I didn’t wan’t to pull this data out of MySQL every time I went to build a map, I wanted to use one giant static array instead. So to write the array back out in a re-usable fashion I developed the following code which can take any array, of any depth, associative or index based, and spit out corresponding PHP that you can copy and paste back into your script.

function phpPrintArr(array $arr) {
	echo "array(".PHP_EOL;

	$c = 1;
	$total = count($arr);

	foreach($arr as $i =>$v) {
		$iq = is_numeric($i) ? '' : '"';
		$vq = is_numeric($v) ? '' : '"';
		$e = $c < $total ? ',' : '';

		if(is_array($v)) {
			echo $iq.$i.$iq.'=>'.PHP_EOL;
			phpPrintArr($v);
			echo $e.PHP_EOL;
		} else {
			echo $iq.$i.$iq.'=>'.$vq.$v.$vq.$e.PHP_EOL;
		}
		$c++;
	}

	echo ")".PHP_EOL;
}

Oh, and for anyone who is interested in the array of country polygons this produced from the Thematic Mapping Engine data, here is the rather large array. Feel free to use it in your own KML project.

Here is the video of the initial announcement along with some juicy technical details:

If you are interested in seeing how your PHP project fares when run through HipHop, check out the official HipHop project page.

With tools like HipHop, scripting languages like PHP are no longer subject to the charges of gross computational inefficiency. In short, it’s a great day to be a web developer.

This demo showcases these custom components:

• Backend:
  • pSOAPjr
  • sfSOAPjrActionPlugin
• Frontend
  • eSOAPjr

Questions/comments? We’d love to hear from you!

Quercus is a nifty utility that will allow you to run PHP code in clouds such as Google App Engine¹. This means your Drupal and WordPress sites can now be distributed across a highly avaliable and scalable cloud infrustructure.

Now if we can only get an MVC framework like Kohana or Symfony to work on top of this system..

1. Other great articles on running PHP in Google’s App Engine can be found here and here. IBM has also highlighted this utility.

If you find this useful or a have a suggestion, feel free to let me know!

private function getStripped($obj) {
		$objVars = get_object_vars($obj);

		if(count($objVars) > 0) {
			foreach($objVars as $propName => $propVal) {
				if(gettype($propVal) == "object") {
					$cObj = $this->getStripped($propVal);
					if($cObj == null) {
						unset($obj->$propName);
					} else {
						$obj->$propName = $cObj;
					}
				} else {
					if(empty($propVal)) {
						unset($obj->$propName);
					}
				}
			}
		} else {
			return null;
		}
		return $obj;
	}