php|architect: PHPCon 2004 &amp; MySQL ComCon
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php|architect has a new posting this morning serving as a reminder to all of those wanting to go to the International PHP Conference (and MySQL ComCon Europe 2004) - time is running out to register.
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The folks heading up the Dutch PHP Conference this year (happening in 5 short days) have posted the complete list of speakers for this year's event including:   Cal Evans - "My First Mashup" Gaylord Aulke - "Zend Framework" Stefan Koopmanschap - "Symfony Framework" Derick Rethans - "Test-driven Development"   Unfortunately, if you haven't gotten your tickets already, you're going to have to wait until next year. According to Ivo Jansch, the conference sold out right before the early-bird deadline came around. With such a great showing from developers and a great lineup of speakers for this year, you can almost guarantee that there'll be a conference next year too - so keep your eyes out for it.
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted his wrapup of this year's Dutch PHP Conference held in Amsterdam.   The chairs are all folded, the displays are back in their tubes and the speakers have all move on to their next big thing. Before the shadows of time fog our memory, let's take a look back over our shoulder at what was The Dutch PHP Conference.   Cal talks about the attendance (sold out!), a link to his keynote code in action and an overview of some of the talks presented.
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The Hiveminds Magazine has pointed out a new effort that's been kicked off today to try to get the PHP community (and providers) to finally make the leap and drop PHP4 support all together:   The idea is to make a unified, concentrated effort to drop PHP4 support and drive PHP5 adoption in the year 2008. Think of it. All CMS, forum and framework projects going completely over to PHP5 on a set date! This would be like a bomb dropping on the web hosting world and cause ripples throughout the open source world.   They point out some of the projects that are leaning either way from ezPublish hanging on to PHP4 and apps like Drupal that have embraced PHP5. In fact, it's the Drupal group that's written up the proposal on how it would all go down - the "Go PHP5 Effort".   It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The open source PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed open source PHP projects have all agreed that effective 5 February 2008, any new feature release will have a minimum  required PHP version no older than PHP 5.2.0.   There's tons of comments to the proposal in both parties (and some in between noting that there are already several PHP4 applications that run quite happily on PHP5).
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Job Posting: National Auto Warranty Seeks MySQL DBAJob Posting: National Auto Warranty Seeks PHP Web App Developer (Wentzville, MO)DevShed: Creating a Login Script for a PHP Invoicing SystemZak Greant's Blog: The eZ partner program (response to Seth Gottlieb's Commercial O/S business post)php|architect: Application-level Logging with the Zend FrameworkPaul Reinheimer's Blog: Object-Oriented PHP, Concepts, Techniques, and CodeRyan Malesevich's Blog: Fight Spam Comments with Bad Behavior and AkismetZend Developer Zone: SQLite: Lean, Mean DB MachineBuilderau.com.au: Cache PHP scripts with APC modulePro-PHP Podcast: Interview With Cal EvansSitePoint PHP Blog: PHP extension for Cairo graphics libraryTechnobabbler.com: making a radar loop with PHPDevShed: Working with MySQL Result Sets and the Decorator Pattern in PHPJob Posting: exhibit-E Seeks Interactive Developer (New York, NY)Jacob Santos' Blog: Patterns for PHP: Page Controller Draft
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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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Michael Kimsal has posted a formal prediction that a patch, created by someone in the community, will emerge making it simple to bridge the gap between PHP4 and PHP5 applications.   Given the high number of shared hosts still running PHP4, the backwards compatibility issues going from 4->5 (yes, there are some!) and the new PHP4 "end of life" date (8/8/8), someone will likely find a way to make these run together, and possibly even charge money for it.   He suggests that many hosts out there would happily pay a sum to get this kind of functionally for their customers. It would provide a solution to customers who just don't understand the force towards PHP5 and would make them (and their PHP4 applications) happier.
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Since it's always good to know where we've come from (to see where we're headed, right?), Sebastian Bergmann has posted an observeration he's had upon PHP Magazin's look back at the world of PHP.   In his editorial for the 5 Year Anniversary Edition of the German PHP Magazin Bj&ouml;rn Schotte posted a link to Kristian K&ouml;hntopp's wrapup of the world's first PHP conference which was held in October 2000 in Cologne, Germany.   The wrapup is of the PHP Congres Cologne that happened back at the beginning October of 2000. Topics disussed were PHPDocumentor, OpenTracker, using MySQL with PHP, web security, and much more. Check out the full posting for all of the details and a bit of a look back in PHP's history.   You can also check out some of Bj&ouml;rn's comments about the article over on the ThinkPHP Blog.
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Tobias Schlitt has announced on his blog today that their PHP event, PHP Weekender, has reached the 50 attendee mark already.   It is a great feeling for us to see how many people are interested. Since we are at the university, we have enough space left to get some more attendees in, but beware, space is already getting rare.   For complete information on this event, check out the homepage and sign up today. There's no charge - just show up and enjoy learning everything from beginner PHP techniques out to best practices and working with PHP 5.
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Vineet Agrawal sent us along an email today about a new event happening at this year's OSSCampDelhi - Delhi's first PHP Unconference:    India's first community driven PHP Camp is on 08-09 September 2007.  PHP Camp is part of India's biggest Open Source UnConference "OSS Camp".  More than 300 Geeks from across the world are expected to participate.    PHP Camp will bring together the PHP community in a distinctly un-conference setting, to gather in groups to discuss or hack on something, rather than sitting in chairs and listening to marketing presentations with corporate logo.  It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.  Participation is free of cost!  OSS Camp is based on philosophy of Bar Camp .  Barcamp is an ad-hoc gathering born out of the desire for people to meet up, share, exchange ideas and possibilities in an open environment.   At OSS Camp there are no RULES, FIXED Formats, where open source geeks run the show!!   Some of the tracks for PHP camps are Frameworks, Unit Testing, PHP Security, Performance Management, High Availability beside product specific themes like Joomla, Drupal, EZ, Dot Project camps.      You can find out more information from the wiki for the event and, if you're interested in presenting, head over to the submissions page and provide the info for your session (around 40 minutes for a normal talk, 90 minutes for a workshop).
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Matthew O'Phinney's Blog: svn:externals (and the Zend Framework)Mark Jaquith's Blog: WordPress 2.0.6: Feedburner issue, and fixJob Posting: Unborn Media Inc Seeks PHP/MySQL Developer (Boston, MA)Zend Developer Zone: Tutorial : Using Zend Framework Without PDONetmag.co.uk: Make your own SoapChristopher Jones' Blog: Duplicate Columns in "2 Day Plus PHP Developer Guide"International PHP Magazine: Poll Question: Which is the Best PHP MVC Framework?William Candillon's Blog: phpAspect alpha 0.1.0 is released!Community News: phpthrowdown Registration OpenZend Developer Zone:  AJAX Chat Part Tutorial 6 : Updating the User ListIBM developerWorks: U2 PDO Driver Tutorial, Parts 1 & 2Stoyan Stefanov's Blog: Reusing an existing database connection with MDB2DevShed: Introducing the Memento PatternNexen.net: PHP statistics for December 2006Sandro Groganz's Blog: Syntax Highlighting & Migrating Permalinks in WordPress
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Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.   I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.   The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.   Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.
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Those that didn't get a chance to check out this year's PHP UK Conference can get a little taste of what it was like from Rob Allen's perspective in his latest blog post today.   Included in the happenings he mentions were the talk that Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone gave on mashups, Kevin Henney's look at Object Orientation, and Rasmus Lerdorf's look at PHP5 performance/security. He also mentions meeting up with Dagfinn Reiersol (author of PHP in Action) to "talk shop" a bit about writing books.   You can check out all of the details about the conference that was over on their website including summaries of the talks that were given during this jam-packed one day event.
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Christopher Jones has a note on his blog today about the Orcale Develop Conference happening in San Francisco October 23rd through the 25th and some of the PHP involvement there.    First on my ToDo list is Oracle's user conference. PHP is well represented at Oracle Develop. This is a new part of the huge Oracle OpenWorld event running in San Francisco in a few weeks.   Registrations are still open for Oracle Develop. You can register separately or if you register for the full OpenWorld you get the Develop conference gratis, I was told.  Check the fine print on this.    Talks for the conference include:  Rasmus Lerdorf's "Getting Rich with PHP" "Hands-on Lab: Developing and Deploying Oracle and PHP" from a representative from Oracle and Christopher Jones giving a talk on "The PHP/Oracle Experience: Building for Scalability"    Check out the conference website for more information and to register today.
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The September 2004 issue of php|architect has been announced.
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Matthew Turland, like many in the PHP community these days, has been pondering PHP6 and what it might mean to both the developers and to the language itself:   Be that as it may, as a user with about five years under his belt as of now who has seen all qualities of PHP code ranging from pristine to pedantic, a thought or two has crossed my mind on the subject of the latest upcoming incarnation of the language.   Specifically, he talks about some of the hot topics like namespaces, the mysqlnd driver, Unicode support, and named parameters. Overall, though, his comments are positive, looking toward a brighter future for PHP with this upcoming edition.
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In a new post to his blog, Christopher Jones mentions some of the talks that he's going to give at the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo:   Oracle & PHP users: make sure you check out the Zend Conference.  I'll be given a couple of sessions, "Connection Pooling & Other Features for Data Scaling" and "Performance Tuning for PHP with Oracle Databases".  There are plenty of other great talks, too.   There's tons of other sessions happening during the conference including talks on:   best practices enterprise PHP the Zend Framework API design   Check out the official conference page for information on location, other sessions and registration.