On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to create digital tickets using PHP and the Apple Passbook service.

Why should we PHP warriors care at all about Apple's Passbook? Well first because Apple made this technology open (well, sort of…), second because it can be used outside iOS devices, and third because it involves a lot of well-known and loved technologies like JSON and RESTful APIs. I'd also add that it's a very interesting piece of technology, but that's my personal opinion. In this article I'll show you how I built a sample web application that creates and distributes passes in the form of a "PHPMaster Membership Card". It is not a full-featured product, but it's a nice base to build on for more serious real world uses.

He talks about the concept of a "pass" (a digitally signed document that can be easily distributed) and the types that the Apple service lets you make. His example (sample code here) is Silm based and Idorim & Paris for the data handling. He talks some about the certificate handling that's involved and the structure of the application including the certs, application code, templates and images. He then works through the code step-by-step and explains what each part does and how it connects with Apple's service to generate the pass.

In an interesting move to help make things easier (and better for the environment) for the attendees of their tek11 conference, the php|architect group is going with an "all digital" format for their conference materials this year.

Conference programs are easily misplaced, pamphlets are often discarded, and so on, and so forth. The end result is an enormous amount of waste - I'm pretty sure that, last year, we probably shipped, handled, and handed out at least 500lbs. of paper - and less value than everyone would like. This year, therefore, we have set out to "go digital" and limit our paper usage as much as possible. As part of this initiative, we are going to introduce a few changes

This year you'll get a USB key instead of the usual bag of handouts, a conference program available in a wide variety of formats and a mobile application you can use to find upcoming sessions and communicate with fellow conference attendees. You can find out more about the conference including the schedule and how to get your ticket on the tek111 website.

The myOpenID project (which has taken on a new name - phpMyID) has released the latest version of the utility, beta v0.3.

phpMyID is a single user (though, if you were so inclined, you could easily turn it into a multi-user setup) IdP, or "Identity Provider" for the OpenID framework. It's a single PHP script with minimal dependancies. You don't need a database, you don't need to make your filesystem writable, you don't need to download any libraries, and you don't need to recompile PHP. Okay, well, you shouldn't need to do any of that.

You can get all of the details on the project and the latest downloads from their website including how to install and use the tool.

Joshua Eichorn mentions today about the "digital shortcut" created for his upcoming book "Understanding Ajax" from Prentice Hall.

A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.

Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.

The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.

They continue on in this post on the Zend Developer Zone with a resource to get you thinking - an Internationalization Primer from Johnathan Snook (as printed in Digital Web Magazine). He looks at the basics you'll need to know when putting in multi-language support, including database designs and precompiling.