Just got a mail (by Thomas Nicolai) that the University of St.Gallen are launching their research platform "Alexandria" today.

While it doesn't look spectacular at first glance, from the inside there's supposed to be some sweet pieces: They use the inofficial MySQL5 XPath support and query Wikipedia through some secret web services interface! The PHP sources are to be published under the LGPL. Now that sounds sweet.

Update: The WS interface to Mediawiki is not a secret, but it ain't active in Wikipedia. Nicolai just adapted it to PHP5 and runs his queries against a local mirror. He will tell about the experiences in this project in an upcoming PHPUG Meeting.

URIQA, the Nokia URI Query Agent is a model for knowledge discovery, they call it a "Semantic Web Enabler". It is based on introducing a set of new HTTP methods (like MGET) for not accessing a resource, but a "Concise Bounded Resource Description" about that resource.
Looks like a reasonable (although disputable) solution to the problem, there are advantages over special HTTP headers, URI suffixes and other approaches which are explained on the URIQA website. Special headers could just be ignored by a server, and usually they are. But if you introduce new HTTP verbs, servers will not know them and should return an error. Apache does, so all seems ok.

Enters PHP. As people wanted to use PHP to, for example, implement WebDAV, they patched their SAPI and pass all HTTP methods to the script requested.
Means you don't have to apply funny workarounds any more, but also means that agents/clients can not rely on the result of queries with those new methods: PHP scripts will return their usual output, not caring about whether you GET, MGET or SHOWMETHATSHIT them:

hg@hg2:~$ telnet gassert.ch 80
Trying 213.3.6.224...
Connected to 224.6.3.213.fix.bluewin.ch.
Escape character is '^]'.
MGET /showmethod.php HTTP/1.1
Host: gassert.ch

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 20:05:44 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) PHP/5.0.3RC2-dev mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.3RC2-dev
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html


It's Wednesday 12th of January 2005 09:05:50 PM
Your request method was MGET

As you can't tell if your request is handled by a PHP script (mod_rewrite et cetera), this does look like a bit of a problem for URIQA, because PHP (+ Apache 1.3.x) is all over the place indeed. Doesn't it? Does PHP kill this nice idea of this Semantic Web Enabler?

It's just my second day here at the Semantic Web Cluster, so I might very well just misunderstand the concept and there's no problem at all for anybody?

Zak Greant, the well-known MySQL advocate and co-founder of the PHP QA team has joined the Sxip team in the role of an "evangelist", pretty similar to his prior job as MySQL's "Community Advocate".
Very probably another clever step by Dick Hardt (whom I met at the FOAF workshop in Galway) and his team - and the really promising idea of sxip.

This just came in:

> From: Michael Wechner
> To: general@oscom.org
> Subject: [OSCOM] JSR-170 and PHP
> Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 19:01:25 +0200
>
> It seems that the Typo 3 community is adapting the JSR-170
>
> http://typo3.org/documentation/mailing-lists/dev-list-archive/thread/60148/
>
> which is cool :-)

Cool, really cool! (At least it sounds so ;))


Edit: There's some more information (the thing is going to be OSS), but the really interesting bits can't be told... NDA... See yourself

See that book cover? See my name? Ha! ;-)
My first one... doesn't actually look beautiful, but it is our baby still - Ain't it sweet? :)

I already told you what it's all about, and they should even be done with printing by now.
If you want one, you can get it at Amazon, from the publishing house or come to Zürich and win one!!
Would be really nice to see you at "the battle"

I have no idea how this post made twice to planet-php.. I have to guess it's this tool's fault..

"How can I use existing PDF documents as templates in PHP scripts?" is an FAQ. Apart from primitive and risky (I guess) string replacement, I haven't heard of any reasonable approach until Oliver of FPDF announced FPDI today. FPDI is an extension for FPDF which adds templating support based on PDF "Form XObjects" to the already amazing capabilites of the free pdf generator FPDF.

PHP De Luxe - PHP5 Edition is being printed these days and will be available in early September already. It's written in German and fills the gap between all those books for beginners (being mostly duplications of the online manual) and those for experts mainly focussing on architectural issues and pretty patterns, in the market of current German PHP books. It's a book for people actually working with that PHP stuff, not for beginners and not for those interested in beautiful theories in the first instance, as the 992 pages were written by people which do actually use those things each and every day: Chregu "domxml" Stocker, Richard "moh" Samar, Andre Gildemeister, Matthias Lehn and myself.
Topics include quite everything the practitioner needs to know, from a careful and example-laden introduction to the new object-oriented features to migration issues, an exclusive in-depth coverage of the all-new XML features to stream wrappers and filters, CLI tricks, effective caching stunts or the new reflection API, and quite some treasures out of PEAR and PECL.
The book concludes with some hands-on real projects such as that Popoon/SlideML/BXE thingy mentioned before.
In retrospect, the most tricky thing was writing really good code examples: they have to be short, as self-contained as possible and certainly exactly demonstrate the issue as clear and undisguised as possible. And then the example should still make sense and be of practical nature. Finding those reasonable examples -and many programmers read only those anyway- often took quite some time, after that it was only a matter of writing the prose in a style both clear and compact, professional and likeable, which I really hope did work out.
You can currently order your copy directly at MITP (no, not that MITP..), via Amazon or any other bookstore. The table of contents and an FAQ section will be published on the accompanying website which is to be updated very soon.
I wonder how it will feel to read my name on the cover of a ~1000 page volume.,

You might be interested in the preliminary conference programme of OSCOM4, the conference of the international association for Open Source Content Management to take place nearby in Zürich in September.
There are several great attractions in the programme consisting of the three sections "Dev/Community", "Business/Legal" and this year's special Apache track, which includes several PHP presentations.
I'm specially looking forward to hearing David speaking about "his" JSR-170.
See you there.

Addendum: ... if I can afford it.

# Edit: I know this blog currently serves corrupt RDF.. apart from pestering the Kaywa folks there's nothing I can do about it.

SlideML is great. If you followed this blog a bit, you know I'm writing all my presentations with it, in order no having to wrestle with tools like evil PowerPoint & Co.
SlideML only lacks a bit of tool support.. but now, as part of a publication not yet to be named, there is the WYSIWYG SlideML-Popoon-BXE Environment, gluing together BXE and Popoon (exaggeratory named "Cocoon for PHP) along with a syntax highlighting engine. An impressing PDF output pipeline remains still to be added, but Chregu and I just had that one day. We didn't even have to time to chat with Harry we coincidentally ran into.
I should say you'd better ignore the content of the demo presentation, by the way, due to the lack of quality it wasn't actually meant for publication. But if you want to try editing: Just browse the presentation and press the edit button.
I do like it the environment a lot, still I think I'll keep on writing my presentations the old-school way, directly hacking the XML. Much more comfortable than never-to-be-trusted WYSIWYG, to me at least. The entire package is open source (Apache-style), you can fetch it from the SVN repository. If you do, please fix the still numerous bugs :)
Oh, and by the way: the not-to-be-named book I mentioned promises to be pretty interesting, I think :)