Using the Google Books service, you can search and navigate material that previously was available only in print form much in the same way you use Google's search engine to comb the world's web sites. [...] he Google Books API allows you to search the database, interact with the service's social features such as retrieve and submit user reviews, view and manage users' book collections, and even embed the book preview interface into your web site.

He includes a few snippets of code showing how to use the Zend_Gdata component to search for books by things like keyword or ISBN number and to pull the records back and display them in a simple table.

As you may know, PHPExcel is built using an extensible model, supporting different input and output formats. The PHPExcel core class library features a spreadsheet engine, which is supported by IReader and IWriter instances used for reading and writing a spreadsheet to/from a file. Currently, PHPExcel supports writers for Excel2007, Excel5 (Excel 97+), CSV, HTML and PDF. Wouldnt it be nice if we could use PHPExcel to store a spreadsheet on Google Documents? Let's combine some technologies.

The two technologies in question are a standard install of the PHPExcel library and the Zend Framework (with its Zend_Gdata component). Using the component, a save() method is created and hooked into the IWriter interface of PHPExcel. When this save method is called, the Zend_Gdata component connects to the Documents service and uploads the resulting information for the account you supply.

The recent Zend Framework 1.0.3 release includes new support for some great services, including Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, and Google Documents List.

He talks about the interfaces for each of these (including what you can grab) and includes some pointers to example code that can be used with either the full framework or just the GData bundle. There's also a video demo of the component being used to fetch data from the Data API.

This mini release includes fixes for 33 issues since the 1.0.0 release only a month ago. These issues are generally bug fixes and improvements, though some feature additions have been included with this release. This release includes enforcement of our new policy of only publishing documentation translations that are at least 50% complete. [...] Also noteworthy for the 1.0.1 release are many improvements for Zend_Gdata and numerous bug fixes for >Zend_Db.

Suggestions for the upcoming 1.1.0 release can be made on this wiki page on the Zend Framework site, and this new version can be downloaded directly from the Zend Framework website.

This is the home stretch toward 1.0! Everyone has worked very hard for many months, and we are very close to finishing what we set out to do with Zend Framework 1.0. This Release Candidate is intended to show the complete set of features Zend Framework 1.0 has. Following the final 1.0 release, Zend Framework will continue to grow and improve, but there will be a great emphasis on maintaining backward-compatibility. That has been the mission of Zend Framework from the beginning, to provide a professional web framework with quality and stability.

Additions in this new release include updates to Zend_Gdata, the addition of the Zend_Service_StrikeIron web service client, seperate download packages (framework+docs versus just framework) and an update to the Zend_Db component. Check out the Changelog for the complete list of updates and fixes.