Four, Oh Four!

One of the most common errors encountered on the net is thedreaded “404”, which indicates that the requested pageis not found. To make things worse, this error has so manypotential causes that it is virtually impossible to completelyeliminate all of them. In this article, Ilia Alshanetsky reviewssome of the preventative steps that can be used to avoid 404s and,in the instances where they cannot be avoided, handle them asgracefully as possible.—by Ilia Alshanetsky

Meet Your Match

In the second installment of his three-part series on regularexpressions, George Schlossnagle dives deeper into the realm ofregex, exploring more exotic (and much more powerful) techniques,such as comments, assertions, greediness and much, muchmore.—by George Schlossnagle

Creating Web Services with PHP and SOAP

If you’ve been reading the last few issues of php|a, youalready how to use SOAP and PHP together to write a client able tocommunicate with a Web Service. What if you wanted to create yourown web service? In this article, Alessandro Sfondrini looks at howyou can accomplish this, both on your own and aided by usefultools, such as the NuSOAP library.—by Alessandro Sfondrini

A Walk Down PDF Lane

PDF files are notoriously complex to decipher. Or are they?In this article, Marco Tabini tries to sort through the 1,000-pluspage Adobe PDF documentation to provide you with the skinny on howa PDF file is structured and how you can go about reading ormodifying it.—by Marco Tabini

Smarty and Internationalization

Internationalization is one of those topics that no onereally wants to deal with. Yet, being able to present contents tousers in their own locale is an important aspect of every modernwebsite. In this article, author John Coggeshall describes his ownefforts at creating a version of the Smarty Templating Enginecapable of supporting data in multiple languages—and all thecode is included!—by John Coggeshall

Zend Does It Again

Just last month, Zend Technologies released the ZendWinEnabler, a product that finally makes Windows and IIS a stableplatform for PHP. The introduction of this new product haspotentially far-reaching implications for the world of PHPdevelopment—therefore, we could hardly resist, andimmediately ran to our phone for this exclusive interview withZend’s Rinat Gersch about what the WinEnabler means and where itwill take us.—by Marco Tabini