Tag: General

I was tagged by Joris and Kristof, so I guess it’s about time I give away some secrets about myself. Did you know that… I’m tagging:

Just for the record: my PHP Excel classes have been released on CodePlex under a GPL license, and will be further released over there. The full URL: www.codeplex.com/PHPExcel.

No posts last week: I was on a ski vacation to Pitztal, Austria. Found a cheap (and good!) hotel over there, Pension Haid, which offered me breakfast and dinner for 36 EUR per night. I’ve been skiing on Rifflsee and the Pitztaler Gletscher, which offers great slopes (and also good weather conditions last week). Après-ski was offered by Siglu, which offered great Kaiser Pilsner! Back to reality (and work) now, problem with all vacations is: they are too short!

In my article on NHibernate, I mentioned MyGeneration, a tool which creates database classes / ORM classes from your database tables. Since MyGeneration uses templates to generate classes, and PHP is underrepresented, I decided to create a PHP Zend_Db_Table template, which creates the necessary Zend_Db_Table overloads for every table in your application built using the Zend Framework. Downloads and updates can be found on the MyGeneration template library: http://www.mygenerationsoftware.com/TemplateLibrary/Template/?id=be41c1ec-07e2-489c-ab6e-13f42f07adda

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.