'Weather Forecast' Calendar Service in PHP
The BBC provide 3 day weather RSS feeds for most locations in the UK. I thought it would be interesting to create a web service to turn the weather feed into calendar feed format, so I could have a constantly updated forecast of the next 3 days of weather mapped on to my iPhone’s calendar. Here it is on my iPhone: Overview The service is separated into five files: ical.php – this contains the class ical which corresponds to a single calendar feed. A method called ‘addevent’ allows you to add new events to the calendar, and a method called ‘returncal’ redirects the resulting calendar file to the browser so people can subscribe to it using their calendar application. forecast.php – this file contains the class forecast, which has properties for all aspects that we want to record for each day’s forecast, ie: Wind Speed and Humidity. It also contains the forecast set, which is a collection of forecast objects. The set class is serializable, which means each forecast object can be stored in a text file, including the Wind Speed, Humidity and all other things we want to record for each day. scrape-weather.php – this file contains code that scrapes the weather feed, populates the forecast set with all the weather information for the next 3 days, and stores the result in a file called forecasts.ser. forecasts.ser – this is all the data for the three day weather forecast, in serialized format. It is automatically deleted and recreated when the scrape-weather.php script is run. reader.php – this file converts the forecasts.ser file into an iCal calendar, and outputs the iCal formatted result to the calendar application that accesses reader.php page. It uses two external libraries: ...