hebig.org/blog
Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

HANDLING GEOGRAPHICAL DATASETS WITH PHP
"Generating maps on demand can be a hard job as most often you don't have the maps you need in digital form. But you can generate your own maps based on raw, digital data-files which are available for free on the net. Most often these datafiles are available in the Arcinfo format which can be parsed quite easily if you follow the e00-documentation. We have used this documentation and generated [some] maps based on the datafiles provided by GIS-Datadepot. The php-classes and some examples we have written for generating the maps are available for free as sourcecode."

USING MINIXML TO CREATE AND PARSE XML WITH PHP
"MiniXML provides a simple API to generating and parsing XML without requiring additional libraries. This set of PHP classes and Perl modules [which are independent implementations that can be used seperately] allows you to access XML data and create valid XML output with a tree-based hierarchy of elements. It provides an easy, object-oriented interface for manipulating XML documents and their constituent elements. It is currently being used to send requests and understand responses from remote servers in PHP and Perl applications, such as shiphp." And "this tutorial [at PHPcomplete] aims to provide enough information to allow you to integrate MiniXML into your own code."

SNOOPY, WEB CLIENT CLASS
Snoopy is a PHP class that simulates a web browser. It automates the task of retrieving web page content and posting forms. It supports basic user/pass authentication setting user_agent, referer, cookies and header content (including 'raw' headers, that is arbitrary headers can be set), it supports browser redirects (controlled depth of redirects), expands fetched links to fully qualified URLs and supports frames and SSL connections. Everything you need "to build a good data-fetcher for a PHP-based News-Aggregator". Via Schockwellenreiter via Sender Traumwind.

BOOKMARK PARSER CLASS
"This class parses IE, Netscape and Opera bookmark files and returns arrays with the bookmark/folder information. Still beta."