NEW: XML Application Objects

[tezza]

I've just released the first distribution for an open-source project called XML Application Objects (XAO). It's the result of working with XML/XSLT in PHP for a couple of years now. Although this is an alpha release, the concept itself has gone through a lot of refinement and is now ready for prime time.

The publication of the project itself was partially motivated by the discussions that took place in this thread (A Complete List of PHP Template Engines?) which basically sees me arguing for the usage of standards (XSLT) rather than having to learn a proprietary new templating system every time you work on someone elses PHP app.

This project is the result of much blood, sweat, and tears so I hope someone out there finds it useful. I have made documentation a paramount considderation for the XAO API because I'm keen for it to be another PHP success story. The website has a tonne of information so I'm not gonna try and promote XAO in this message.

Please check it out...

http://xao-php.sourceforge.net/

cheers.

[Hartmann]

Looks pretty cool... Gonna do some in depth looking at it tonight when I get home

Thanks for the heads up!

[Dr Livingston]

Glad you've got it finished and ready for alpha; Quite busy just now though so I'll have a look later and post back my comments ?

Dr Livingstone

[Skunk]

It sounds really interesting and the site looks great so far, but as I don't have a PHP 4.3.3/DOM enabled install to hand it's hard for me to get a good idea of how it works. An example speaks a thousand words, so even though the tutorial doesn't work on the SF server it would be great if the text from it was included on the site, even if it was just as static HTML. That way people like me would have a better chance of evaluating the technology (which could convince us to set up the necessary installation environment and try it out for real).

[tezza]

Thanks for showing an interest guys

The good news is, two additional developers have shown an interest in helping develop the project. So that's 3 developers plus myself. Hopefully that will allow me to develop more tutorials. At the moment, the priority is to stablise the core library. It should be fairly stable but there is no substitute for community testing

Originally Posted by Skunk

It sounds really interesting and the site looks great so far, but as I don't have a PHP 4.3.3/DOM enabled install to hand it's hard for me to get a good idea of how it works. An example speaks a thousand words, so even though the tutorial doesn't work on the SF server it would be great if the text from it was included on the site, even if it was just as static HTML. That way people like me would have a better chance of evaluating the technology (which could convince us to set up the necessary installation environment and try it out for real).

Yeah, I think the requirements will be a bit steep for some. Unfortunately DOMXML is still "experimental" so I pushed up the version of PHP that is required. DOMXML is obviously not negotiable :-)
You can actually run it without Sablotron if you set
$AppDoc->strXsltProcessor = "DOMXML";
But I don't think you will be able to get any useful error reporting -- so that kinda kills your XSL stylesheet debugging.

I did give some consideration to "offlining" the tutorials so they could run as flat HTML, but I opted instead to spend the time developing more of them. I felt is was important to put in the DbToXml tutorial on release. If I had more time, I would definately offline the tutes.
One of the reasons why the tutes work in "live" mode is that you can get in amnd modify stuff yourself.

Anyway, now that you've mentioned it, I will make it a little higher in my priority list.

In the mean time, can't you install the latest PHP on a desktop PC?
I've developed this thing on WindowsXP with Apache 1.3.x for windows.