The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new tutorial today (from Richard Bates) about creating PDF forms from inside a Flex application with a little help from PHP.

Leveraging the power of PHP and a PDF generation library called dompdf, you can create a simple, seamless user experience in Adobe Flex. Flex enables you to create an outstanding presentation to the end-user, with instant validation of user-supplied data and the full power of ActionScript 3. Through AMFPHP, you'll gain access to PHP's full toolset, enabling virtually limitless applications.

They show how to install the needed packages - AMFPHP and the dompdf PHP package to make the PDF generation easy ("one of the best PDF tools for PHP you can get"). The rest is the creation of the Flex part of the application - generating the form and using PHP to push out a PDF file at the other end, complete with their data.

Rudy Nappee has just finished what he calls the hardest week in his Google Summer of Code project - work on the PDF output methods:

Here was the hardest GSoC week ! I wrote a big part of the PDF output and both the themes "phppdf" (each PHP manual part in a file) and "phpbigpdf" (a big PDF file with all the sections).

Rudy's project for the GSoC is to create a Docbook renderer that can take in a standard Docbook file and output it into multiple formats. This past week saw the development of the PDF output method but he's also created methods for making a CHM (Windows help file) and a manpage output format. You can keep up with his latest progress on his blog.

Padraic Brady has posted a new entry in his series on developing blogging software with the Zend Framework today. It's no new content, but it is a contained version of a previous part (part 9) marked up in Docbook and pushed out into a PDF.

After my playtime with Docbook and PDF generation, I decided to make a sample PDF of the current Part 9 of the tutorial series. Your comments as to layout, style, portability and other facets that make a PDF worth downloading are very welcome. Eventually the whole series will be available in this format as well as HTML.

He's using Docbook 5, Docbook XSL and Apache FOP to generate the files. Syntax highlighting is done through Phing.

Eirik Hoem recently pointed out two libraries that can be used in PHP to generate PDF files dynamically - FPDF and FPDI.

Ever wanted to generated PDF documents on the fly with PHP? Perhaps populate a standard contract with a customers name and address? FPDF and FPDI are two neat libraries which greatly helps when working with PDF files.

FPDF handles most of the work of creating and working with the PDF files while FPDI works together with it to pull in existing PDF files so FPDF can modify them. He links to some sample code you can try out once you've installed the two libraries.

php|architect has announced the release of a new book - the Guide to Programming Magento, now up for preorder:

We're happy to announce the upcoming release of php|architect's Guide to Programming Magento, the first comprehensive guide for developers who want to learn more about the Magento e-commerce platform.

The book, by Mark Kimsal shows you how to install and successfully deploy a Magento installation on your website. The preorder is available right now for a 15% discount and the full PDF version will be released on May 15th, 2008 (print on May 31st). Check out the product page for more information and to reserve your copy today.

The PHP London Conference group has posted three more mp3s of presentations given at this year's conference - one from Scott MacVicar, another from Zoe Slattery and the last from Anthony Phillips:

• Scott MacVicar talking about Sqlite3, explaining what it is and how it's best applied with PHP. [mp3] [pdf]
• Zoe Slattery talking about testing PHP itself and how you can write tests to help improve PHP in the future. [mp3] [pdf]
• Anthony Phillips talking about IBM's Project Zero, how it can give your existing code a new lease of life in a REST context amongst other subjects. [mp3] [pdf]

Check out the conference's site for other great speakers and their sessions (with mp3s and pdfs).

On the Developer Tutorials website, they're posted this new article talking about a simple way to create PDFs with PHP:

[PDFs] also serve as a perfect way of allowing your users to download or email a page from your website. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to generate PDF files in pure PHP and distribute your content in a single, consistent format.

They look at the why behind creating PDFs in PHP, what options you have and an example creating a basic "hello world" PDF.

Raphael Stolt, in working on his component for the Zend Framework (based on the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package), pulled together all of the information Zend provides about their coding standards into one place.

Before jumping into the development of a Zend Framework coding standard for the PHP_CodeSniffer Pear package, I spent some time revisiting and compiling the available Zend Framework coding standards into a handy one-paged Pdf document.

You can download the file here or, if you want something a bit more "spread out", check out the coding standards on the Zend Framework website.

As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new post on kapustabrothers.com about a method for indexing all of those PDF files your site uses with the help of the Zend Framework's Zend_Search_Lucene component.

along with many others have been trying and asking how to index and search PDF files. Once Zend released its Framework, which is a port of Java Lucene to PHP, I decided to jump on board and find a way to index and search PDF files.

He uses the XPDF software to parse out the PDF files and the ZF component to do the actual indexing and searching. XPDF extracts key information from the PDF and puts it out to a new file where Zend_Search_Lucene can get to it. Example code is included to show the automatic creation of these details and how to add them to the component's index.