Wedge No More

Before landing my latest gig, I spent about nine months coding on my own. Occasionally I'd get together for design meetings with a buddy, but day to day it was me and the computer. When you're flying solo and you get wedged on a problem, it can take an amazingly long time to un-wedge yourself. Its just plain nice to have another coder on the other side of the cube wall sometimes. You one person software shops out there, you have my complete and absolute respect.

Our php guy wedged himself good this week on marshaling and unmarshaling XML. Not that he was stuck, but he knew he was spending way too much of his time dealing with it. I did a quick example of how he might use XML-RPC in php 4. I grabbed this library and a did a quick example. It didn't amount to much more than:

   print "\nConvert to XML-RPC...\n";
   $tmp = XMLRPC_prepare($myarray);
   $tmp = XML_serialize($tmp);
   print $tmp;

   print "\nConvert back ...\n";
   $tmp = XML_unserialize($tmp);
   $newmyarray = XMLRPC_adjustValue($tmp);
   var_dump($newmyarray);

Dead simple, but that was the point, show options. Just toss it out there. Let him reject it. I was thinking I should do the equivalent with say NuSOAP when another team member trumped me by showing off all the neat XML features in php 5. SimpleXML, I've got to say, looks like da bomb. An upgrade to php 5 is in the works. Wedge no more.