I’ve highlighted two forthcoming (commercial) HTML5 video players recently and someone brought the OSM Player to my attention. Unlike the others, this is an open source project that media for HTML5, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flash (the Flash video player is the fallback). Like pretty much everything good these days (!), it’s written in jQuery, which means that this player can also be skinned using the jQuery ThemeRoller. The creators behind the Open Standard Media Player have already created a Drupal module for it and are working on Wordpress and Moodle versions, too.

A very common need in PHP-based Web applications is to validate email addresses. An email address, at its most basic contains the @ and a dot and no spaces or special characters, so it’s pretty easy coming up with a regular expression that will fit this most simple restriction. However, if you want a full-on precise regular expression, that takes an immense amount of code (the full email validation pattern takes up almost a page of code). An alternative, then is to use the EmailAddressValidation class, created by Added Bytes and now hosted on Google Code.

After you’ve downloaded the code and put it on your server, you use it like so:

require('/path/to/EmailAddressValidator.php');
$emailValidator = new EmailAddressValidator();
if ($emailValidator->check_email_address('test@example.org')) {
    // Email address is technically valid.
} else {
    // Email not valid.
}

Apple, who has a complex interest in supporting HTML5, has created a a bunch of pages on their Web site dedicated to HTML5. If you ignore all the politics involved with this, you’ll see several great uses of HTML5: video, typography, image gallery, transitions, audio, 360 degree rotations, virtual reality, and pixel manipulation. Unfortunately, the demos insist you use Safari, but lots of the code, which is available to examine, is not specific to Safari. It just amazing that all this is possible without any additional plug-ins!

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• On the Blog => HTML5 Video
• On the Web => Second Excerpt from “Effortless Flex 4 Development”
• On the Web => Google “recursion”
• On the Web => Editra Editor
• On the Web => Google’s Ajax Libraries API
• Q&A => What are the dangers with PHP’s allow_url_fopen setting?
• What is Larry Thinking? => Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Savings
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “Effortless Flex 4 Development” and more

About This Newsletter

No particular theme this time, just some stuff I’ve found, the answer to a good question sent in some time back, and news about my forthcoming books. In my next newsletter I’ll probably do a giveaway, but feel free to keep those questions and comments coming in the interim. As always, thanks for reading!

On the Blog => HTML5 Video

In recent weeks I’ve come across two new players for video in HTML5. Because HTML5 has a video element, you can now embed video in an HTML page without using a plug-in. The players that control the actual playing of the video are written in JavaScript. You can find more information about these two players, and HTML5 in general, here.

LongTail Video, creator of a very popular Flash video player (which I’ve used on a couple of sites), has released a beta version of their new JW Player for HTML5. This player is written in JavaScript, using jQuery, and will fall back upon the JW Player for Flash if the JavaScript version can’t run in the user’s browser. For information on using and customizing the player, see that Web page. The first official release of the player is expected this summer.

Just as interesting, I think, are the thoughts that the creator of the JW Player has on HTML5 video. Initially, you’ll learn about some of the issues regarding video codecs and streaming limitations. But if you read through the comments, you’ll learn a lot more about what’s going into the discussion on just this one (quite important) aspect of HTML5.

About two months ago, Johannes Schlüter posted about the Future of PHP 6. Schlüter works for MySQL (and therefore Oracle-Sun) and is an active and involved member of the PHP team. In his post, Schlüter discusses the difficult choices facing PHP with respect to the intended version 6 and its support for Unicode. In turns out that changing all of PHP to support Unicode isn’t as easy as one would have thought. And, of course, it was originally considered to be, well, hard. Apparently, this struggle is the reason PHP 6 is still nowhere to be found (in fact, the source code has slowly been disappearing from PHP’s snaps site). So now, the PHP team is regrouping in order to go forward and we’re not exactly sure when or how Unicode support will be integrated into PHP, or how this change affects the next few versions of PHP, both minor (i.e., 5.3) and major (6 and 7).