require and Version checking.

This new version (0.7) can be downloaded directly from its Google Code page.

His list of four is:

• Doc Comments
• Flexible Parameters
• Use method Entry contracts
• Be Stateful and Refactor

The "Doc Comments" is pretty obvious, but some of the others need a bit more explaining. Being flexible with your parameters is more about requiring the least from a developer, "entry contracts" being the restrictions to let the developer know what you're expecting and refactoring commonly used functionality into a easy, single point of contact.

Well, if you are into duck typing style of programming, it may be interesting for you to have an object that implements certain set of functions, but not necessary declares it at class definition. Languages like Smalltalk do it all day along, so why PHP couldn't?

His example defines an interface Cow and a class MooingGrassEater and a function, CowConsumer, that does the work. A classname is passed in and an instance of that class is checked with "implements" rather than "instanceof" to see if it uses the Cow interface. He points out a place where PHP itself uses something similar in user defined streams.

• How to Check the Status of an Ad Group in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Keywords in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ads in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ad Groups in PHP (V5)

Check out his blog listing for more.

Because such [popularity] data is much better to comprehend when accompanied by some nice graphs, I had a look at the Google Chart API today.

He also mentions three wrapper libraries that help your apps interface with the Charts API. Of course, he also includes some graphs of the popularity stats showing things like web server usage and PHP versions.