The IBM developerWorks site has posted a new tutorial (written up by Vikram Vaswani) about integrating your application with the Google Calendar web service.

Google Calendar allows Web application developers to access user-generated content and event information through its REST-based Developer API. PHP's SimpleXML extension and Zend's GData Library are ideal for processing the XML feeds generated by this API and using them to build customized PHP applications. This article introduces the Google Calendar Data API, demonstrates how you can use it to browse user-generated calendars; add and update calendar events; and perform keyword searches.

As mentioned, the tutorial steps you through a pretty complete interface with the Google Calendar API - everything from fetching events, adding new ones and searching your current events. He uses the GCal library to interface with the API.

Now that it's all wrapped up, Chris Shiflett has posted his own look back at the PHP Advent calendar he coordinated.

Coordinating this turned out to be a lot of work, but I hope to do it again next year. [...] With a little bit of prodding, we all hopefully learned a little more than we would have otherwise, and the people who were gracious enough to share something deserve our thanks.

You can check out his post (and, of course, our own) for a complete list of all twenty-four days.

Paul Reinheimer and Courtney Wilson have put together a new PHP project - the Funcaday

I am proud to announce the launch of the funcaday project with my graphic design buddy Courtney Wilson. The goal of the project is to showcase a new PHP function each weekday, then a new concept, term, or technique each weekend.

There's even a feed you can subscribe to to get your daily fix of function-ness. Today (the inaugural day of the site), the function is pathinfo.

Chris Shiflett has started up a PHP project for the holidays - a PHP Advent Calendar to share helpful hints and knowledge from members of the PHP community:

Welcome to the PHP Advent Calendar. If you are unfamiliar with the format of an Advent calendar, Wikipedia has a pretty good description. The PHP Advent Calendar is similar in spirit to the Perl Advent Calendar, a tradition the Perl community has sustained for several years.

So far he's posted the first (Sean Coates) and second (Elizabeth Naramore) days. Keep an eye on his blog for more holiday PHP goodness!

You can also keep track of the latest ones on this calendar Sean has put together as well as on our list below:

Days:

• Day 1: Sean Coates (using mail)
• Day 2: Elizabeth Naramore (documentation)
• Day 3: Sebastian Bergmann (finding bugs)
• Day 4: James McGlinn (Handling SSL/Non-SSL Redirection)
• Day 5: Cal Evans (lesser known resources)
• Day 6: Davey Shafik (UIs and APIs)
• Day 7: Elizabeth Smith (SPL to the Rescue)
• Day 8: Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Don't Reinvent the Wheel)
• Day 9: Ivo Jansch (Design Patterns)
• Day 10: Chris Cornutt (Planning)
• Day 11: Ben Ramsey (Getting Involved in the PHP Community)
• Day 12: Ed Finkler (Making Assumptions & Asking Questions)
• Day 13: Terry Chay (web site security)
• Day 14: David Sklar (timing and profiling)
• Day 15: Paul Reinheimer (channels and output)
• Day 16: Jeff Moore ("What We Can Learn about Software Development from a Failing Restaurant")
• Day 17: Ilia Alshanetsky (grepping for parse errors)
• Day 18: Christian Wenz (WSDL despite PHP5)
• Day 19: Marcus Borger (using the Google charting API)
• Day 20: Adam Trachtenberg (SQLite)
• Day 21: Luke Welling (Follow the Big Dogs?)
• Day 22: Derick Rethans (Using the VLD tool)
• Day 23: Jay Pipes (Two PHP/MySQL Tips)
• Day 24: Nate Abele (Session Security)

As pointed out by his post on the PHPGeek.com blog, Jim Wynia has worked up some scripts for connecting his Google Calendar with his site that's powered by Zend Framework.

It struck me that keeping track of that stuff on Google Calendar would be a reasonably good way to centralize [a list of daily accomplishments] and make it accessible from any of the computers that I work on (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.) without depending on software. So, I took a quick look at the PHP API for using GCal's information. It requires the Zend Framework, so this was an opportunity to install that as well.

Once he got the Zend Framework installed, he installed the PHP adapter. He talks about the configuration changes he had to make to the Calendar.php file and gives an example of it in action.

As a former ASP.Net coder, I've missed the convenience of Microsoft's built-in Calendar Control since I switched to doing Web site development in PHP. On a recent project I needed the ability to display a calendar with dates serving as hyperlinks to selected database items. I decided to use the opportunity to write some portable PHP code that I could use in other projects.

So started Donald McArthur's work on creating a simple, easy to use calendaring system to be used in a popup inside an application. He provides all the code you'll need - the PHP code and the HTML layout/functionality you'll need to get it working.

He helps you visualize the structure of the end result HTML table with a simpler version (three cells by five cells) and explains the date functions the code uses to figure out the dates and days of the selected month.

Over on Evolt.org today, there's a new tutorial combining two great tastes that taste great together - Ajax and PHP - to create an online calendar system quick and easy.

There are many web calendars in the market but some of them are quite complicated. If we are not able to understand the code, it becomes harder for us to customize the calendar to fit into our existing application. As such, we need to create a calendar that can plug itself into any system seamlessly without problems.

They show the creation of a calendar that can be used by including one line into the app and integrates easily into whatever style the website might be using. They give the code for building the calendar and to add dates to it on the server-side with PHP. The Ajax comes in when they make a call to the script in the background, requesting the next/previous month's output and pushing it into a local div.

On the Chronosight Blog, there's a follow-up post with a look at some enhancements to the original tutorial - Simple Calendar Tutorial.

Almost a year ago I made a tutorial on Simple Calendar Tutorial which trained us to develop a calendar using PHP. Now it times to enhance that tutorial to a whole new level. Let trou in some AJAX code and Javascript Document Object Model (DOM) to create not one, but three type of calendar: Single Calendar, Time Period Selection Calendar, Month-Year Calendar

He steps you through the creation of two files - one to provide a space for the Ajax interface and another for the calendar PHP class. Toss in a little CSS and some explainations along the way and you have all that you need to make a simple, easy to use calendaring system.

Hot on the heels of the recent Google Calendar release, the Zend Developer Zone has posted a quick tutorial on using the Zend Framework to consume the data the calendaring service provides.

A couple of weeks ago, Google jumped into the online calendar space by launching Google Calendar (um, beta). The application is chock-full of Ajaxy goodness and plenty of features, but I'm here to talk about what you can do with your calendar data behind the scenes. Using some handy tools from the Swiss Army Knife that is the Zend Framework, I'll show you how to pull data from your Google Calendar into your site. Just for kicks, I'll also throw in a caching layer to keep things fast and reduce the network traffic between your server and Google.

The framework makes the script simple, a matter of pulling in the feed with the Zend_Feed module and caching it with Zend_Cache. The example grabs the latest data from the RSS feed, parses it into values to store in a server-side cache (in /tmp) and loops through each item to display the relevant event details.

In a pointer from this blog post on Adam Trachtenberg's site today, there's a story of some struggles that Tim Bray has been having when it comes to online calenders and coordinating with those in his life.

Here's the problem: Dr. Wood and I both have complicated jobs plus we have a family, so just like everyone else in the world, keeping in sync is a problem. Herewith a painful half-finished story of trying to solve it with technology. The conclusion is painfully obvious: whoever first provides a family-scheduling tool that non-geeks can use and Just Works with the tools most people run their calendars on is going to make a lot of money and do Humanity a major service.

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