green galoshes

Sounds like Upcoming.org is set for some upgrades (does version 2.0 of a Web 2.0 application == 4.0? :) ) next week. Aside from a yahoo account merge, they are keeping things pretty close to the vest. Maybe the documentation wiki will be reincarnated. The suggestion board is nice, but doesn’t have the same information.

A little while ago, I made a few changes to their original PHP 5 API wrapper, so that it works with PHP 4. By the way, I can’t seem to find the original wrapper mentioned in that post – maybe it got lost when the wiki went away? I’ve kept what I believe is the original example file that was bundled with the wrapper. You can download it all here:

• Upcoming.org API Wrapper for PHP 4

All I did was replace the use of the SimpleXML extension in PHP5 with the PEAR XML_Serializer package. In other words, switching out calls to the simple_xml functions with $unserializer->unserialize().

A number of the PEAR packages on our system were either missing or not the right version. Here are the PEAR dependencies I ended up having to “install” locally. Installation in this case meant download and unpack vs. $ pear install, since the latter wasn’t behaving th way I needed it to.

Cache_Lite/
HTTP_Request/
Net_URL/
XML_Serializer/
HTTP_Client/
Net_Socket/
XML_Parser/

Oh. Since we wanted to be sure we were doing things right, we went ahead and asked if we would need an official/corporate API key (more on this project later). What a nice surprise it was when the founder replied directly. For me, this really gives Upcoming that small business, customer oriented feel. For some reason I didn’t see this coming from something that is part of such a big organization like Yahoo!