I stumbled upon a fantastic PHP class today and felt compelled to comment on it. Originally written by Tyler Hall, this class allows you to send notifications to any system running Growl from a PHP script. For those of you that don’t know, Growl is an application written for Mac OS X that is intended to act as a universal notification tool (much like the taskbar notification bubbles we’ve all come to know and love in Windows XP/Vista).

The class itself is incredibly simple and straightforward, and allows you to send notifications using only 5 lines of code. Consider this simple example:

// Setup
$growl = new Growl();
$growl->setAddress('127.0.0.1');
$growl->addNotification("Test");
$growl->register();
 
// Send Notification
$growl->notify("Test", "Test Alert", "The body of the test alert!");

 
Pretty nifty isn’t it? One could very easily integrate this into a logger to notify you immediately of any critical errors with your scripts, or even tell you every time a given page is viewed. So if you want to check out my modified version (a bit more standards-compliant with PHP 5) you can see it here, or view the original author’s site to see the original.

Download: Growl PHP Class