I just found out a very strange PHP feature by browsing the PHP-GTK2 API with the Reflection classes : spaces can be used in some alien places, like variable names.

But the doc says you can't !

Well, try this in PHP 5.2.5, for instance:

With OSInet focusing more heavily now on Drupal services, the company is now offering internships for students interested in working on Drupal.

First things first, I've offered to mentor for the Google Summer of Code, and would be specifically interested if a student picked up the live Drupal backup project if it came to be approved.

With OSInet having a large part of its business with suppliers and customers within the EU at large, I often find myself having to check the validity of the VAT information for third parties, and the EU VIES database comes in handy.

However, although I had been discussing remote access using XML-RPC or SOAP as early at 2004 with the database administrators, the UI had remained web 1.0-only until quite recently (apparently march 2007), when an AXIS SOAP service went online, just as I had suggested three years ago. So I figured I really couldn't let the occasion pass, and did a PHP-GTK client to VIES, which happens to be my first production SOAP application in PHP-GTK, previous ones having always been done in Pascal using Delphi or Kylix.

Let's see how this can be done...

I had been in need of a class to read config data into both the PHP-GTK OSInet back-office front end, and the back-office client UI for the Drupal 5.x offload module, and hesitated between various solutions, ranging from roll-our-own to the various frameworks out there and the existing PEAR packages.

Since Zend Framework appears to be well on its way to becoming a standard for professional PHP developers, I figured I'd give it a spin :

A discussion these days on the PHP-GTK general mailing list revolved around the issue of feeding a large amount of rows to the model bound to a GtkTreeView.

The problem: while coding PHP-GTK apps, the most elementary debugging method is to use echo or print statements. These are fine and dandy for english or usonian coders, but may be a problem for coders elsewhere around the globe, since PHP scripts are typically stored under UTF-8 encoding to limit i18n headaches, while the console in which their output will be displayed is normally configured to some regional encoding, like IBM850 in Windows/XP French.

So we need a workaround...

The new Drupal-based community site for PHP-GTK is up at http://www.php-gtk.eu.

Drupal features

Technically, this is pretty much a plain Drupal 5.0 Beta 1 Beta 2 RC1 RC2 site, using the new Garland theme without custom changes besides a much needed fix, and a site-specific module for things like useful referer counting and the PHP-GTK dev geolocation service.

Zend Studio is a convenient environment to code in PHP, even though it is not currently possible to use it for integrated debugging of PHP-GTK code: its php completion and file management, and phpdoc integration make it very useful for the PHP-GTK environment too. However some settings are necessary to ease its use, due to the specific extensions typically used by PHP-GTK programs: phpw files for applications, and glade / gladep for Glade files storing UIs.

The function of the GtkCTree, GtkCList and other associated components has been overhauled in GTK2, meaning PHP-GTK now has a very thoughtfully detailed mechanism for building trees and lists, more or less following an MVC model. The attached diagram shows the relations between the set of classes involved in laying out a tree or list using GtkTreeView.

The official site for PHP-GTK is obviously a natural must for anything related to PHP-GTK 2.

However, its resource pages links indiscriminately to fresh and useful material, and to obsolete intro-level information for the now-defunct PHP-GTK 1.

Here is my selection of current useful resources for PHP-GTK 2, for the developer who already read the advertorials, installed the environment and ran the intro tutorials, and now wants to actually create with the extension.