Developing php applications using web matrix

WebMatrix is a free web development tool from Microsoft that includes everything you need for web site development. WebMatrix provides an integrated environment for building, testing, and deploying web sites. This integrated environment includes an embedded IIS web server, database, and programming template that lets you get started with web site development,  which includes PHP and .NET applications. If you use any of the widely used blog and content…

Resolving URL file access is disabled in the server configuration

I was trying out the simplexml_load_file function for parsing RSS feeds on my hosting server using the following code-

$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…

Parsing XML data in PHP

If you are planning to deal with XML data in PHP , for instance parsing an RSS feed or pattern matching (finding images or elements in an XHTML) , than probably you need an XML library which extracts the data for you.

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…