Lorna Mitchell has started a three part series on her blog detailing the process she went through to develop a REST server in PHP.

I recently had reason to write a REST server in PHP, which was very interesting. There aren't a whole lot of resources on this topic around so I thought I'd write an outline of what I did. There is quite a lot to it so I'm publishing in multiple sections - this is part 1, which covers the central functionality and handling the incoming request.

In this first part she talks about the wrapper class she developed and includes some sample code that does the initial handling of the request (reading from php://input and passing it off to a handle() method to the taken care of).

Robert Eisele has posted on an interesting topic recently - using a PHP interface to the OpenCV library (from Intel) to detect faces in images.

The headline does say facedetection - but what does this mean? Easy said, this article focus on how to find faces on images with PHP. Faces have a certain form and so it is possible to search for it. At the end of the search you will say how many human faces are on the image or better: Where are human faces on my image. This article is not intended to be mathematically.

The OpenCV library is a pattern-detection tool that can, based on the "experience" it has trained on with sample files, do its best to find similar structures in any given image. He's come up with a wrapper that handles most of the details for you. You can define the xml file type (frontalface, lowerbody, upperbody, etc) that you want it to try to match to.

He gives some examples of the output from each on one of the sample images included in the training group as well as a random photo grab from flickr that dynamically tries to apply one of the face filters.

Kore Nordmann has posted about a PHP wrapper they've created to lay on top of CouchDB - PHPillow.

The wrapper is called PHPillow, lays on top of the Couch and offers even more comfort laying anything into the database. :) It has complete API documentation, currently a test coverage of >95%, tutorials and practical examples included. Even I would call it alpha - as CouchDB is still alpha at the current state - you can expect it stay quite stable API wise, as I rely heavily on it in other projects and therefore won't break too much.

You can check out the latest version of this wrapper from its subversion site and get more information about CouchDB on its website and wiki.

Matthew Turland has come across an "interesting bug" in PHP's stream wrappers functionality - some strange 404 or 500 HTTP errors in one of his scripts.

I wrote a small script a while back that's gained a surprising amount of popularity thanks to a plug from the site that it posts to. [...] I learned that this [connection from the script] could be done with streams, I attempted to implement it in that fashion, but ran into strange issues where I would get 404 or 500-level HTTP errors rather than the response I was expected.

He eventually found the bug related to his problem (in the 5.2.x branch) but happily notes that it has been corrected and will be patched in the upcoming 5.3 (and 6) branches.

As both the Zend Developer Zone and Ajaxian point out, there's been two new projects based on the Ext JS user interface widget system adapted for PHP - PHP-Ext and ExtPHP.

PHP-Ext is an open source widget library written for PHP 4 and 5 to empower the UI Layer. It is based on Ext JS javascript widgets which provide a standard and powerful API to build Rich Internet Applications. It basically works as a convenient wrapper for the Ext JS Javascript Objects.

And from the ExtPHP site:

I needed to be the one person who would have to wrestle JavaScript when problems happened. I therefore needed a way to insulate them from the gory details, which is why I created ExtPHP. As you may have guessed from subtle hints, such as this entry's 12-feet tall header, ExtPHP creates a PHP wrapper for ExtJS.

The Ajaxian post also includes code examples for each of them, one showing form construction and the other a tabbed interface.

While attending a code camp for Xenerix, Ivo Jansch decided to challenge himself to create a way to implement Object Constraint Language functionality in PHP objects.

To give a practical example: if you have a class 'Creditcard', you could define the constraints 'self.limit > 0' when withdrawing an amount. While the goal of the code camp was to do some nifty things with OCL and Ruby, I wanted to see if I could create a method to easily implement OCL constraints in arbitrary PHP objects.

He structures his example similar to the one provided, making CreditCard and Person classes with constraints on the person's name, withdrawing past the expire date of the card and the keeping the limit of the card above zero. He created a OCL wrapper class to handle most of the hard work, but he provides the code examples you'll need to see it in action, complete with constraints.

In response to Travis Swicegood's post about fluent APIs, Alex Netkachov has added some of his own examples to the topic from the Zend Framework and the popular Javascript library, jQuery.

In his recent post Travis Swicegood is talking about the "Fluent API". This kind of API is very popular in scripting languages and I use it during my work with Zend Framework or jQuery projects. Another good example of such technique is Document Object Model API.

His examples show the method chaining that's the hallmark of fluent interfaces. Unfortunately, there's no good way to just make an object and call a fluent interface on it in PHP, so Alex suggests a simple little wrapper (that just returns the object) to make it easier.

Michael Kimsal mentions the posting of his latest show for his podcast - WebDevRadio, episode #34:

[This show contains a] quick overview of upcoming interviews, and mentions of the projectzero webdev project from IBM, Sheeri Kritzer's OurSQL podcast, my upcoming SOLR presentation @ OSCON, and a bit more.

Also included in this show is a look at a PHP4->PHP5 XML wrapper that looks to take care of some of the transition of XML functionality when making the move between PHP4 and PHP5.

You can grab this latest show here or subscribe to the feed and get more shows, both past and future.

Jonathan Street has officially released his version of a Complete API (for Complete.com) to grab traffic information for a particular site.

With the exception of a link from the homepage, which is apparently in the works, Compete has made good on the points I raised so it's time for me to fulfil my part of the deal and release a PHP5 wrapper for the compete API.

The wrapper is simple at this point, only containing only a few methods to make the connection with Complete.com, generate the query and pull out one of three bits of information (including the traffic).

On his blog, Michael Kimsal points out a PHP4 to PHP5 XML wrapper he dig up over on this site:

I know I've looked for this sort of thing before, and I'm not sure why I didn't find it earlier, but it's just made a tedious task take about 2 minutes. Thanks guys! While I'm sure it's not perfect, it seems to be working well enough for what I needed it to do - basically read data from an XML file in to an array structure. Doesn't simplexml do that already?

The script provides a lot of the functions that PHP5 has to offer in a handy-dandy library to make working with XML in PHP4 a little easier.