With the announcement Facebook as made about opening up their chat service to outside connections, several developers are taking the opportunity to create their own scripts to interface with the service. One developer, Abhinav Singh has posted a tutorial about the sample application he's created to do just that.

Today facebook officially announced availability of it's chat through jabber/xmpp clients. This is a big win for XMPP, with almost 400 million new probable users adding into XMPP club. In this post, I will demonstrate how to connect to facebook chat servers using Jaxl client library in PHP. It can further be used to make custom chat bots for facebook.

He shows how to use the Jaxl library to make the connection, setting up some basic environment variables and making the connection to the server. The index.php file that comes with the library reads this config file and sends a default message to the server and returns the response.

Evert Pot has posted to his blog about a CalDAV library he's worked up to allow for read/write access to calendaring that's compatible with the normal CalDAV systems.

My main goal is to create a general-purpose CalDAV library, rather than a consumer-ready server app. I'm hoping people will be able to use this library to enable CalDAV functionality in their existing applications.

You can get more information on the installation of the library from the SabreDAV wiki and to get at the code, you'll need to do a subversion checkout to get it.

Janos Rusiczki has released a library for CodeIgniter that makes integration of the Postmark service simple.

What are transactional e-mails, you might ask? The answer is: e-mails generated by a web application after an user action such as registration, requesting a password reminder, receiving a reply to a comment, etc. The problem me and many developers faced is that sometimes the client's servers are blacklisted and these e-mails land in the users' spam folder. This is where Postmark comes to the rescue, hopefully.

The Postmark API accepts JSON encoded content via a POST request that includes the to, from, message (plain text or HTML) and an API key. The Postmark service is currently in closed beta but you can still grab the library from either this direct download or on its github repository.

In this new post today Gonzalo Ayuso shows how to make "pivot tables" (at least the concept) in a PHP script to modify a data set and transform it into something else.

It's not very difficult to handle pivot tables by hand but the work is always the same: groups by, totals, subtotals, totals per row... Now I want to write a class to pivot tables in PHP with the most common requirements (at least for me).

His examples takes a few rows of records from a MySQL result and shows how, with the help of a library he's developed, he can make a few commands and fetch just the data he needs including the column to pivot on. A few more examples are also included.

Phil Sturgeon has written up a new post about a templating library he's whipped up for CodeIgniter sites, a rework of his previous templating efforts.

Working with multiple views in CodeIgniter has always been a pain. Out of the box CodeIgniter provides no real way of having a layout file and the only way to get header/footer functionality is to put $this->load->view('header') in your views or in each controller and method. Obviously as a programmer I am lazy and don't want to do that. Years ago I made some dodgy helper which evolved into a library which I called CodeIgniter Layout library.

After realizing it needed a good amount of work to get to where it needed to be, he re-coded it and is releasing the new version of the CodeIgniter Template library. Features include breadcrumbs, meta-data, layout files, partials, and loading views into modules.

Phil Sturgeon has a new post to his blog talking about a way to give your CodeIgniter site a bit more "pep" - use his updated implementation of the Dwoo templating engine.

Not wanting to spend too much time re-inventing the wheel I had a look at existing templating engines and decided to use Dwoo. [...] So after a little head-scratching, we now have CodeIgniter-Dwoo. DwooParser? DwooIgniter? Whatever we call it, my new Dwoo implementation for CodeIgniter sits in with "the CodeIgniter way" perfectly and the only code you will need to change within your application is the Parser file and your view files. No changes to your controllers at all!

You can download the library from the code section of his site.

In this latest post from the PHPClasses.org blog, Manuel Lemos looks at a class designed specifically for working with Arabic data in PHP - Ar-PHP - and interviews its lead developer, Khaled Al-Shamaa.

Arabic is a language spoken in many countries. The number of PHP developers from countries that use the Arabic language has been growing a lot. Currently it represents almost 2% of the users that access the PHPClasses site. The Arabic language writing direction is from right to left. It requires the use of a non-Latin character set. These facts raise special challenges to developers willing to build sites with Arabic text. Khaled Al-Shamaa, a PHP developer from Syria has written a library of classes named Ar-PHP. It address many of the challenges of building Arabic sites in PHP.

They talk about who Khaled is, look at a general overview of the project, what kinds of things are in the future for the library and what kind of difference PHP6 will make.

Clay Loveless has started up a survey to gather more comprehensive information about the use of several PHP libraries and frameworks out in the general community.

I've created a more comprehensive survey about PHP frameworks, libraries, databases, evaluation techniques and other assorted tidbits in an attempt to better understand how people pick the libraries they do. My hope is that if enough people complete the survey, a picture will form that illustrates some itches that so many projects have been created to try to scratch.

The survey asks questions about current projects, system load, licensing and how important several different feature and non-feature considerations are in your development.

Hasin Hayber has posted about a new library he and his group have created to interface directly with the RackSpace Cloud Server API - phprackcloud.

So we have spend our time for last two days and developed a PHP client library to use RackSpace cloud server API from inside a PHP application. [...] There is plenty of documentation and example included. The code is mostly self explanatory. Please don't forget to check the Wiki page to get some idea on how to use this library and how far you can go. We have covered all available methods by RackSpace cloud server in our client library.

Davey Shafik also added a comment to the post about an interface of his own that uses parts of the Zend Framework to make and handle the request.

Gilang Chandrasa has put together a list of PHP libraries the Komunitasweb.com site recommends using in your applications.

Having a collection of php libraries in one places will help you get your job done faster. It help me, so I share my list. I'll keep update the list with more libraries.

Among those in the list are libraries like PEAR's Services_JSON, PHPUnit, My_Twitter, SimplePie and SwiftMailer.