Webmapping with MapServer

Wondering how to give a “plus” to yourapplication? How about spatially ena-bling your data?Webmapping—to deliver maps through the web—is easierthan you would think. In this article, Rodrigo Becke Cabraldiscusses how to use MapScript, a PHP wrapper for the opensourceMapServer technology that allows you to draw maps on demand anddeploy them within your PHP application.—by Rodrigo Becke Cabral

User Abandonment Tracking with PHP and DHTML

In this article, Darrell Brodgon discusses the technique ofusing PHP and JavaScript to cap-ture real-time information enteredinto a form for the purposes of user aban-donment tracking. He alsoshows you how to gain a solid understanding of the powerful wayclient-side DHTML can interact with server-side PHP.—by Darrell Brogdon

Build Your Own Debugging Library

Debugging can be tough no matter what language you’reusing. PHP offers some special difficulties of its own—butthat doesn’t mean that, with a little creativity and a look at thePHP manual, you can’t build a complete debugging library thatrequires no external components. Michael Paul Baley shows you howin this great article!—by Michael Bailey

Charted Data Mining with PHP and JpGraph

Data Mining transforms raw data into useful knowledge. Joinauthor Jason Sweat as he shows you how to use PHP, and the JpGraphlibrary, to generate several kinds of graphs—some of whichare not part of the standard JpGraph capabilities—based onthe PHP bug database as the raw data set.—by Jason Sweat

Socket Interprocess Communication

PHP’s increasing capabilities allow us to stray away frompure web applications into such areas as Unix systems programming,and rich client-side applications. In this piece, Rick Morrisdelves into the uses for interprocess communication over sockets,with a look at the Unix-oriented way of programming (which willwork equally well on Windows). As a way to show you how powerfulPHP is in this field, Rick also combines a socket-driven messagingserver with a real-time instant messaging solution written in XULthat is completely portable across multiple platforms withoutrequiring any special compilers.—by Rick Morris