As we countdown to the public beta release, I want to keep you informed of some exciting functionality that’s being added.

Functionality

Along with the JSON controller, a new XML controller has been added. This allows you to return nearly anything from an action and it will automatically convert it to XML, send the proper content-type header and provide the data to the client. Here is an example of how it would work:

<?php
 
class MyController extends \Fever\Controller\Action\AbstractXml
{
    public function getTestData()
    {
        return array
            (
            'name' => 'Will Fitch',
            'attributes' =>
                array(
                'height' => 76,
                'hair' => 'brown',
                'eyes' => 'brown'
                )
            );
    }
}

This will, in turn, produce the following XML document to the client:

<results>
    <name>Will Fitch</name>
    <attributes>
        <height>76</height>
        <hair>brown</hair>
        <eyes>brown</eyes>
    </attributes>
</results>

Now I’m sure there are those out there that are screaming, “But I want to customize the name of the elements!!!”. No problem! There is a method withing the AbstractXml controller called “setXmlElement” which accepts an instance of SimpleXMLElement. This will be used when converting data provided into XML.

This is all thanks to a new component called “XmlConverter” which lives in the \Fever\IO\Xml namespace. It follows the chain-of-command pattern and iterates until it finds the correct data type provided. Here are a list of converters available for iteration:

• ArrayToXml
• BooleanToXml
• NullToXml
• NumberToXml
• ObjectToXml
• StringToXml

All of these are separate entities, so they can be used independently.

I’ll continue to update throughout the upcoming days before the public beta!

Presenter Bios

Travis Black, Developer, Centre{source}
Travis Black is a software developer currently employed centre{source} interactive strategies. He has been developing web applications in php since 2004. After some experience developing in Ruby, using both the Rails and Merb frameworks, he spent a good deal of time attempting to find a php alternative. In the end, he found symfony, and fell in love. Travis and symfony were married last year and have lived together happily ever since.

Brent Shaffer, Developer, Centre{source}
Brent Shaffer is a symfony developer and architect at centre{source} interactive strategies. He graduated from Belmont University in 2008 with a degree in Commercial Music Technology and a minor in Computer Science. He has experience with the .NET framework, but has seen the light, and has been a symfony zealot ever since. He has also done some other cool stuff.

The meeting location will be announced next week once I work out the sponsorship details.

This fix adds two additional children:

1. currentMilitaryTime – The 24 hour time format
2. currentMeridiemTime – The 12 hour time format with AM or PM

I have left the currentTime element for backwards compatibility. I do plan on removing it when I release the new zip code web service some time this month.

This is caused an uproar in the community and I’m personally not a fan of it. At the same time (and after many weeks of debating), I have decided to support this effort. While I’m not a fan of its implementation, I’m still pleased that namespace functionality is being implemented into PHP.

Your thoughts?

In conjunction with namespaces, this release includes some new features including NOWDOCS – The single quote equivalent of HEREDOCS, Lambda functions and closures, optional cyclic garbage collection, limited GOTO (uh oh) statements and more.

It is important to note that this is an alpha release, so production use is discouraged.

I plan on downloading and playing with this new release, and I will show my results later.

For more information on this list, check out http://www.php.net/archive/2008.php#id2008-08-01-1

1. Web / Mail Server
   • Dual-core Xeon 2 GHz
   • 8GB of RAM
   • RHEL 5 64-bit
2. Database Server
   • Dual-core Xeon 2 GHz
   • 2GB of RAM (I know, it will eventually get upgraded)
   • RHEL 5 64-bit

This is especially important to me so I can increase my web services. Free data is always better than free software!