QuickBooks SDK Integration in PHP

I know lot of people may be facing the issue of integrating QuickBooks SDK correctly using PHP. QuickBooks SDK basically used their own xml format qbXml to pass and retrieve data from QuickBooks. And if you have a website or an online store that need to create invoices automatically in QuickBooks, then you should create a SOAP web service to process these request.

Unlike other API’s around for different application, QuickBooks synchronization is is initiated from QuickBooks Web Connector (An application provided by Intuit to connect to the websites web service). This is mainly for security purpose. Once the QuickBooks Web Connector connects to the web service, the web service should pass qbXml requests for the corresponding tasks you want to achieve. The QuickBooks Web Connector will process the same and will send a qbXml response data to the web service, which can be processed by the website if required.

The PHP QuickBooks Framework can be found here at https://idnforums.intuit.com/messageview.aspx?catid=56&threadid=9164
This link also will be helpful to you. http://www.consolibyte.com/wiki/doku.php/quickbooks

The difficult part in these are it is difficult to debug the code when an error occurs. And when you start using this you will initially have lot of issues dealing with the correct qbXml format. If you have QuickBooks SDK installed in your system, a qbXml format document can be found under the Intuit installation directory. (For example, in my PC it is located at D:\Program Files\Intuit\IDN\QBSDK8.0\doc\qbxmlops80.xml). Always refer this document and make sure you don’t missed any required options while creating the qbXml request. You can also find a helpful an Xml Validator for qbXml in the “Start Up > Program Files > Intuit SDKs > QuickBooks SDK 8.0 > Tools > XML Validator“.

Luckily Keith Palmer has already spent time creating an open source PHP QuickBooks Framework ready to use for you. Thanks to him for creating that helpful framework for the PHP community. But still the above tools and info I mentioned may be helpful for you.

Feel free to post me if you have any questions, I will try my best to answer your queries.

Prabhul Sankar
South Ocean Solutions

 

Tony Robbins motivational speech at TEDTalks

Tony Robbins is the one whose books and speeches really inspire me to use my full potential and also motivates me on helping others as well.

 

jQuery Video tutorial series for Absolute Beginners

When I was browsing through the interest I came across these brilliant jQuery tutorials that maybe helpful for absolute beginners. If you want to get started on jQuery straightaway start learning here at “jQuery for Absolute Beginners : The Complete Series”

jQuery

jQuery is an excellent javascript library that will make coding javascript for your web applications far more easier. You can use different elements of your web page directly without worrying about traversing via the DOM structure. Another advantage of using jQuery is it automatically takes care of browser compatibility issues, so that you can focus on the logic rather than spending time trying to figure out how to make the same functionality work in different browsers. I use jQuery on most of the web projects I do.

 

PHP Frameworks Comparision

I recently spent some time to do some research on different php frameworks. I know there are a lot of PHP MVC (Model View Controller) frameworks out there. But I tried checking only three of them – CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Zend framework. All these frameworks are Open Source. I’m not going to give you a detailed review of each and every point of each framework, as you can find lot of detailed reviews out there. This is just a conclusion on review of those.

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is really a framework with very small footprint, as they claim it. It has all the MVC structure, scaffolding and all. Even though I don’t think scaffolding can be used for production purpose in it. CodeIgniter is basically a structure and some libraries and easy to learn compared to the other two frameworks I think. If you are about to start a project straight away and you want to use an MVC framework, then CodeIgniter is best option as the learning curve is small. And its also flexible, not strict on the MVC rules, as you have the option not to use models in the MVC structure and code around different ways you like to achieve the result you want.

CakePHP

CakePHP is also a very robust framework. I think we can define it as CakePHP is to PHP is more like what Rails is for Ruby (Correct me if I am wrong, as I’m not too much familiar with rails). The problem with CakePHP is the learning curve is more than that of CodeIgniter, and most importantly you need to code exactly how they want you to code. i.e. you have to follow exact naming conventions, even follow it in database field naming too. Even a missed underscore or a different name (than what they expect) for an object can pop up as an error. For example, if the model object name is “User” then the Controller object name for it has to be UsersController, exactly the same model object name in plural form. And this is a must and CakePHP will show errors if they don’t find the object. But the good part of that is if follow the conventions correct in CakePHP, everything falls in correct automatically. In addition to this the scaffolding feature of CakePHP is also brilliant.

Zend Framework

I really didn’t got a chance to try too much in it, mainly because the learning curve far more bigger than the other two frameworks. Zend has a massive objects library (yeah I mean really BIG library). You can understand it by just by seeing the download file size of Zend framework, its around 12 MB whereas other frameworks mentioned above are only around 1.5 MB. Zend framework is not very strict in their conventions and coding compared to CakePHP I think. I would say its just a massive library in the MVC structure that can be used it whichever way we want it to be used for projects. But I’m still not familiar with Zend compared to the other two frameworks, so I may be wrong about. (Feel free shed some light on my review if you know more about Zend framework).

Conclusion: To me I would pick CodeIgniter or CakePHP. I really can’t pick between these two. CakePHP needs some getting used to also, but I think it will help to standardize the coding as every coder has to follow same rules.

Feel free to post your comments about your experience with these frameworks.

Prabhul Sankar
www.southoceansolutions.com

 

Steve Jobs’ adress Stanford Commencement in 2005

A great speech by Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers, where he talks about the setbacks and opportunities he had in his life. And at the same time motivating the younger generation to follow their dreams.