Cool PHP Class that uses Google's Mapping API so that you can create your own customizable Google Maps using PHP More info

Sometimes you just don't really need the XmlHttpRequest object, but want the Ajax-ish effect. This article might be a good read then. More info

'One of the keys to unlocking the full return on investment in SOA is the ability to build service-oriented UIs,' contends the co-founder & CEO of Appcelerator, Jeff Haynie. These SOUIs, as he calls them, are clients designed to consume services, regardless of language or platform. Haynie believes Appcelerator's approach truly zeros in on the need for a clean separation the application from services in an agile development model. More info

'While the subprime credit crisis, the weakened housing sector and the relentless stream of negative economic reports in the media would lead one to expect a softening in demand, we have not yet seen it. Outside of a handful of sectors, demand for IT professionals remains robust,' concluded Mark Roberts, CEO of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses (NACCB), which tracks IT employment on a monthly basis. More info

Google's main page today celebrates the 50th anniversary of the iconic LEGO brick. Today?s LEGO bricks still fit bricks from 1958, but more importantly it is one of Denmark's best-known exports, along with programming language creators Anders Hejlsberg, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Rasmus Lerdorf, who between them created C#, Turbo Pascal, C++, and PHP. More info

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF), formed in 2006 'to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community,' yesterday announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined its board. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept OpenID enabled URLs. More info

Time magazine has chosen and posted what it considers to be the top 50 web sites of 2007 - sites that show, '...exceptional style and smarts, sites that offer new and improved ways to access and share content, generate our own and otherwise enrich the online (and off-line) experience.' In the Social Networks category, the top sites included StumbleUpon, Hitchsters (a carpooling site), and LinkedIn. More info

Compositional programming style In the object oriented programming style, it&#8217;s preferable to split functionality out to multiple objects, that can work together to solve a single task. Taken to the extreme, this results in more, but smaller, classes and generally relies less on inheritance and more on composition. In lack of better words, I&#8217;ll call this [...]<br style="clear: both;"/> <a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=5f6ce651a7ebc7fe2c810651d014cffd"><img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=5f6ce651a7ebc7fe2c810651d014cffd"/></a> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=5f6ce651a7ebc7fe2c810651d014cffd" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/> More info

A while back was writing some stuff on this blog about regular expressoins. While that remains unfinished, a mini regex example - nothing earth shattering but a useful technique if you hadn&#8217;t already seen it. Promtped by a real world example, one often-overlooked feature of most regular expressions engines is how subpatterns can useful to whip [...]<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=f70a638f99bbc9aaacf45dc6c3683bab" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=f70a638f99bbc9aaacf45dc6c3683bab" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/> More info

I mentioned briefly, in my last post, that Wez Furlong made a patch back in March, that allows a native syntax for creating anonymous functions. This could replace the heinous create_function. Since then, I brought up Wez&#8217; original patch again on the php-internals lists. This has prompted some hefty debate over the last week. The main [...]<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=ed1420b70bc1b62df705169237ca0733" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=ed1420b70bc1b62df705169237ca0733" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/> More info