Programming

phpGroupware and XSLT

    Harry Fuecks
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    If you’ve been around PHP for a while you’ve probably heard of phpGroupWare, now in it’s fourth year (for PHP that’s old), according to Sourceforge.

    As Dan Kuykendall recently commented here, phpGroupware, The Next Generation is in progress. I’ve managed to have at least one meaningful chat, via email, with Dan in past, while fighting the never-ending deluge, and he’s got some very interesting ideas on the use of XSLT.

    For example, head to the demo of the next gen phpGroupWare and login (user: admin, pass: temppass). Surf around and enjoy some nice visuals. Now for the surprise – “View > Source” from your browser…. where’s the HTML? Assuming you’re using a recent version of Mozilla or IE, you should see an XML document. Up at the top you should find something like;


    It’s actually your browser transforming the page to something that looks nice. For browsers without a built-in XSLT processor, Dan transforms the page to HTML on the server side, with PHP. Provides an interesting alternative to way templating is normally done in PHP and may mean faster page loading for users of newer browsers plus opens the way for REST based web services (side note Sitepoint are also employing a similar trick with their RSS feeds these days.)

    Also interesting to note is the nextgen phpGroupWare is packing SOAP and XML-RPC interfaces, which offers further alternatives to accessing phpGroupWare, perhaps opening the way for an XUL client.