I have been working for years on the microsoft side of the world, but in the last years I have worked more and more with PHP/MySql projects. The last versions of these platform are quite powerful and it turns out that it is now very [...]]]> I find PHP to be a great solution for creating websites.

I have been working for years on the microsoft side of the world, but in the last years I have worked more and more with PHP/MySql projects. The last versions of these platform are quite powerful and it turns out that it is now very easy to build/use webservices in PHP5. OOP is fully supported and, above all, there are plenty of free Editors and IDE.

If you want to start working in PHP, I would strongly recommend you the WAMP server, which offer, for free, APACHE,  PHP5 and MySQL server to install on your home PC!

It is very easy to install and in some minutes you are free to write your applications and see them running on your PC. In the same package you will receive a phpmyadmin to administer your databases.

To write PHP code, you have then an incredible number of options… I am using PSPAD, a light editor that let you develop in many languages.

If you are used to work in Eclipse, do not forget to download the PHP environment for Eclipse, I am not using it personally, but a colleague of mine is, and he’s enthusiast

For sure you know this great social network, but I’m not so sure you know that it is very easy to create and publish applications on it.

You can even use your favourite language to create the application, as [...]]]> I will spend some posts to talk about applications on facebook, and what to do to create one.

For sure you know this great social network, but I’m not so sure you know that it is very easy to create and publish applications on it.

You can even use your favourite language to create the application, as the whole application will work through internet.

I have chosen PHP, but you can work in DotNet or one of the many other languages  that can produce webpages.

Why did I choose PHP?

Mainly because it is free and because I like the fact that I can develop in the same platform used by Facebook itself.

Now, everybody can download for free the Facebook PHP API.

You will find also a sample application, in order to get started easily.

Before starting developing, you will need to register on the developer application, within Facebook. You will be given a KEY, to use in your code.

Using a mix of API and FBML, the facebook markup language, you will then be able to add easily friends lists and other FB features to your pages.

SQL lovers will soon discover that they can use FQL, the facebook query language, to create queries qnd obtain data.

Uncaught SoapFault exception: [WSDL] SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn’t load from ‘http://thisistheUrlOfTheWsdl?wsdl’ : Extra content at the end of the document

After some investigations, I realised that this is probably a bug of PHP: [...]]]> I was trying to test some webservices using PHP 5.3.0 as client.
Most of them were working properly, but One gave me the following error:

Uncaught SoapFault exception: [WSDL] SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn’t load from ‘http://thisistheUrlOfTheWsdl?wsdl’ : Extra content at the end of the document

After some investigations, I realised that this is probably a bug of PHP: I’ve found out that the webservice is working if I access it using PHP 5.2.10.

The solution I found is to create a local copy of the WSDL file (it’ll be something mywsdl.xml) and reference the local copy instead of the original wsdl url.

$_SESSION["myvariable"] = myvalue;

To use it, in another page, you can then just use $_SESSION["myvariable"]. Just remember to put at the top of the code this instruction:

session_start();

Actually, this will not re-initialise the session, but will create the session object with [...]]]> Managing session variables in PHP is really easy.
First thing to do is to initialise the variable. For instance

$_SESSION["myvariable"] = myvalue;

To use it, in another page, you can then just use $_SESSION["myvariable"].
Just remember to put at the top of the code this instruction:

session_start();

Actually, this will not re-initialise the session, but will create the session object with the current session variables.