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Friday, November 30, 2007

Display Google Calendar Events on your PHP Web Site with XPath

In this article the author explains how XPath and SimpleXML provide
the right balance between readability and verbosity in XML-parsing
APIs. Google Calendar and other online calendaring applications
provide simple centralized systems where online communities can
maintain event calendars and community members can get information
about upcoming events. But many organizations prefer to display event
calendars on their community portals, forums, or blogs. They often
copy event calendar information from online calendaring applications
onto their Web sites, reducing the effectiveness of centrally managing
events online. Google Calendar provides an integration application
program interface (API) that provides a good solution to this problem.
The Google data API provides Atom feeds and the Atom Publishing
Protocol for retrieving, querying, updating, and creating events and
other information using Google Calendar and almost all the other
Google applications. There are also third-party integration APIs for
Microsoft .NET, the Java programming language, Python, and PHP that
encapsulate much of the Google data API functionality in a set of
object-oriented wrapper classes. Using XPath, you can automatically
keep a Web site's display of upcoming events up to date by querying
the Google data API event feeds and parsing its entries for relevant
details among the entries' elements. While XPath is not the fastest
XML API in the PHP toolkit, it is among the easiest to use when you
have a well-documented XML document on hand. You can use caching to
reduce the impact of XPath's relatively slow performance. More Information

3 comments:

anon_anon said...

VTD-XML has the fastest XPath engine (http://vtd-xml.sf.net)

Lots for sale in Costa Rica said...

Thank you for sharing information. It quite useful for us also. I always love to read such type of things.

Anonymous said...

This is perfect because I didn't know the difference between both of them, actually I have a similar doubt if I have to buy Cialis or to buy another medication.