In a new post on his Medium.com site Romans Malinovskis has posted an objective comparison of ORM/DBAL libraries based on his own list. It includes several different libraries from all around the community including Doctrine, Eloquent, Cake ORM and Agile Data.

For many of us, developers, pattern of accessing external data (SQL) is a thing of preference. We get used to different syntaxes and subjectively endorse it. By looking past the individual preferences, I wanted to create a “comparison criteria” that would help PHP community to objectively evaluate data persistence frameworks based on features. As I looked around I haven’t found anything, so I started to work on my own list:

https://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/php-data-access-libraries-orm-activerecord-persistence. I welcome my readers to help me populate and use the table. In this article I explain various features which I’ve used as comparison criteria.

The (lengthy) post is divided up into sections for each of the criteria including:

• Sections and Scope
• Support of Persistence Engines
• Criteria, Scope, Condition
• Query Building
• Single-record operations
• Relations and References

...just to name a few. Each section comes with an explanation of what it is in a library-agnostic way and code examples where relevant. Be sure to check out both the table and the rest of the post for the full details.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new article posted sharing four of the best charting libraries they've seen for use in your PHP applications. Options include both server and client side tools, making finding one for your situation easier.

Data is everywhere around us, but it is boring to deal with raw data alone. That’s where visualization comes into the picture. [...] So, if you are dealing with data and are not already using some kind of charting component, there is a good chance that you are going to need one soon. That’s the reason I decided to make a list of libraries that will make the task of visualizing data easier for you.

He starts with a brief comparison of the server side versus client side options, pointing out some high level advantages and disadvantages of each. He then gets into each of the libraries, giving an overview, an output example and some sample code to get you started:

• Google Charts (Client Side)
• FusionCharts (Client Side)
• pChart (Server Side)
• ChartLogix PHP Graphs (Server Side)

He ends with a wrapup of the options and links to two other possibilities you could also evaluate to find the best fit.

SitePoint's PHP blog has a new post that walks you through the creation of Excel files with the help of the PHPExcel tool, a part of the overall PHPOffice package.

After my article “How To Make Microsoft Word Documents with PHP” (using Interop capability under Windows), there were quite a few comments urging a pure PHP implementation, i.e., only using a universal PHP library to manipulate Office files. In this article, we will see how to use a PHPExcel library to provide an “Export to Excel” function in a web app so that the user can export the data into an Excel 2007/2013 file for further analysis.

His example spreadsheet shows game information for an NBA team (the LA Lakers) including some charting and analytic data in the exported output. He sets up a simple Silex application and both a base and export endpoints. He also shows you how to create the PHPExcel instance, configure it with properties like creator, title and a set of keywords. With this object in place he moves into setting data for each of the rows/cells, populating it from a database table. He also includes examples of creating more than one sheet of results, inserting formulas and creating the charts mentioned earlier.

Ariz Jacinto has pointed out some results from a recent benchmarking "game" that compares the performance of several languages against each other in overall speed.

Here's the link to the Computer Language Benchmark Game as of July 15, 2012. You'll see that the median speed of PHP is slightly faster than Python 3 and Ruby 1.9 on x64 Ubuntu/IntelQ6600 Quad-core machine.

You can visit the results page and turn on and off various languages to get the updated results in the chart. You can also limit it down to one of the many benchmarking test types as well.

Lorna Mitchell has a tip for those using the Google Charts API to plot the data from their applications - a simple way to add multiple axis labels to the chart's output.

The axes in Google Charts are a bit interesting, because what they display bears absolutely no resemblance to what data is there - you label the axes separately, even if they are numbers. To label multiple things - in this example a scale and some units, you simply specify the axis more than once.

In her example it creates a bar graph that puts the values for "chxr" and "chxl" on the axis. The Google Charts API can be used to generate other sorts of dynamic graphs too including the traditional pie, line or scatter charts. It can also create things like QR codes and formula images, all on the fly.

On the RIA Zone today Ryan Stweart has posted a new tutorial about using Flex and PHP to chart out some data pulled from a backend database with just a hint of animation on load.

Creating charts and data visualization is one of the areas where Adobe Flash shines. The combination of a very powerful drawing API that makes it easy to generate artwork and the interactivity means that Flash is ideally suited for integrating data visualizations. It used to be that you'd have to be very familiar with Flash and scripting to work with charting. [...] You use a combination of XML-markup and scripting to create [Flex] applications. Further, you can use CSS syntax to customize the look and feel of the charts. Flex makes it straightforward to add interactive charts to web applications.

The tutorial walks you through the creation of the Flex project (you'll need Flash Builder 4 to follow along), creating and pulling in the data from a PHP-based service call, binding the data to the chart object and a few tips on how to modify the HTML output to use teh Flex/Ajax bridge. Animating the resulting chart is as simple as adding two new tags to the Flex definition.

On the Sony AK Knowledge Center there's a new tutorial showing how to use FusionCharts (Free) to create a real-time charts with no page refresh. FusionCharts is an open source Flash charting component for desktop and web apps.

We will create realtime chart data update that reflect to price fluctuation. There is a line type chart to visualize the price fluctuation. The data of price fluctuation will be fetched from database every 5 seconds using Ajax call and then display the latest 5 (five) data to the chart without any page refresh.

Using FusionCharts and Prototype, they show how to pull information out of a backend MySQL database into a basic graph (HTML and Javascript provided) with a periodic update that grabs the latest from the backend PHP script and pushes it to the graph. You can see an example of the graph here.

Developer.com has posted the latest part in their series on using the Google Maps API. This time they focus on something a bit more complex - working with more than one point and creating complex routes between them.

This installment tackles another fascinating aspect you'll undoubtedly encounter when building location-based solutions, namely distance calculation. Whether you want to simply plot the distance separating two points on the map, or perform more complex operations involving measuring the total distance spanning a more complex route, understanding how to perform these sorts of calculations will prove invaluable time and again.

The tutorial gives you example screenshots and complete code to calculate the distance between two points and, based on plots of a few different points, how to determine the distance traveled. His example is of a running route around a park.

NETTUTS.com has posted a list of nine libraries you can use to quickly and easily add functionality to your web application.

A lot of functionality is shared among applications - like sending emails or preventing spam. In the spirit of reusing the wheel instead of reinventing it, here are nine free web libraries that you can use in your next program which will dramatically increase your efficiency.

Here's their list:

• ReCAPTCHA
• Akismet
• Services_JSON
• Smarty
• pChart
• SimplePie
• XML-RPC PHP Library
• Amazon S3
• PHPMailer

Screenshots (and code examples) are provided for several of the items as well as links to their website and documentation pages.

Vinu Thomas points out a nice looking PHP charting library on his blog today - pChart.

Looking for some good looking graphs without having to pay for a library or resort to Flash graphs? Try creating your own using pChart. pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. This project focuses on allowing developers to generate great looking graphs by increasing rendering quality introducing an aliasing algorithm.

It uses GD to create the graphs, so just about any PHP distribution out there will support it (if you're not sure, make a phpinfo() page to check out your setup). There's even some example graphs so you can get an idea of what some of the end results could be.