Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Zend looking for PHP developers!

We're looking for good PHP developers to work either locally at our Cupertino, California office, or work from remote (preferably from North. America).
If you fit the following profile, please send resume and and code samples to Mike, who's email is mike.n at our domain (spam DBs probably recognize the "at" and "dot" trick :)

Qualified candidates must posess the following:

- Preferrably 2+ years PHP or equivalent experience
- PHP 5 experience
- Database experience
- Strong Object-Oriented Programming skills
- Understands and uses Design Patterns
- Source Code Management (CVS or SVN)
- Team player, goal-oriented, able to work independently.
- Zend Certified Engineer a plus

The following additional experience is also highly desired:

- .NET or J2EE web development experience
- Familiar with Test-Driven Development
- Web Services and SOA experience
- Understands XML, DOM, and other W3C standards
- Front-end experience (XHTML, CSS, Javascript)

Qualified candidates will have a solid work history in web development or related technologies with excellent references.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Automatic Salesforce Excel reports with PHP

Today, I gave a talk at Salesforce.com's dreamforce conference as part of their "Gearing Up: Tools for Your Next Project" developer tools session.

I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised as to how many in the audience were actually using PHP. It must have been about 50% of the audience and this was without PHP being explicitly mentioned on the session agenda.

In my talk I showcased two features of PHP 5, the new SOAP extension and the rewritten COM extension. The example I used is a script that creates an Excel report (with graph), of the geographic distribution of Salesforce leads.

The real interesting part of this example is actually how to create the Excel graphs. Probably one of the easier ways to do that is to use Visual Basic from within Excel. However, as at Zend we want to do everything with PHP, and there are advantages of automating the process from the server, our challenge was how to actually create the Excel files from PHP. We decided to automate Excel using COM and PHP on Windows. The main challenge for us was the lack of good Excel COM documentation. Creating graphs using COM is not a trivial task, especially as a lot of the material isn't well documented by Microsoft. The only somewhat useful reference is the Excel Visual Basic CHM (called VBAXL10.CHM), however, a lot of those features don't map directly into COM, nor are the constant values of the graph types listed in the docs, so you have to do a lot of guess working to actually get it working. We literally had to guess the constant ids for creating the various Excel graphs. After quite a lot of guess work we finally managed to brew up a class which made it easy for us to populate Excel with Data, Worksheets, and create the required graphs. This work is freely available at http://gutmans.org/COM_excel.php. If you use or enhance this code, if possibe, please be sure to share it with me. I'd like to hear from your experiences. Currently, it is very much tailored to what our requirements were.

The second piece of the example is actually getting the data out of Salesforce. Zeev and George have both blogged about accessing Salesforce so I won't add much more. In a nutshell what my code does is query Salesforce for leads, calculate the distribution by country, and display an Excel graph with the resulting information (the results are skewed so that I don't give away real Zend info but it really works...)

I've put up the script which glues the SOAP interoperability and Excel together at http://gutmans.org/SF_COM_example.php. Besides the username, password and exact query itself the script is complete.

I hope this info, especially the Excel class helps people out. Share your experiences!

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

PHP OCI8 Driver Updated!

Antony just sent an email that he finished commiting the updates to the PHP OCI8 driver and giving a short overview of the bug fixes and improvements.

The OCI8 extension has had a lot of bugs in the past few years, and it became clear that if this extension was to become supportable, it would need a serious face lift and architectural improvement.

I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to the extension. This includes Christopher Jones from Oracle who has been very active over the years on bugs.php.net trying to support the Oracle users; the OCI team including Srinath, Luxi, and Shoaib who helped a lot in understanding how to best use the OCI API, how to optimize the driver, and even learnt to read PHP extensions and provided feedback for the code itself, Wez who played a huge role in rearchitecting the extension, and of course Antony, who did all the hard work of implementing the extension, rewriting the documentation, writing the gazillion new tests cases, and putting up with the constant nitpicking for improvements (and of course, stepping up in the past to become the OCI8 maintainer and help with damage control).

I encourage all Oracle users to test the new extension. In addition to resolving the many bugs, it also has some performance improvements, mainly in defaulting to a 10 row prefetch, and by supporting statement caching. Also, please review the new documentation which has been significantly improved.

If you bump into any problems, please email Antony or open a bug report at http://bugs.php.net.

Enjoy!