Archive for the ‘PHP’ Category

On wednesday my entry for this year's PHP Advent calendar was published. The article provides some guidelines for visiting PHP conferences and how to get the most out of them.

Since the advent site doesn't have a comments feature, feel free to post any comments you might have below.

I'm very impressed with the quality of the advent calendar this year. Articles like yesterday's 'The Framework as Franchise' by Paul Jones are really insightful. This year, there are hardly any articles with code samples. That's a good thing, there are enough of those on the regular sites. So this year's advent is one to treasure, it will be a nice collection of insightful articles on a wide range of PHP related topics.

For an overview of the articles so far, go here.

I will write up a post on all the conferences I did in the past 2 weeks later, but here are the slides from the 'Enterprise PHP' talk I did at this year's php|works conference:

So what does the PHP community think about why the chicken crossed the road?

Lukas Smith: "We should ignore the chicken for now and make sure that the parse-ability, typeability and ide compatibility of what separates this side from the road from the other side is better than the current separator proposal." *

Zoe Slattery: "To ensure the quality of the chicken once it has crossed the road, the code coverage of /ext/road needs to be at least 80%. The chicken will test || die." *

Chris Shiflett: "The chicken should be more aware of Cross Road Scripting vulnerabilities when crossing the road like that." *

Stefan Esser: "Ze chicken needs to be protected from ze stupid dumbasses that have no clue how to secure ze road. I have demonstrated zeveral vulnerabilities in ze road before, but I was ignored." *

Lorna Mitchell: "We do NOT exlude roosters, but we need to encourage the chicken so that it knows that it is ok to cross the obviously male-dominated road." *

Terry Chay: "Fuck, is crossing the road a design pattern? Shit no, it's not a fucking algorithm either. When I blog about it, I'm, like, the guy that totally killed the fucking chicken." *

Paul M Jones: "I don't care why the chicken crossed the road, but we need to benchmark how fast the chicken crossed the road using all the major frameworks. And Chay is a bully for making it cross the road!" * *

Ivo Jansch: "Why did the chicken cross the road? [jaws]Dumdumdumdum...[/jaws]" *

Cal Evans: "Good morning twitterverse! Today is an AWESOME day for the chicken to cross the road! But if it doesn't cross the road in 60 seconds, I'll move to Holland." * * *

Paul Reinheimer: "The chicken crossed the road because I was on the other side. In my KISS outfit." *

Ligaya Turmelle: "Chicken Darlin!" (smooches chicken) *

Derick Rethans: "I debugged the chicken while it crossed the road. I will speak about the results at works, tek, ipc, phpnw, phpbarcelona, phplondon, phpquebec, froscon, phpvikinger, oscon, dpc, phpnorge and zendcon. Hey, alcohol!" * *

Michelangelo van Dam "50 chickens are marching across the road!" *

Harold Goldberg: "We are The Chicken Company. To cross the road, please enter your Zend user id and password." *

Chris Cornutt: "The chicken has posted an update on its blog today, explaining the reasons for crossing the road. Some of the reasons it mentioned are 'wanting to be on the other side', 'just because' and 'what road?'. Check out the full details in the chicken's post, as well as the community's responses to the crossing of the road here." *

Laura Thomson: "All chicken suck." *

Post your PHP community chicken theories below!

This fall is quite a busy time, conference wise. This weekend I returned from Microsoft's PDC2008 conference (small report on the PHP related things on the company blog). This week I'll be at the office to catch up with people and to start our PHP Center of Expertise with Cal Evans who had his first official work day at Ibuildings today.

Next week, I'm off to Atlanta for php|works. I will do my 'Enterprise PHP' talk there. It'll be the last time I'm doing that talk. It started as a 25 minute introduction at a Zend business seminar 1.5 years ago, and has since evolved into a book, a series of conference talks and into an upcoming column in php|architect magazine. That stretches the lifetime of the talk, and I'll start working on a whole new topic for next year.

Directly after php|works I'm off to Redmond, where Microsoft has invited a group of people from the PHP community to their 'Web Summit' to talk about things like PHP on Windows, and then from there I'll be flying to Manchester, for the phpNW conference in Manchester. I will take part in a panel discussion, the topic is 'State of the Community'.

phpNW is the first of its kind in the North of the UK, and there are only a few days left to get tickets at the special early bird price of 50 GBP. 50 Pounds is very cheap for a conference of this size. You'll learn as much as in a training course, yet you pay only a fraction. It should be very easy to convince your boss that you should go there, if you are in the UK.

And then I hope for a quiet December month, which gives me some time to reflect on 2008, and to start working on plans for 2009 (exciting things are ahead).

I'm usually not very late with a conference report, but last week's events kept me busy. With Leoni having to work a Sunday shift however, I have a day to clean up some odds and ends, so here's my report.

The day to day reports can be read on our company blog so I'll just give a more general opinion on the conference and pick two favorite talks.

In many ways, Zendcon08 was an improvement over Zendcon07 (which already was a great conference, but it's nice to see Zend was able to improve it even more). Most notable for me was that the community aspect was bigger than last year. The Uncon (sessions organized by the community outside the main conference) was more prominent and more popular, and featured several outstanding sessions.

Also, the evening events got a lot more visitors than last year. The Yahoo! party was generally considered to be less than last year however, mainly due to the fact that unlike last year, there was only one free drink and any drinks afterward had ridiculous prices. But the ZCE party on monday, the general reception on tuesday and the meet the team session on wednesday were very nice and I got a chance to talk to a lot of people.

The opening keynote was still a bit 'corporate', with Harold, the CEO from Zend talking mainly about PHP adoption in the enterprise and some case studies. I liked it, but 'enterprise php' is kind of my thing; I heard several developers say they rather have something more technical. Another way they made the conference less corporate was that they dropped the vendor keynotes they had in 2007. Since those tend to be overly commercial, it was a good idea to skip them.

My favorite presentation was "The State of Ajax" by Ben Galbraith. I hadn't expected that actually; from the title I thought it would be Yet Another Ajax talk, but it was very insightful and Ben did a great job explaining current and future trends. Most interesting thing I got out of it was getting to know Fluid, a 'site specific browser' that lets you treat webapps such as Gmail, Facebook, Google Calendar etc. as separate desktop applications with even nifty things such as Growl notifications or 'new mail' indicators in the OSX dock. I immediately installed it on my macbook and I love it.

My second favorite was Terry Chay's uncon session on 'Making Frameworks Suck Less'. I hope Terry will convert that into a real talk, as it was even better than his 'The internet is an Ogre' talk: this time he had a lot more valid points and he did a better job of getting them across. (On the other hand, if he converts this to a real talk, probably the charm of running it as an informal uncon session using just a flip-chart will be lost.)

The next conference I'm looking forward to is php|works where for the first time a PHP conference is combined with a Python conference. It will be interesting to see how that works out. But first I'll be visiting Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference in October. Although that is not likely to contain a lot of PHP, I was invited by Microsoft because they want to reach out to the PHP community (which was also obvious from their ZendCon presence), so let's find out what they have to tell us.

Cal Evans and I recently had a wild idea involving ElePHPants and pictures. Since we're usually not very busy people anyway, we converted the idea into a little site:

http://www.elephpantworldtour.com

(Well, 'we': Cal did the coding, I just added the text and the logos; I guess organizing ZendCon must be very easy this year )

We got our companies and a bunch of other companies to sponsor some prizes so we could turn this into a contest.

So take your elephpants and your camera to ZendCon, IPC, PHPNW, php|works etc, or just take them with you on your next vacation, and show us the adventures of your elephpant! The site's About page contains more information and the instructions.

See also Cal's blog post about ewt08.

Have fun!