In a new post to his site Alex Bilbie looks at a good approach to simplifying the OAuth 2 authorization flow for a device and some of the simple PHP that can power it.

When signing into apps and services on devices such as a Playstation or an Apple TV it can be immensely frustrating experience. Generally you will ordeal something similar to one of the following scenarios: The utterly terrible experience whereby you don’t have anything other than an onscreen keyboard [or] A slightly less terrible experience whereby you can pair a bluetooth keyboard to enter your username and that crazy long password.

[...] There are some apps however - such as Youtube for Apple TV - that have a much better end user experience.

He talks more about this better experience involving a simple code presented to the user, a special URL to link the device and the typical OAuth-ish authorization page to link the request to your account. He then explains how it would work with a PHP backend: making the request to the auth server, returning a message with the codes and URL to pass along and the "device code" it responds with. He also includes a few examples of error responses for polling too quickly, pending authorization and a denied request. This is all based on the (currently in draft) OAuth 2.0 Device Flow Grant currently in the works.

On the Ibuildings techPortal there's a new post with the latest episode in their DPCRadio series (as recorded at this past Dutch PHP Conference) - Melanie Rhianna Lewis' talk on web services and consumer devices.

A web service is an API provided by a site that allows a remote application to access data and use functionality without having to 'act like a web browser'. [...] The talk will describe how a web service targeted at consumer devices can be implemented. It will look at the different methods of calling remote functionality such as SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON and restful services. It will also consider the limitations of consumer devices, memory restrictions, communications bandwidth restrictions, and so on that have to be considered when designing a web service aimed at consumer devices. Finally it will have a brief look at how to make a service secure.

You can find the slides for the session here and you can either listen to the episode through the in-page player or buy downloading the mp3 directly.

On the These Days blog there's a recent post talking about creating a mobile version of your site and how you can detect if the visitor is using a mobile browser or not using WURFL.

WURFL, The Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL) is an open source project which collects information about all of the different mobile devices in use. It is constantly being updated, so as long as you keep your WURFL definitions up-to-date you don't have to worry about your detection scripts not recognising new devices. By querying a WURFL database with your visitor’s User Agent string, you can not only determine whether the device they are using is a mobile device, but whether it has a touch screen, can make phone calls, is a tablet (iPad) and more.

They include a snippet of code that uses the Tera-WURFL service and a call to getCapabilitiesFromAgent to see what kind of client is making the requests and what it supports.

The Ibuildings techPortal has published two new episodes of their DPC09 Sessions podcast today - one from Sebastian Bergmann and the other from Michal Wittke.

>Sebastian's talk covered the internals of the PHP language and gave a step by step tour though how the code is parsed and executed. You can either listen to this episode via the in-page player or via the mp3 download

The next episode is Michael Wittke's talk in getting PHP up and running on embedded devices like web-enabled cameras or mobile devices. As with the previous episode, you can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

Michael Kimsal points out an article posted recently concerning a new feature of the Symbain OS for mobile phones - a web server that could support PHP and MySQL.

From the article:

Jukka on the S60 Blogs is reporting that PHP and mySQL are going to be available for S60 devices in early 2008. [...] I (Johan Wikman) can now reveal that we at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas in January, 2008 will demonstrate and release what we call the PAMP stack.

The PAMP stack stands for "Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP" and will be included in the S60 smartphones and makes it possible to install most PHP applications (that use MySQL) right off the shelf. Developers of several GTD-type applications are reported to already be in testing on the new platform.

Michael Kimsal points out an article posted recently concerning a new feature of the Symbain OS for mobile phones - a web server that could support PHP and MySQL.

From the article:

Jukka on the S60 Blogs is reporting that PHP and mySQL are going to be available for S60 devices in early 2008. [...] I (Johan Wikman) can now reveal that we at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas in January, 2008 will demonstrate and release what we call the PAMP stack.

The PAMP stack stands for "Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP" and will be included in the S60 smartphones and makes it possible to install most PHP applications (that use MySQL) right off the shelf. Developers of several GTD-type applications are reported to already be in testing on the new platform.

Hartmut Holzgraefe shares an interesting extension with the community in this new blog post - one for outputting to a Braille device.

And yet another library wrapper extension, this time for libbraille, a library providing a unified API for Braille output devices.

You can get the full details on the extension from its homepage and it can be installed via the pear system.

Hartmut Holzgraefe shares an interesting extension with the community in this new blog post - one for outputting to a Braille device.

And yet another library wrapper extension, this time for libbraille, a library providing a unified API for Braille output devices.

You can get the full details on the extension from its homepage and it can be installed via the pear system.