Cowburn

Introduction

In this article, I'll be talking about a useful new feature introduced in PHP5 as part of the OOP improvements over PHP4. This feature is called Method Chaining and enables us to do pretty cool things like:

$object->method_a()->method_b()->method_c();

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Hi folks,

We all use printf (or sprintf) to help ourselves when mingling together output strings with our variables, right? This is a tip that I use often, but I continually see people writing code where this technique would be useful but isn't used. What _am_ I on about? Read the rest of this entry »

I've been wanting to sink my teeth into something juicy for a while now. Since I have been working heavily with various web APIs recently (Yahoo Web Services, Google APIs, etc) I figured that it was about time I got with the spirit of open data access.

Now, I like to dip my feet in gently to new projects so am going to be working with something small (just a few methods) in PHP (why not?) by creating yet another URL shortening website. I'm not expecting it to be a success more just something that I can say, "well, I made this." Where does the API fit into this? Well, the site itself will be running off of a REST-based API that I will create and will allow anyone else to access the same resources (to make their own url shortener?) through simple REST requests and responses.

I'll get into details in later posts probably, this really is just a "hey, I'm doing this" style of post. Before that, I might give some quick and easy examples of consuming popular web services (with PHP), just to get the ball rolling.