Maarten Balliauw has made a new blog post today about a method he's using to help reuse some of the business logic that Excel spreadsheets can have in a PHP script with help from PHPExcel.

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to automate parts of their everyday job using Excel. [...] Did you know you can use PHPExcel to take advantage of the Excel-based business logic without having to worry about duplicate business logic?

He creates a quick example of a script that can take in an Excal file and pull it into a PHPExcel object, ready for manipulation. He fills in values for the already defined fields (like "carColor" or "leatherSeats") and uses the getCalculatedValue method to perform the action on the cell. The output is dropped into a variable that can be echoed out or used later on in the PHP script.

The Developer Tutorials blog has an interesting perspective on the whole framework front today - use whatever framework you choose, but be sure to "add a little Zend" when you need it.

The Zend Framework is a fairly standard, (optionally) MVC PHP application framework. It comes with all the usual functionality; request routing, database access, templates (through view files) etc. [...] But here's the kicker: it works entirely standalone. The classes and their methods can, generally, be used statically in any context, or at least independently of the framework.

They point out that the components of the Zend Framework, while able to happily live in their self-contained MVC bubble, can also break "out of the box" and live their own happy, separate lives. He even points out another blog entry looking at using the Zend Framework right along side CodeIgniter in a web application.

Nick Halsted has posted the first two in a series of programming tips, not necessarily specific to PHP, but still very useful.

Over the years I have built up what I call my 'programming wisdom' this is what has replaced my early years of supposed 'raw talent'. [...] So I thought to myself what have I learnt that I can put across that will be useful to my fellow programmers who have not made all the mistakes I have. I plan on writing a long series of programming tips over the coming weeks (disturbed only by solicitors, investors and other scary programming time eating monsters).

The first two of the series are:

• Don't Repeat Yourself - make reusable code to save you time in the long run.
• Test, test, test - finding bugs in software before it's too late.

In this new blog post, Stoyan Stefanov shares a method he's found to reuse an existing database connection with the MDB2 library.

This is a follow up to a question posted by Sam in my DB-2-MDB2 post. The question was if you can reuse an exisitng database connection you've already established and not have MDB2 creating a second connection.

He gives two different methods, one for persistent connections and the other for non-persistent ones - including some code.