jarmes's blog

    Last week I introduced you to the WorkXpress API. If you have not read it already you should do so before reading this post. Once you have a basic understanding of what it is and how it works, it's time to start diving into the API.

    I recently finished documenting the WorkXpress API and thought I would share some of the details. First of all, the documentation can be downloaded at http://www.workxpress.com/sites/default/files/WorkXpress%20API_1.pdf (PDF). For PHP, there is a PEAR package that makes working with the API easier. Look for that in a later post.

    I was playing around with Selenium RC a little while ago and ran into a little problem that I thought I would share with everyone.  I was writing a test that bounced around WorkXpress to give me some performance benchmarks.  My test added a new item that had a list layout of related items on it.  I wanted to be able to follow a link to add items to that list.  Seems easy enough right?

    I received a letter in the mail today from Cambridge Who's Who.  The letter stated that I had been "appointed as a biographical candidate to represent Duncannon, PA in the 2009/2010 online Cambridge Who's Who Registry among Executives and Professionals."  The letter goes on to say that I have been chosen based on my current position and that inclusion in the registry is free.   In order to complete my listing, It stated I could fill out a form online or send in an applica

    I have been doing a lot of web service development at work lately. I completed a FedEx integration for WorkXpress and have been working on a new integration with Drupal. Each of these integrations have involved using both SOAP servers and clients (the client being WorkXpress).

    With PHP 5.3 just over the horizon, I decided to see how well prepared WorkXpress was. Our coding standard is pretty strict and was developed to ensure that our application conforms to E_STRICT standards. However, we all know that some things are inevitably going to fall through the cracks.

    Have a Viddler account and looking to embed videos on your website? You could embed the videos directly into the body of your nodes, but that doesn't give you as much control as you may desire. You could use CCK and the Embedded Media Field (emfield) module, but that doesn't support Viddler. Or does it?

    Earlier this week I ran into an issue resizing bitmap images inside of WorkXpress. We currently use GD for our image resizing needs. Unknown to us, GD has plenty of issues resizing bitmaps, and all of our bitmap files we becoming corrupted. I modified our resize code to use Image Magick if the image is a bitmap and continue using GD for other image types.

    Lately, I have been constantly switching between both operating systems and mail clients. I became quite fond of Kontact, KDE's PIM suite, long ago. The only thing that stopped me from switching over to it full time was its lack of support for HTML signatures. As of the KDE 4 release of Kontact, support has been added for HTML signatures. I decided to make the switch back to Kontact earlier this week.

    Sending mail is a common task for many applications today.  Whether sending mail through a webform or as an automated tasks, sending mail can be simple using PHP and PEAR.  Using the sendMail() function below, you can send HTML formatted mail through any smtp server.

    Update March 11, 2009: Removed the demo since GoDaddy does not support external SMTP servers.