Have you ever tried to create a professional quality document programmatically from within PHP? It’s a real pain and surprisingly tricky to do. There are limited options for PHP developers to produce files in the formats most often used in business. There are libraries for producing PDF files in PHP but they are complex and are difficult to use for producing documents.

Read the full text at:

• Creating Professional Documents the Easy Way

Julien Pauli has just published a great commentary about Zend_Service_LiveDocx, comparing it to his library odtphp. If you are able to read French take a look at the following:

Voila quelques temps j’ai sorti odtphp, un script PHP qui analyse des fichiers odt à la recherche de “tags” et qui les remplace par des données que vous fournissez.
C’est très pratique pour générer des factures ou d’autres documents basés sur un template odt et une source de données type MySQL.

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• LiveDocx : service web de templating de documents

Gjero Krsteski has just published an introduction that illustrates how to create word processing documents using Zend_Service_LiveDocx. If you are new to Zend_Service_LiveDocx and can read German, this is a great starting point:

Letztens stand ich vor der Herausforderung, eine PDF-Klasse zu schreiben, die PDF-Dateien erzeugt. Als Inhalt für die PDF Dateien waren sensible Kundendaten angedacht. Diese Anforderung war mir nicht fremd, jedoch konnte ich mich gut daran erinnern, dass sie mit viel Arbeit verbunden war. Die meisten Libraries bieten nur die Möglichkeit, die PDF-Dateien Zeile pro Zeile zu generieren Je nachdem woher man die Daten dafür beschaffen muss, kann sich dies zu einem mühseligem Unterfangen entwickeln. Hier kann ich aktuell zwei Lösungsansätze vorschlagen, die leicht anzuwenden sind und eine gute Sicherheit gewährleisten.

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• PDF Datei erzeugen

You may have heard about FPDF, TCPDF. These are used to generate PDF document in PHP. But very few of you may have heard about LiveDocx, can be found here http://www.livedocx.com/. The most cool news I’m going to tell you that Zend Framework 1.10.0 provides clean and simple interface to LiveDocx API. LiveDocx is soap based service. If you are interested more in LiveDocx, following the link I’ve already provided you.

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• Creating word processing document using Zend_Service_LiveDocx

This new service offers all the functionality of the free public LiveDocx service, but in addition adds a number of enterprise features:

• Only 16 users per server.
• Dual-Core AMD Opteron Processor 1218 HE 2.60 GHz.
• 64 bit and 4 GB RAM.
• High availability (99.9% uptime).
• Blisteringly fast Internet connection (130 Gbit).
• Faster round trips.
• Privacy regulations complaint.

The Hosted ‘Shared’ Service is available to rent for only EUR 29.90 (approx. USD 44.47) per month.

For details, take a look at the new pricing section on LiveDocx.com.

The leading German language PHP web site, PHPHatesMe.com has just published an article in German about Zend_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge.

The text introduces the component library, explains the benefits of its template-based approach and finally offers some sample applications, which illustrate the work-flow of applications, deploying LiveDocx for document generation.

Click on the following screenshot to read the full article.

#LiveDocx

Please tag all tweets with this hash tag.

Judging by the very strong feedback that we have received in the last two weeks, it seems that there are many hosting companies, which have uninstalled or deactivated this vital extension.

Mats Andersson, an active member of the phpLiveDocx community, recently contributed a solution for exactly this scenario. Using NuSOAP, it is possible to access LiveDocx without the PHP 5 SOAP extension. Based on Mats’ code, we have written a brief article, which explains how:

• Using LiveDocx with NuSOAP

A big thanks goes out to Mats for his contribution and work with NuSOAP!

Many users are not comfortable with sending very private data over a network to have their documents generated (regardless of SSL). In some cases, corporate policy disallows such methods, thus they are not permitted to use phpLiveDocx in the first place.

Similarly, some users create vast amounts of documents every day. In order to speed up their applications, a dedicated service – to which only they have access – could be deployed.

We have often talked about a premium service, and now we would officially like to ask for your opinion. We have created a very short survey (only three questions) and would be very grateful, if you could fill it in. It should not take more than about 2 minutes of your time.

On analyzing the results, we will decide which kind of premium service is best suited to our userbase.

LiveDocx Premium Services Survey

We’ve finished review on your proposed Zend_Service_LiveDocx component, and have approved it for immediate development in the Standard Incubator. [...]

This is excellent news. In the medium to long term, it has always been one of the goals of the phpLiveDocx project to get the code directly included in the Zend Framework.

This has the advantage for the developer that there are no further libraries to install on the server. All s/he needs to do is download the Zend Framework and start generating print ready documents with phpLiveDocx.

Note: As soon as phpLiveDocx is being distributed directly in the Zend Framework, the namespace of the project classes will change from Tis_ to Zend_. This is required by the Zend Framework coding guidelines.

Updated on December 03, 2009: Zend_Service_LiveDocx has now been migrated to Zend Framework Standard Trunk. See this blog post for details.