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Something really interesting has just been released on CodePlex: PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library. The code you have to use in your scripts is clean and easy, providing a full-featured PHP backend to the Microsoft AJAX Library.

Thanks to Sam Cooper’s testing, some scalability issues came up in my SpreadSheet classes. Seems PHP has some odd internal quirks, which cause performance loss that can be severe on large amounts of data. These strange things are probably caused by PHP because it uses multiple C functions in order to perform something a single C function can handle. Here’s an example I discovered in my own code:

After a month of development, I think it’s time for a status update on my PHP Excel2007 classes. 16 december 2007, I started working on these classes as a test to check how hard it could be to create Excel2007 files using PHP5. The story about Excel2007 and PHP, got picked up by a few websites, and it seems my set of classes has been downloaded quite a number of times. This made me continue developing the basic “Hello World” example, to a set of classes which can produce Excel files like this one:

Checkout Emmanuel Nuyttens’ article on DataBindable Business Objects. It’s an interesting article, focussing on the other side of data binding that I wrote an article on myself for .NET magazine. “There has been, and still is a lot of discussion going around of what kind of technique a developer in general should use to represent the data from the DataLayer through the BusinessLayer to the Presentation Layer.

The new .NET magazine Belgium/Netherlands has been distributed to all subscribers. For the latest edition, #15, I’ve written an article on the basic principles and usage of NHibernate, an ORM-mapper for the .NET platform. It’s written in Dutch, so I must disappoint my English blog readers… A PDF version and example code can be downloaded on the .NET magazine #15 homepage. Comments can be posted on this blog post.

In my evening hours, I’ve been working on a set of PHP classes to create Offixe 2007 SpreasheetML documents (.xlsx files). I finished my first goals (some basic XLSX writing), and I want to share this set of classes to the community. Currently, the following features are supported: Each cell supports the following data formats: string, number, formula, boolean. Visual formatting is not implemented, but I’ll get to that later. An example of what can be achieved, can be found in this example XLSX file.

Today, I was once again testing the Zed Framework. One of the things I was trying to do, is creating URL’s in different languages. What I did was creating a controller ‘user’, with the action ‘edit’ (i.e. www.example.com/user/edit). Now, I want this to be available in Dutch too (i.e. www.example.com/gebruiker/bewerken). The trick is to add custom routes, which map back to the real controller and action. In my case, adding the following in my index.php did the job:

One of my former classmates, Bart Dekeersmaeker, has just created his own blog. He will be posting news from Chennai, India, where he currently resides for work. He is outsourced to KBC, and they asked him to go to India. Good luck on your mission, Bart!

A nice press release today at Microsoft: Microsoft and Zend Technologies Announce Technical Collaboration to Improve Interoperability of PHP on the Windows Server Platform. Both companies admit that PHP is often developed on Windows systems, but the final server environment is mostly *nix. With this collaboration, Microsoft and Zend will try to change that. The specific points of action in this collaboration: I think this is nice news! Looking forward to results of this collaboration…

Today, I discovered a nice PHP thing: Munin. This is a PHP version of Apache mod_security, allowing it to be run on IIS too. Munin performs rule based checks on HTTP headers, get and post data, … The standard rule set disallows some things like path traversal and possible fopen() attacks. In addition to these rulesets, one should add some more for filtering out SQL injection attacks, cross-site script loading, … These things should already be covered in your code, but an extra filter at the front door is always nice.