On the TutsPlus.com site there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to create custom drivers in a CodeIgniter application. In this case the "drivers" are what lefts the application work with external technology or services.

The best way to understand the concept of drivers is to look at how caching is implemented in the core CodeIgniter framework. The main Cache class acts as a parent class and extends the CI_Driver_Library class. On the other hand, you'll end up finding child classes for APC, Memcached, Redis and the like, implemented as pluggable adapters. The child classes extend the CI_Driver class instead of the main driver class.

[...] Creating a custom driver in the CodeIgniter application is the aim of today's article. In the course of that, we'll go through a real-world example that creates a MediaRenderer driver used to render the media from different services like YouTube, Vimeo and similar. The different services will be implemented in the form of adapter classes.

He starts by listing the files that he'll be creating along the way and where they need to be located in the application structure. He then starts in on the configuration changes required and the contents of the files. He then walks through the code for each of them briefly explaining how they work. He starts with the drivers then moves to the adapters and, finally, how to put them together to make a functional renderer for either Vimeo our Youtube videos.

New on her blog Elizabeth Smith talks about tree views and rendering in a PHP-GTK application (with sample code included).

I get this question a lot - "How do I change the background color of a single cell in a treeview?" If you look around you'll see a couple of ways of doing this using display callbacks and other highly processor and memory intensive methods - but there’s a much simpler way.

She explains how the tree views are rendered (with the GtkTreeView component, of course) via a "cell renderer" with different variations based on the contents of the cell - each with their own properties. Her example code illustrates how to manipulate this by making the tree object and attaching other columns to it with custom background properties. A quick screencast is included to show it in action.

Hannes Magnusson has bloccked about the latest release of their application, PhD (the [PH]P based [D]ocbook renderer) that builds up documentation, like that for the PHP manual.

Quick note; We released PhD0.1RC1 today o/ Building the php.net documentations has never been as easy or as fast. [...] It takes less than 2 minutes (on my two years old Precision M70 laptop) to render the entire php.net documentations in three formats.

He includes instructions on fetching the packages needed/documents to compile, modify the configuration files and installing and rendering the php.net documentation. They've also set up a special mirror of the PHP documentation with experimental builds of the docs.

Hannes Magnusson has bloccked about the latest release of their application, PhD (the [PH]P based [D]ocbook renderer) that builds up documentation, like that for the PHP manual.

Quick note; We released PhD0.1RC1 today o/ Building the php.net documentations has never been as easy or as fast. [...] It takes less than 2 minutes (on my two years old Precision M70 laptop) to render the entire php.net documentations in three formats.

He includes instructions on fetching the packages needed/documents to compile, modify the configuration files and installing and rendering the php.net documentation. They've also set up a special mirror of the PHP documentation with experimental builds of the docs.

In an incredible example of PHP's flexibility, there's this example of what it can do with the properly applied knowledge (and a little patience) - the creation of a 3D raytracer.

I mentioned recently that I was looking for an interesting PHP project. This evening I remembered an idea I had a while ago to make a 3D renderer in PHP (and if anyone's tempted to ask - "because I can" ). I did a bit of reading on old 3D engines, as I didn't want something modern and slow, and found out that the "raycaster" rendering used in Wolfenstein 3D is ridiculously easy to implement.

A few hours later and it's up and running I've not run any proper speed tests yet, but the images load up pretty much instantaneously. I have a couple of ideas of what this could be used for, so watch this space.

Screenshots are included in the post as well as tons of comments from all about the web (it was also linked on digg). He hasn't released the source for it yet, but it'll still be an interesting project to keep an eye on. In the meantime, there's always Kore Nordmann's Image_3D project to look into.

In an incredible example of PHP's flexibility, there's this example of what it can do with the properly applied knowledge (and a little patience) - the creation of a 3D raytracer.

I mentioned recently that I was looking for an interesting PHP project. This evening I remembered an idea I had a while ago to make a 3D renderer in PHP (and if anyone's tempted to ask - "because I can" ). I did a bit of reading on old 3D engines, as I didn't want something modern and slow, and found out that the "raycaster" rendering used in Wolfenstein 3D is ridiculously easy to implement.

A few hours later and it's up and running I've not run any proper speed tests yet, but the images load up pretty much instantaneously. I have a couple of ideas of what this could be used for, so watch this space.

Screenshots are included in the post as well as tons of comments from all about the web (it was also linked on digg). He hasn't released the source for it yet, but it'll still be an interesting project to keep an eye on. In the meantime, there's always Kore Nordmann's Image_3D project to look into.