In this blog, you will learn how to:

• Setup users and groups in LDAP
• Configure LDAP with WebSphere Lombardi Edition.
• Associate LDAP Roles with WLE Process

Click here to download the article.

Click Here to download the sample ldap-sample-user-groups.ldif file.

Recently, I published an article on web matrix on dzone on how to get started with developing php applications using web matrix. Checkout the the article for more details.

The new Cloud Foundry offers more support for languages, cloud deployment vendors and cloud capabilities and is probably  based on there  initial Cloud Foundry offering which was launched some where in 2009.

I have requested for an environment ,by signing up for a beta account.  In future blog, I would post my views on Cloud Foundry. Stay tuned.

$rss =  simplexml_load_file(‘http://naveenbalani.com/index.php/feed/’);

and got the following exception on my hosting server -

“URL file access is disabled in the server configuration”

After googling through the documentation, I noticed that the simple_xml_load uses furl_open function to get files remotely. This function, due to security issues was not supported on my hosting server (and probably most of the hosting providers.)

The option was to use CURL library to parse remote urls , along with simple_xml function. Here is the modified code which should work on most of the hosting servers.

<?php

function load_file($url) {
$ch = curl_init($url);
#Return http response in string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$xml = simplexml_load_string(curl_exec($ch));
return $xml;
}

$feedurl = 'http://naveenbalani.com/index.php/feed/';
$rss = load_file($feedurl);

foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item) {
echo "<h2>" . $item->title . "</h2>";
echo "<p>" . $item->description . "</p>";
}

?>

Check out the script output as -  http://naveenbalani.com/util/php/rss.php

The SimpleXML extension provides a very intuitive API to convert XML to an object and traverse elements easily.The only disadvantage is that it loads entire document in memory, so for very large XML files, performance could be an issue.

If performance is a consideration, you can go with XMLReader , which is an XML pull parser, which doesn’t load entire document in memory, instead it traverses each node on the way.

There are many special purpose libraries available, like simple pie (which is used by wordpress internally for RSS feeds) but I found it too overloaded while dealing with simple fields and didn’t offer XPATH capability to get required nodes quickly and you end up dealing with pattern matching capability with simple pie.
The following code uses simple xml and fetches the latest RSS feeds from my website. I have used curl library to deal with http connections, as its more secured and supported on my hosting server.

<?php

function load_file($url) {
$ch = curl_init($url);
#Return http response in string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$xml = simplexml_load_string(curl_exec($ch));
return $xml;
}

$feedurl = 'http://naveenbalani.com/index.php/feed/';
$rss = load_file($feedurl);

foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item) {
echo "<h2>" . $item->title . "</h2>";
echo "<p>" . $item->description . "</p>";
}

?>

Check out the script output as -  http://naveenbalani.com/util/php/rss.php

The blog -  http://naveenbalani.com/index.php/2011/01/creating-a-travel-blog-using-wordpress/ , provides my experiences on how to use wordpress to create a travel blog.