PHP PHP IDE , Eclipse PDT

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Reading and Writing Spreadsheets with PHP -- March 31, 2008

Breaking The Language Barrier

When it comes to playing nice with data in different formats, PHP's pedigree is hard to beat. Not only does the language make it a breeze to deal with SQL resultsets and XML files, but it comes with extensions to deal with formats as diverse as Ogg/Vorbis audio files, ZIP archives and EXIF headers. So it should come as no surprise that PHP can also read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, albeit with a little help from PEAR.

In this article, I'll introduce you to two packages that make it surprisingly easy to hook your PHP scripts up to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and extract the data contained therein. I'll also show you how to dynamically create a new spreadsheet from scratch, complete with formulae and formatting, and import data from a spreadsheet into a database. So come on it, and let's get started!
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PHPExcel - OpenXML - Create Excel2007 documents in PHP - Spreadsheet engine
Project providing a set of classes for the PHP programming language, which allow you to write to and read from different file formats, like Excel 2007, PDF, HTML, ... This project is built around Microsoft's OpenXML standard and PHP.

reviews
# Output your spreadsheet object to different file formats

* Excel 2007 (spreadsheetML)
* BIFF8 (Excel 97 and higher)
* PHPExcel Serialized Spreadsheet
* CSV (Comma Separated Values)
* HTML
* PDF

# Read different file formats into your spreadsheet object

* Excel 2007 (spreadsheetML)
* BIFF5 (Excel 5.0 / Excel 95), BIFF8 (Excel 97 and higher)
* PHPExcel Serialized Spreadsheet
* Excel 2003 XML format
* Symbolic Link (SYLK)
* CSV (Comma Separated Values)
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PHP : where best suites the requirements as programming language
1) to report log information in IT departmetns: Just read from DB or text files and display info with less than 10 lines of code, no huge try catch exception blocks as java , any school graduate can learn and do it.
- this may be reason why google is using to report all it server logs ( see notes below )
2) code development productivity may be at leaset 3 times to that of java
3) huge community generated notes and examples see this url below
http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-list-tables.php
4) using PDT free IDE , it must be very easy to debug visually , kids can enjoy it too
5) May be good language to introduce programming to kids in 5/6 th grade summber time. no complexity they can learn varibles and simple loops etc..




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About PDT
The PDT project provides a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project encompasses all development components necessary to develop PHP and facilitate extensibility. It leverages the existing Web Tools Project in providing developers with PHP capabilities.
- PDT is about 1 year old started APR 2007


Eclipse Announces New Tools for PHP Developers - press release
- PDT 1.0 release - the first Eclipse project targeting PHP
- “PDT has evolved to a mature and high-quality Eclipse toolset for PHP developers,” says Peter MacIntyre, principal at Paladin Business Solutions in Charlottetown, PE in Canada. “Its strength as a framework for creating PHP systems and applications is certainly evident, and it is exciting to think of the commercial products that can now be delivered leveraging the PDT framework.



PDT 1.0 Release Review
- Aug. 20, 2007
- 17 Committers (14 from Zend and 3 from IBM), so Zend is mainly driving it .
- 40,000 downloads a month

Comparison with PDT
While Zend Studio for Eclipse is built on top of Eclipse and PDT there are significant differences. PDT is designed as a basic PHP editor and a framework for building IDE. Zend Studio for Eclipse is designed as a full featured multi-language PHP IDE based on Zend’s strong experience with Zend Studio to create the most powerful PHP IDE available. This table will give you a quick comparison.
- Basic free PDT version should do for many developments

- PDT you tube
- user comment
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Where is Python used at GOOGLE - blog dated 2006.02.01 Wed
http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm

* The Google build system is written in python. All of Google's corporate code is checked into a repository and the dependency and building of this code is managed by python. Greg mentioned that to create code.google.com took about 100 lines of python code. But since it has so many dependencies, the build system generated a 3 megabyte makefile for it!
* Packaging. Google has an internal packaging format like RPM. These packages are created using python.
* Binary Data Pusher. This is the area where Alex Martelli is working, on optimizing pushing bits between thousands of servers
* Production servers. All monitoring, restarting and data collection functionality is done with python
* Reporting. Logs are analyzed and reports are generated using Python.
* A few services including code.google.com and google groups. Most other front ends are in C++ (google.com) and Java (gmail). All web services are built on top of a highly optimizing http server wrapped with SWIG.