There comes a time in a developers life (well, okay, some of them) when they'll need to get one machine to talk to another in a quick and easy way. There's lots of options for this, but in this new tutorial, they'll focus on one - a combination of OpenJMS, XFire, and PHP.

recently got involved in a project where reliable communication between etherogenous platforms was required. Having already worked with JMS, I had to find a way to expose its services to the frontend(a PHP base web application). Some time before I had come across XFire, and had been looking for a chance to work on it.

This was that chance. I know SOAP can sometimes be cumbersome, but XFire really makes its use easy, and PHP well supports it( we'll use the nusoap library). In this article I'll make an introduction on how to easily merge together OpenJMS,XFire and PHP to get a generic, immediately usable messaging system. If someone will be interested in it, further articles will follow on this topic.

He introduces the technology, explaining what they are and the role they'll play. From there, it's straight into the code - first looking at the "functionalities wrapper" on the OpenJMS site, then how to expose this OpenJMS services with XFire (implementing a SOAP interface). Finally, the last piece of the puzzle - the PHP - comes into play with a simple set of calls surrounding the NuSOAP library to grab the data.

From the Experts Round Table, there's this extended reference with an overview of HTTP headers (format and what raw HTTP connections look like) and what that means for PHP's header() function.

Many beginning and intermediate PHP programmers seem to think the header() function is some kind of strange voodoo. They work from examples and code snippets and are able to get things done with it, but they don't know quite how it works. That was certainly the way I regarded header() the first time I saw it.

In reality, it's quite simple. In this tutorial, I'll explain a little about how HTTP headers work, how they relate to PHP, and a little about their meta tag equivalents.

They go on to talk about what the HTTP protocol/headers are and how to "see the whole conversation" by telneting into a server on port 80. They explain what role the headers play in this. The rest of the tutorial goes into detail on PHP's header function. They mention redirection, refreshing the page after a few seconds, preventing page caching, and sending along the Content-type header to correctly identify the contents of your page (including things like dynamic images).

They also include (too) brief section covering the fact that some of the $_SERVER variables influenced by the HTTP headers should not be trusted. They specifically mention HTTP_REFERER.

Drew McLellan has created a set of scripts (a toolkit) to deal specifically with microformats inside of PHP - hKit.

On returning from a very successful @media conference at the weekend, I had the urge to get hacking on some code. In an enviroment such as that created by a tech conference, where you're surrounded by many like-minded individuals who are passionate about the same things you're passionate about, it's hard not to get the bug and be compelled into action.

It quickly became apparent that what should've been a couple of hours coding was going to take me quite a while, because I had no toolkits to back me up. I poked around looking at stuff that's already out there, including Microformats Base, but I couldn't find anything that fitted the model I was after.

He mentions what he was looking for (a simple interface, generic to support multiple formats as packaged in a plugin layer). Unfortunately, he didn't find anything, but fortunately, he created one, hKit.

The package uses SimpleXML and a system of profiles held in the packages for each different format. He mentiontions some of the things that are yet to be done on the toolkit, but he wanted to "post early and post often" to get it out there. As of this post, it's currently in version 0.3.

Plugins can be one of the most useful parts of your application, if developed correctly. Felix Geisendörfer has posted some of his opinions on what this way might be and a basic model to get started with - specifically related to building them inside a CakePHP project.

I think a lot of people, including me, are trying to create modularized websites where they can simply drop in a new folder and new functionality will start to appear on the site. The system I'm working on right now is called SpliceIt! and I've decided to use plugins as those modules. In this post I'll explain what plugins are for, how they are implemented in CakePHP and what I did to make them work according to my ideas ; ).

He talks about what plugins are and how you can create one in the framework (location, model, view, etc). They also give brief examples of what the controller and model would look like for a simple plugin. They touch on how to use this plugin code and provide some useful tips for common issues and getting everything working smoothly.

• fixed issue where phplist user would be deleted if a version was deleted (reported by Brendan)
• added script to import eZ users into phplist

• fixed issue where phplist user would be deleted if a version was deleted (reported by Brendan)
• added script to import eZ users into phplist

From the Limitless Studios website, there's a new tutorial for those frustrated by the other "who's online" tutorials that require a database. Their example doesn't, opting instead to handle the process with PHP's sessions.

Most web developers will usually like to determine the number of online users currently browsing their web site. Most tutorials will teach you how to do just that using a database of some sort because it is easy to implant. Using a database though can be a bit slow at times, especially if your web site gets a lot of hits. In this tutorial, we will teach you an alternative and effective way to determine the number of online users WITHOUT using a database.

They note the overhead that using a database can cause, and look instead to something PHP works with natively - sessions. Their code is contained inside of a function, checking the session path PHP uses for session files that haven't expired yet.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's this quick look at a post from the Zend Forums about grabbing DB2 data from inside of i5/OS.

Every now and then you find a gem stuffed way back in the back of the forums. I came across this one and since it solves a problem that I've seen asked more than once I thought I'd post it here for all to see. This was original posted by Mike Smith of IBM. Many thanks to Mike for this informative post.

For those of you who read the entire thread, I do have confirmation from IBM that the problem pointed out near the bottom of the thread is fixed in the latest beta.

The reminder of the post gives the functions and two code examples to help you pull the information (in this case names and catalog information) from the DB2 instance.