ShrimpWorks

I’ve been adding some nifty things to my PHP project at work (cellphone starter pack invoicing, usage tracking [big bro is watching you earn him money every time you use your pre-paid airtime :P], etc). It’s got a lot of pretty nice features. Using client-side JavaScript, it actually pretty much behaves as a normal desktop application, only it lags like hell when you visit other pages (slow web server :P).

Anyway, I can’t claim I’ve written all the snazzy features myself unfortunately. Due to time and pressure I’ve been relying on good old Open Source to help me out. There’s actually a helluva lot of stuff out there to make things easier for just about anything you need to do…

• ADOdb - http://adodb.sourceforge.net/

  Obviously the first thing to get going on any database-aware application, is to actually interact with the database. PHP has an Interbase module, with a whole bunch of Interbase functions. These all work fine, and there’s really no problem with them. ADOdb however makes working with SQL databases so much easier. No need to remember PHP’s randomly named module functions, and it gives you access to a huge assortment of database drivers (of corse all dependent on normal PHP modules). It’s even available for Python now!

• Smarty - http://smarty.php.net/

  Next you’d presumably like a fancy presentation for your application. You have three options here - painfully output every single line of HTML manually through your code, create yourself a template engine/language, or use Smarty. Smarty is a Template Engine, which lets you define “.tpl” files which are bascally just HTML files with a couple of variable placeholders and smarty function calls. But it’s not just the simplicity of creating a Smarty instance, assigning variables to it, and then just calling display(), it’s the functions you can put into your template files. Looping through customer listings, building tables or drop lists, check lists, etc, etc, etc. One of the most useful things I’ve found is the ability to define your own smarty functions, allowing you to add custom functionality to your templates and the output they generate.

• PHP pdf / PDFClass - http://ros.co.nz/pdf/

  One of the requirements of this project was that reports had to be generated in user and printer friendly PDF format. At first I looked into the option of having Smarty generate tabular reports, and get an HTML to PDF processor (there are several PHP options available) to turn my HTML into the PDFs required. Unfortunately, for the most part, these converters are heavily buggy, and didn’t give me very much control at all over the output (ok, I had full control over the output, but things like page headers and footers, page numbering, etc, etc are required for nice reports). Anyway, so I set about using PHP’s PDF functions. Unfortunately, that turned out rather risky across different versions of PHP, and was generally a pain to work with. Enter this package. It doesn’t require any of PHP’s PDF modules, so it’s free from cross-version and cross-platform bugs and stuff. It also has a bunch of nice functions for headers, footers, tables, etc. It also provides the option to save the output to disk, output direct to browser, or plop the output into memory where I can play with it. I’ve built a very nice reporting class around this package.

• Code 3 of 9 Barcode Generator - http://www.sid6581.net/cs/php-scripts/barcode/

  Another requirement of the system is the ability to group multiple items into a single item. From the code side of things, it’s fairly simple, but to users, trying to manage these million boxes of starter packs and remembering or creating their own codes for these boxes would obviously be rather difficult. Anyway, I though it’d be nice to offer a barcode people can print and stick to the boxes. Enter this little script. Couldn’t be easier to use, and with the help of a little Javascript, users can even scale the barcodes up and down (by dynamically reloading the image, not just changing the dimensions and possibly corrupting it) before printing.

• PHPMailer - http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/

  I’m using this for sending my PDF reports via email. It allows you to easily attach files, or file content (so I don’t need to save the PDF’s to temp files before attaching, just attach the output directly from script). Also supports SMTP, so no need to rely on PHP’s mail configuration.

I’m also using a nifty little ZIP lib that allows me to zip my in-memory PDF reports, and send them direct to the browser for downloadable reports (since a normal PDF will open in the browser). Unfortunately there’s no readme or author URL in the source :)

I did get it from PHPClasses.org though, which has quickly become by first stop for anything I need in a hurry that I couldn’t be bothered, or don’t have time to write myself. Nice rating system and “top 10"s filter out the good stuff instantly, making finding stuff really simple. I highly recommend it to any PHP developers.