There are quite a few good screen scraping libraries available for PHP apps so that you can pull and parse a page, search for specific elements, enter data into and post forms et cetera, but if you just need to do a bit of screen-scraping work and you don’t need an entire library (or don’t want the additional overhead of another file to load), PHP has a few handy tricks up its sleeve to make this really easy.
There are very few times when you get to test out a genuinely exciting product - something that is revered and well known across a community and is hugely anticipated. I’m lucky enough to be able to test out the latest version of Brandon Kelly’s infamous Playa, which yesterday hit version 3. This update, among other things, introduces ExpressionEngine 2 support, a snazzy new interface and loads of bug fixes. I’ve been testing it out for a few days, and here’s my review.
One of the additions that I’m most excited about to the in-development CodeIgniter 2.0 codebase is the addition of code packages, and the power to then load those packages inside your application. This opens so many doors to developers, because, finally, we can bundle repeated functionality inside a package and distribute it as open-source or free code. Even if you don’t want to expose your own packages, you can re-use them internally, which makes for a veritable mix of both writing application specific code, and abstracting elements of those applications out (such as an authentication engine, for instance) to become re-usable and unspecific. With documentation for 2.0 still patchy, I thought I’d go through exactly how to use packages and what benefits they provide.
I’ve been doing a lot of Rails development recently as part of my new job (our whole infrastructure is built on Rails, you see), and have been practicing Test-driven Development religiously. As part of this, I’ve been developing an API that returns more than one response format, and I was looking to find out how to test if the correct response type is being returned.
With the announcement that CodeIgniter 2 is now under public development over at BitBucket, lots of developers have been moving their open source projects over to Mercurial, and thus BitBucket. With such a big change that is starting to be reflected across the community, I propose we create a globally used convention for naming BitBucket Repositories (or GitHub, for that matter) that contain CodeIgniter-based libraries or projects.
Jamie on Software is the personal blog of 15 year old entrepreneur, developer, speaker and musician Jamie Rumbelow.
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