Currently browsing php
Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:27 UTC
It’s been a week since Day 3 (Day 2 for those on the zero-indexed conference time-table), and it’s high time I got around to writing up my thoughts on the conference…
I arrived late to Sebastian Bergmann’s “Graph-Oriented Programming with PHP” presentation, where he showed how to use graph-oriented programming to implement workflows in PHP applications.
Next up was Maggie Nelson’s “How to Optimize a Database Query,” about which others have written nice things. (As a side note, Maggie presented this with live examples from the Oracle command line interface instead of using slides—a difficult and risky way to present, but she pulled it off flawlessly.)
After that, I sat in on Ed Finkler’s “Intro to Code Igniter” presentation. As a minimalistic framework (which I love), Code Igniter appears promising, but I was a bit disappointed to see that it makes attempts to be supported on PHP 4, so there are no advanced OOP techniques being used.
The highlight of the day came next with Terry Chay’s new talk “The Internet Is An Ogre: Finding Art in the Software Architecture” where Terry was his typical self, dropping the f-bomb and pointing out where popular books are dead wrong. I look forward to watching him present this again at ZendCon and seeing how it’s evolved by then.
Finally Chris Jones and Ed Finkler rounded out the day with “Next Generation Database Applications” and “Securing the PHP Environment With PhpSecInfo” (respectively).
In all, this was one of the best PHP conferences I’ve attended. I agree with Ed, who said, “php|architect conferences lack pretension, and that’s really nice—it’s about the people and sharing knowledge.” This really was the case. And there wasn’t a time slot that I couldn’t find something of interest to attend; all the speakers and topics were interesting and relevant. Kudos to the folks at php|architect for having the discernment to select excellent presenters/topics!
There was one thing, however, that was a shame: although the event was held in Atlanta, there were few locals in attendance. I counted about five or six from the Atlanta PHP user group, but apart from that, I don’t know of any others from Atlanta who attended.
Atlanta PHP developers: you had a PHP conference in your backyard, and you missed it! What a wasted opportunity!
1 Comment »
Permalink
Tags: conferences, php, phpworks, phpworks2007, works07
Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:03 UTC
Even though today is officially “day 1” of php|works, I consider it “day 2” because I spent the majority of yesterday (six hours of it) standing and talking to a room full of people about topics they need to know to pass the Zend Certification Exam. It was a tiring day, and my lack of sleep and trek through two hours of Atlanta rush-hour traffic didn’t help. Still, I made it through the day, I think the tutorial was a success, and I hope that those attending who took the exam yesterday or today passed with flying colors.
Today began with Andrei Zmievski’s keynote entitled “The Future: PHP6,” or “Im in ur endginn, playin wif ur stringz.” Here are a few notes I gleaned from his presentation:
- Unicode is so simple you could probably explain it to Paris Hilton, or Miss Teen South Carolina might be able to explain it to you.
- PHP6 = PHP5 + Unicode, PHP5 = PHP6 – Unicode, Unicode = PHP6 – PHP5
- mojibake: phenomenon of incorrect, unreadable characters shown when software fails to render a text according to its associated encoding
- “APC is the best thing to happen to PHP since Rasmus stopped working on it single-handedly.”
- “Ask yourself: Can I live with PHP 4? Until 8/8/8? If yes, you’re done. Thanks for playing.”
Afterwards, I supported my colleague, Maggie Nelson, by attending her talk, “You Don’t Need A DBA.” I had the opportunity to see a preliminary version of her talk, and while I enjoyed the preliminary version, she had vastly improved it with great examples and information.
After Maggie’s presentation, it was my turn to give my talk “Designing RESTful Web Applications.” The slides for this talk are already available on my site.
Due to some unavoidable distractions from work, I had to miss the lunchtime keynote, “PHP 4 is dead! Migrate your code,” delivered by Chris Shiflett. This was unfortunate because I was apparently featured in all my drunken karaoke glory on one of the slides. Now, I’ll never know how I helped to convince people to transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5.
The highlight presentation of the day, though, was perhaps Sara Golemon’s “How PHP Ticks.” In this talk, Sara explained how the PHP engine converts PHP code into tokens, which get further converted into their opcodes that the Zend engine then runs. It was very informative and not at all dry, due mostly in part to Sara’s sense of humor and presentation style. Two big take-aways from this talk:
- Use token_get_all() to get all the tokens in your script
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:06 UTC
So, I’m here gearing up for php|works at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel near the Atlanta airport. I’m giving a 6-hour Zend PHP 5 Certification Crash Course tomorrow. Following that, I’ll play host to some speakers and conference attendees (as a sort of unofficial social coordinator—as if I have those skills) for after-hours dinner and drinks. If you’re interested in hanging out after-hours this week, look me up at the conference and let me know.
Also, I’ll be logged into #phpc on Freenode IRC this week along with many other conference attendees. The channel will serve as a sort of (unofficial) conference chatter channel to find conference goers, make plans, and make general mischief, heckling the speakers behind their backs. 
I assume there’s still time to register if you’re interested in attending.
No Comments
Permalink
Tags: conferences, php, phpc, phpcommunity, phpworks, phpworks2007, works07, zce
Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:24 UTC
Atlanta PHP is proud to welcome php|works to Atlanta, GA on September 12-14!
php|architect invites you to Harness the Power of PHP, at this year’s php|works conference.
This year’s edition of php|works will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, home of the Braves and of the Atlanta PHP user group, on September 13th and 14th, with an extra tutorial day on September 12th.
The conference once again promises to be an excellent event for PHP developers of all levels, with talks from top PHP experts such as Derick Rethans, Chris Shiflett, Andrei Zmievski, Sara Golemon, and many more (and plenty of new faces, as well).
Sign up today before the conference sells out!
No Comments
Permalink
Tags: atlanta, atlphp, conferences, php, phpworks, phpworks2007, works07
Fri, 24 Aug 2007 0:14 UTC
I just wanted to take a moment to promote the PHP Unconference to be hosted this year by Zend during the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo in Burlingame, CA. The Chairperson for the PHP Unconference ‘07 is none other than the PHP community’s very own Patrick Reilly. He’ll be in charge of making sure things run smoothly and that the open community aspect of the unconference is maintained.
Patrick writes this on the Zend Conference wiki page for the PHP Unconference:
When was the last time an event challenged your assumptions, and made you think?
The PHP Unconference is a way to bring people who have a shared interest in PHP together. It could be just to explore interest in a common theme or it could be to do work together to accomplish a goal.
The PHP Unconference is being hosted by Zend Technologies Ltd. as a community space that it is sponsoring and helping create.
In addition to running the unconference, Patrick has created a #zendcon IRC channel for all attendees of the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo. This channel will serve as an excellent community gathering place during the conference to chat about presentations, ideas, and where to get drinks. It’s located on the Freenode network, so stop by and say “hi.”
2 Comments »
Permalink
Tags: conferences, php, zendcon, zendcon07, ZendConference, zendconference2007
Wed, 22 Aug 2007 3:02 UTC
Last year, a substantial number of regulars of #phpc attended the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, so we decided to make #phpc t-shirts for everyone. This year, that number of attendees from #phpc has dramatically risen, and, again, we’ll be creating special t-shirts, this time using the original PHPCommunity.org logo created by Peter Jovanovic (with contributions from Richard Davey).
If you’ll be attending the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, and you’d like to show your support for PHPCommunity.org, then use this handy form to buy a shirt. Ligaya Turmelle will be in charge of handing out the shirts at the conference. If you can’t make it to the conference, and you’d still like a shirt, I’m sure Lig can work out something for you (like shipping). Just ask her on the IRC channel.
3 Comments »
Permalink
Tags: conferences, php, phpc, phpcommunity, zendcon, ZendConference
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:35 UTC
I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, so today’s post will include my thoughts on sessions I’ve attended for the past two days, but I’ll try to keep things short. If you know me, you’ll understand how difficult this can be.
I’m trying to attend many of the community talks and panels, especially because of my involvement in Atlanta PHP and the #phpc IRC channel. So, the first talk I attended yesterday was How to Herd Cats and Influence People by Jono Bacon. I actually have a lot of notes on this, but I won’t share them here, but the one big quote I took home from this talk was: “Always be flexible; when you stop being flexible, that’s when bureaucracy kicks in.” The bottom line about dealing with an open source community is: you want to encourage people to accomplish things quickly. Getting newcomers involved right away and accomplishing things helps them to get involved right away achieving and contributing. This gets them excited about contributing, and they’ll move on to do more, and they’ll become effective members of the community. If anyone has to ask questions about how to get involved, then you’ve lost. You need to have all this stuff documented so it’s easy for them to figure out how and where to get involved.
Afterwards, I attended the panel Who Gets to Decide What Open Source Means?, Rob Richard’s Who Am I? The Age of the Digital Identity, and Patrick Reilly’s Improving Performance by Profiling PHP Applications.
The day ended with the Mozilla party off-site. The band was good, but the free (as in “free beer” and “freedom”) beer was awful. Someone should fork the beer and make it better. After the Mozilla party, we descended upon Sun’s OpenSolaris party. In years past, the OpenSolaris party was small and held in one of the suites at the DoubleTree Hotel. This year, it was held in the hotel’s garage, and it was huge and loud. I prefer the more personable parties they’ve had in the past; they were quiet, and the Sun representatives were fun to hang out with. I didn’t see any Sun representatives at the party this year, but perhaps I wasn’t looking.
Today, I attended Andrei Zmievski’s VIM for PHP Programmers, A Resource-Oriented Approach on Data Services by Mike Pittaro of SnapLogic, Accessibility for Web 2.0 by Eric David, the Art of Community panel, and Brenda Wallace’s PHP Add-ons for Fun and Profit.
For the “Resource-Oriented Approach” talk, Mike Pittaro described SnapLogic’s method of returning resources through the use of “pipelines.” Basically, as I understood it, the client would request data from one particular URI, which would send the request through a “pipeline,” do something with the data, and return a new URI from which the data can be fetched. For example, if you request a sorted representation of data, you would send a request to the sort URI, which would return a URI that represents the sorted data, but this URI is temporary and is no longer valid after a time.
Now, a group of us are sitting around in the hallway trying to figure out our dinner/party plans for the evening. My flight leaves tomorrow, and I can’t wait to get home to my wife and son, so I’ll miss the brewers’ fest, but I’ll be glad to be home.
(On the board next to me is a place for people to list software tools they wish they had. Someone put in one of the blocks that they want a “virtual girlfriend.” Beside it, a note was added in a different handwriting: “that doesn’t suck.”)
3 Comments »
Permalink
Tags: oscon, oscon07, php
Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:51 UTC
Yesterday, I mentioned a “super secret” announcement party that Intel was throwing for bloggers and the press. So, what did they announce? Well, in short, they are releasing a fully open source version of their Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) C++ template library. It’s under the GPLv2 (and not an Intel OSS license). The TBB simplifies development of software running on multiple cores (in parallel).
The announcement itself doesn’t really apply to me and the work I do. I am a PHP programmer, and I rarely hack at the PHP core. Even if I did contribute to the PHP core, it’s all in C, so using TBB, which is for C++, isn’t an option. Still, TBB might be useful for PHP extensions written in C++, so there is that.
Today, I sat in on the OpenID Bootcamp and Simple Ways To Be a Better Programmer sessions.
The latter was by far the most entertaining session I’ve attended thus far, and it wasn’t anything that I expected. It focused more on “people hacks” than programming principals. The basic gist was to be a better programmer by being a member of the programming community, communicating more effectively in the community and with your co-workers, looking in the right places for help, taking part in community discussions, and meeting other members of the community. I can attest from experience that these all do really make you a better programmer.
Tomorrow the official conference begins with opening keynotes and regular sessions. Lots of great sessions to attend, but, for now, I’m heading to the Zend/MySQL party.
1 Comment »
Permalink
Tags: intel, oscon, oscon07, parallel, php, tbb, threading
Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:44 UTC
Hi, all. It’s been about a month since my last post, and, for those who know me, I’ve been off of IRC and IM for nearly a month, as well. It’s been very busy around the office, but now that things have slowed down a little, I plan to be around a bit more.
So, now I’m breaking my “radio silence” to write about OSCON. I’ll be here all week, and I hope to blog consistently about the goings on.
Today and tomorrow are the tutorial days, and, at times, tutorials can be too long because the speakers are often dry. The information is great, but the delivery is not always very engaging. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the two tutorials I attended today: Rasmus’s “You Got JavaScript in My PHP! And…” and Theo’s “Scalable Internet Architectures” tutorials.
I’ve also had the chance to catch up with some old friends, and I ran into Cal Evans in the hallway today wearing the t-shirt below. On the shirt, it reads: “PHP is the new BLACK.” Anyone want to enlighten me as to what that means?
So… now, I’ve heard tale of some secret announcement party for bloggers and the press to attend. Gotta make my way there and see what the hoopla is all about.
2 Comments »
Permalink
Tags: oscon, oscon07, php
Wed, 13 Jun 2007 1:18 UTC
Maggie writes about an Oracle problem over which we were pulling out our hair. In the end, the solution was fairly simple, but I’ll let you read her post for all the details. I’ll just mention that Christopher Jones pointed me to a freely available book he and Alison Holloway wrote specifically for PHP developers using Oracle: The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual.
Christopher says, “The book is designed to bridge the gap between the many PHP and the many Oracle texts available.” This is a must-read for anyone using Oracle and PHP together, and they continually maintain it and keep it up-to-date.
On page 80 of the manual, it states:
If you are using an Oracle Database 10g Release 2 database other than the Express Edition (“XE”), you may need to give the Apache process access to Oracle’s libraries and globalization data. Refer to the $ORACLE_HOME/install/changePerm.sh script. Each time you restart Apache, make sure you have the same environment variables set for Oracle. In particular ORACLE_HOME should always be set.
Wiser words were never writ…
1 Comment »
Permalink
Tags: oracle, php
