In a new post to his blog today, Ken Guest talks about the split that's been made in a PEAR package for calculating the dates of holidays (Date_Holidays) for localization reasons.

We decided that this one package should be split into subpackages: one subpackage per region/country. Some advantages of this approach are that each driver / filter / subpackage gets it's own stability and version number - we wouldn't have to keep increasing the version number of Date_Holidays each time a new driver is added or when an existing driver gets a significant number of fixes.

To replace your current version of the package (with all of the regions built in) with a new version that still contains all versions, uninstall the Date_Holidays and grab the "Date_Holidays#all" package. Otherwise, you can check out the PEAR page for the main package and see the subpackage list if you only need one for your area.

PHP developers working on Debian have one more reason to be happy with their choice of linux distributions - as Derick Reathans notes, XDebug has been added as an apt-getable package to the Debian systems.

Since a few days, there is a new package in Debian: php5-xdebug. After a few years of talking licenses, due to the help of Martin Meredith and Francois Marier Xdebug can finally be installed with apt-get.

XDebug is a debugging and profiling tool that adds additional information (more than just the usual "error on line..." sort of thing) to the output of your PHP scripts. It also adds more complex functionality like profiling and code coverage reports run on your applications.

In a new article from PHPBuilder.com.au today, they talk about the "powerhouse of web services", SOAP, and how to get started working with it in PHP.

You've tried your hand at building mashups, experimented with a few RESTful Web services, maybe even started your own. Sure, you've got data sharing working. But how do you make your Web applications really talk to each other? In this tutorial, I'll show you how to take your Web applications to the next level with SOAP.

They opt to go with the NuSOAP method to consume another service and create your own simple one. They include a few code examples for either side and a (very) brief look at doing some debugging with what NuSOAP has to offer. One thing to note - if you have PHP5's SOAP extension compiled in and working, NuSOAP will throw an error about redeclaring a class name. This is because of a conflict between the naming of the SOAP extension's methods and NuSOAP.

Hasin Hayder has a new post to his blog today about trying to set up the PHP extension for interaction between his scripts and the subversion version control libraries on his Ubuntu linux system.

I was trying to interact with my subversion repositories using PHP yesterday and I knew that PECL has a extension named "SVN" for PHP users. So I tried to install in in my machine by when I tried to install it with the [following] command it always failed.

The trick to his hint is to install the libsvn-dev package (found via a search with apt-get) and installed and compiled in to the PHP installation with the extension. Sample code is included.

On his blog, Michael Kimsal talks about a presentation he sat in on at this year's MySQL Conference given by Joe Stump from Digg.com:

One key thing he's repeating is using a service layer to access data asynchronously. His advice right now is to group data requests at the top of a user request, do them asynchronously, and then use the data in the rendering when it comes back.

They've published a PEAR package as an example of this asynchronous method that interfaces with Digg's API (http://services.digg.com). You can read more about the subject of his talk on the MySQL Conference website.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Vikram Vaswani has posted a tutorial that shows hos to "break the language barrier" between PHP and Microsoft's Excel to allow for the reading and writing of spreadsheet data directly from one to the other.

When it comes to playing nice with data in different formats, PHP's pedigree is hard to beat. Not only does the language make it a breeze to deal with SQL result sets and XML files, but it comes with extensions to deal with formats as diverse as Ogg/Vorbis audio files, ZIP archives and EXIF headers. So it should come as no surprise that PHP can also read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, albeit with a little help from PEAR.

After grabbing the different parts needed (the PHP-ExcelReader package and the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR package, he shows how to create a simple spreadsheet with just numeric information in it. For something a bit more interesting, he goes the other way and shows spreadsheet data as an HTML table.

Other examples included as well are things like: pushing spreadsheet data into a database, working with formulas and styling it to your liking.

On his blog today, Johnathan Street poses a question - is PHP "good enough" to be used in the scientific community?

There is an accelerating trend in Biology to make data and tools available via web interfaces. In my opinion this is an environment where PHP excels and yet all the literature I've seen discussing the development of these services uses Perl or occasionally Java.

He came across two science-related PEAR packages that were created back in 2003, but not too much since then. He wonders if there's anyone else out there that might feel like PHP is a perfect fit for some of the sort of applications the scientific community could need.

So my question is this. Is anyone out there using PHP in a scientific environment? Are there resources available which I've missed?

Akash Mehta has pointed out five "PEAR gems" that can help you get your code up and running faster - some helpful bits of code to help you deal with some common issues.

Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it’s hard to tell what you want when you don't know what's available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful.

The five that made his list are:

• Service_Akismet
• HTTP_Request
• Archive_Tar
• Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
• XML_Parser

Mike Gauthier has created a PEAR-based implementation for the popular Akismet spam filtering system that he's added to the site:

I'd like to let you know about a new PHP 5 implementation of the Akismet REST API. The package, Services_Akismet is MIT licensed and distributed through the official PEAR channel at http://pear.php.net/package/Services_Akismet.

Hopefully this will make it even easier for third-party PHP projects to use Akismet spam tools. The code is well documented and should "just work" on any PHP 5.2.1+ system.

It's currently in its alpha stage and was derived from the miPHP Akismet class written by Bret Kuhns.

The Slackware linux development group has released a new package for PHP4-using users of their distribution today:

New php-4.4.8 packages are available for Slackware 10.2 and 11.0 to fix security issues. More details about the issues may be found here: http://bugs.php.net/43010.

You can download it from their FTP sites, two versions for each of the most recent distributions: Slackware 10.2 and Slackware 11.0