A new tutorial over on the IBM developerWorks site (from Vikram Vaswani) shows how to pull data from the Google Notebook service into your script via the service's REST API.

Google Notebook is a free service that allows users to save and share notes and Web clippings in an online journal. A REST-based API allows developers to build customized PHP applications around this service using SimpleXML. In this article, you learn how to use the API, with examples of reading notebooks and notebook contents using PHP.

His method grabs the contents of the REST request and drops them into a SimpleXML object for easy manipulation. Different kinds of requests are included - getting the list of notebooks, getting the notebook's contents and how to add on extra parameters to the REST call to get more information in the responses.

On the C7Y website, a new tutorial has been posted from Nate Abele (following his previous CakePHP-related article) covering the use of the framework to create a REST web service and manage resources inside of it.

We're going to take these concepts [from the previous article] further and add a new one: REST. In the course of this series so far, we've only been discussing how to use the Router to examine and act on different parts of a URL.

He gives a list of possible headers that could come from a client (like Accept-Charset or Content-Type) and how these can be directly pulled in to the CakePHP routing system. A few extra bits of code later and your app can be mapping requests directly to the controllers for the actions the user's requesting. All that's left is to serialize the results back into XML to echo out.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new article/tutorial showing how to keep things in sync on your Drupal installation with the help of Adobe AIR.

Whether you're an enterprise developer working in a large shop or setting up a blog for yourself, you've almost certainly been tasked with keeping your development code in sync with some type of stable release. Whether a project is big or small, you still need to ensure that the core code you work with remains consistent.

The tutorial walks you through the setup of a basic AIR application, how to pull the configuration XML into it and parsing it to use in the interface. The next step is the sync, grabbing your config and pushing it out to other multiple configs across your sites (via a REST service).

Korynn Bohn has posted a new tutorial/article on the Zend Developer Zone website that talks about (and advocates for) web services.

Web services are the coolest technology I know of that ends up turning everyone off. I don't know about you, but when I go to a lecture on Web services, invariably tons of acronyms come out [...] and then I start to nod off and dream about a land where free Krispy Kreme donuts grow on trees.

He reframes the web services world away from the acronyms and strict standards to more towards using it as a method of communication between apps, letting them engage in some friendly conversation. He uses the rest of the tutorial showing how to create an RSS reader of sorts using dashes of PEAR, XML, C#, XSLT, Ajax and Flex.

Ben Ramsey has recently blogged about some of the research and bit of development that he's done to add "more correct" functionality to the Zend Framework for working with RESTful interfaces - proper PUT and DELETE support.

I've recently been wrapped up in an effort to design and implement a RESTful API using the Atom Protocol for a project at work. We are using the Zend Framework as the underlying framework for the project, so, in order to follow the Atom Protocol, I needed to support the HTTP methods PUT and DELETE

Since the Zend Framework has been playing such a prominent role in the development, he's been digging into the Zend_Rest_Server component code and isn't too happy about its support for PUT and DELETE. As a result, he's proposed methods that might help resolve things such as isGet, isDelete, isOptions and getEntityBody. He' even created a patch to make the needed changes.

Andrew Johnstone has a new post today with a look at a project he'd worked on - an implementation of a web service with the Zend Framework functionality.

I was recently working on a project to expose our trading systems via XmlRpc, Rest and SOAP. It was quite an interesting project, which took two of us three weeks to develop (Amongst other things).

He talks about some of the issues they worked through (like the ZF's "not quite ready" in the web services department) and problems they found with how the web services functionality was implemented in the framework's components. They also came across two strange bugs - one with accepting raw input and the other with a wrong return type from a method call.

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.

Hasin Hayder had been working with the Facebook API and stumbled across a bug in an application they had created for the social networking site:

The method which we used to count number of friends of a specific user who has added that application was returning 1 when there is no friend actually installed it.

He gives the SQL query and the PHP code he was originally using to find out the number of users for the application. The problem came from the fact that the returning value wasn't an array - it was a string. The corrected code (that checks for array-ness) is also included.