I'm not a fan of bragging, but something is going on here that makes me extremely proud.

It's been 7 years since I started to work for Ibuildings. Back then, they were an average development startup, focussed on delivering web applications, and they were using this fairly new, experimental, open source scripting language called PHP3.

It's fun to see how a company can grow with a language. I've seen PHP go from PHP3 to PHP4 and later from PHP4 to PHP5, and in the meanwhile, Ibuildings' focus has shifted more and more from a development shop to a PHP service company. Companies that used to be our competitors, gradually became our customers. And we've grown from a 3 people group to a crowd of 48.

And I'm proud (and not too shy) to say that at the moment, we are the only 100% PHP service company in The Netherlands, with projects ranging from plain old development and outplacement, to training and consultancy (audits, development methodology implementation, architecture etc.). And promoting PHP in general, with events such as the DPC earlier this year.

Last year I was very proud when Zend made us their official representative in The Netherlands. Besides the fact that we can now sell Zend products and services, which is nice for our sales people, I was particularly fond of this, as it confirmed that we must have been doing something right.

And now we're happy to announce we're going to do something left.

Recently we've seen increasing demand for PHP services in the UK. The adoption of open source in the UK has been a bit slower than on the European mainland, but PHP is finally gaining momentum there.
And if there's a market for PHP, there's a market for PHP services.

So now we are not only 'Ibuildings.nl BV', but also 'Ibuildings UK Ltd', and we have a home in London. Whoot! PHP on the right and on the left side of the road.

We already have a small group there doing cool things with PHP. And we're happy to have bright people such as Gavin Lee Foster, the author of Xinc on board.

I'm not bragging entirely without a reason. We are hiring. We have job openings in both the Netherlands and the UK. And we have plans in several other European countries as well (servicing those primarily from the UK and NL for now).

So if you're above average in terms of PHP skills, have good communication skills, and you want to use those skills not only to develop, but also to help others learn to see the power of PHP, send us proof of your skills, and an up to date resume, and we'll be in touch.

On june 16th we organized the first Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. The event was attended by more than 250 people and with speakers such as Cal Evans, Kevlin Henney, Lukas Smith, Derick Rethans and many others, I think it was a great event.

We've decided to make it a yearly event, so mark June 14, 2008 in your agenda for the next instalment.

I did a presentation on business frameworks (and ATK in particular) at the conference, the slides of which can be found on slideshare.

The DPC was not the only new conference, last monday I visited the first Zend UK PHP for Business Seminar organized by the London office of Zend. This conference was targeted at 'business people', and featured speakers such as Zeev Suraski, Harold Goldberg (Zend's new CEO), David Boloker (IBM) and Clint Oram (SugarCRM).

I had the honor of presenting a talk on 'enterprise PHP development' on the seminar. Since it was targeted at business people, I explained the development process of PHP applications using metaphors. What may be obvious for most of us, isn't so obvious for a lot of people and companies, so I found it important to talk about the process surrounding PHP development, and not just plain PHP coding itself.

Below are the slides of this talk:

This is the 7th presentation I did in 3 months time; I'm beginning to get the hang of this.

Some of the developers at Ibuildings are working with PHP on IBM's System-i platform. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it has been called 'iSeries' for a while and it's basically a new name for the old AS/400. If you're old enough to remember Happy Days you probably remember those nifty 'green screens' that they used to use in stores, banks etc. There's a 90% chance that these green screen applications were running on AS/400.

The green screens have mostly made way for more modern interfaces, but the servers that run them still exist today. Many of the applications on them have been modernized by adding a web-interface to the existing applications.

There are several ways to make a web interface for green screen applications, or 'RPG programs', as System-i developers call them; RPG is the programming language that they traditionally use on those machines, and it is complete abacadabra to most PHP developers.

For a while now it is possible to use Java to make webinterfaces on System-i, and there are several cgi based tools. And recently IBM and Zend have teamed up to port PHP to the i5/OS operating system. So far this port seems succesful; one of the reasons is perhaps that PHP is easier to adopt by traditional System-i developers than Java, which forces you to learn Object Oriented Programming. In PHP you can do OOP, but you don't have to. You don't even have to use functions, and this is a lot closer to classic System-i languages (although I would of course recommend any System-i developer moving to PHP to learn at least about procedural programming).

When running PHP apps on System-i, you can use the standard db2 database extension to access the db2 database, but alternatively you can also use the 'i5 toolkit' that is available in PHP on i5/OS. There are some subtle differences, and if you find yourself having to write PHP applications for System-i, it's good to know about how to use the i5 toolkit to use the db2 database. Harrie Verveer has written an article on this topic on our company blog. It explains one of the differences between the db2_* and i5_* functions, but it contains some sample code and as such is a nice example of how to use the i5 functions.

Ever since the International PHP Conference Spring Edition was cancelled last year, and moved to Germany this year, we've been planning to do a replacement conference for the Dutch PHP community.

We've worked hard the past few weeks to pull this together, and I am happy to announce that on June 16th, we will have the first instalment of the official Dutch PHP Conference!

The conference is oranised by Ibuildings with the help of Zend, and is targeted at a Dutch audience. We are still finalizing the program but we already have quite a lineup, with speakers such as Cal Evans, Lukas Smith, Kevlin Henney and Gaylord Aulke (all present in the PHP card deck ;)).

In total there will be 12 presentations divided over 3 parallel tracks. The Dutch PHP Usergroup will arrange an exhibition area where open source PHP project can show off their projects.

Following the example of the UK PHP Conference we are keeping the price low, at 75 euro if you register before the first of June. Registrations will start on monday, but you can already have a look at the conference web site:

http://www.phpconference.nl