The wkhtmltopdf tool, which converts HTML markup to a PDF document, is quite powerful compared to most other solutions that I have come across. It uses the WebKit rendering engine, which powers many Mac OS X applications such as Safari – and previously Google Chrome. This article shows you how to make the Google Visualization API work with the wkhtmltopdf tool.
Sometimes one has several variables that are related – typically in a class – and one wants to document them with PHPDoc. Defining the same type and perhaps description for each of these variables or constants can be tedious and result in a lot of redundant documentation. Luckily, PHPDoc provides a way of documenting multiple… read more
Sometimes one needs to use internationalization features in PHP. It might be that a library that you are using depends upon the PHP intl extension – for instance, some validators in Zend Framework 2 do so. This article will show you how to install the things you need by hand. It has been tested on… read more
Autoloading third party libraries in PHP has become much less of a pain since the introduction of Composer. In this article we will see how this can be done for libraries that do not comply with the PSR-0 autoloading specification.
With the release of PHP 5.5, so-called generator functions are now available. Generators can among others be used to decrease the memory usage of your web server. This article gives you an overview of the generators in PHP 5.5.
The binary search algorithm is an important algorithm in computer science. It solves the problem of searching large data sets efficiently. Luckily, the algorithm is quite simple to implement. This article shows two implementations of the algorithm in PHP and discusses the efficiency of them.
Manipulating DOM documents with PHP is difficult without the use of libraries or extensions. This article discusses the various options that are available and focuses on the phpQuery project, which is a PHP port of the popular jQuery JavaScript library.
Making multiple concurrent AJAX requests to a PHP script, for example, may have left you wondering why the requests are not executed in parallel as expected. Rather, the requests are blocking each other. Chances are that this is caused by using sessions within the PHP script.
Using transactions in databases is often necessary and useful. If several database operations depend on each other, then it was both easier and prettier to make use of transactions. This article shows how the Zend\Db makes database transactions easy to use.
Performing case insensitive searches for things such as attribute values can be quite a pain with XPath. There is a well known workaround available, but it is not so pretty and clean like one would hope for. PHP developers are also limited by the fact that PHP does not implement XPath 2.0. This article shows an additional approach that helps keep XPath queries simpler.