In this edition I talked with Ivo Jansch (@ijansch) ex-CTO of Ibuildings which is one of the biggest PHP service companies in Europe. Ivo is known for his involvement in evangelising the use of PHP technology in enterprise environments. He is also the PHP 5.x Certification Advisory Board Member at Zend Technologies. You can read more about Jansch on his blog.

The questions asked include the usual with a few extras thrown in:

• How did you start with PHP?
• To someone who wants to become a better PHP developer, what is your advice?
• How do you debug your PHP code, do you use something like xdebug or krumo..etc?
• In the next 5 years, how do you foresee the PHP ecosystem
• If you had to go back in time, would you still choose PHP?

Cloud computing is finally reaching a point of maturity and leaving its early "hype" years behind. Ivo and Vito do a very good job of bringing the topic into a PHP developer's world in a very concise and objective manner, without leaving important platforms and concepts behind.

He briefly mentions the book's contents, both the technical and infrastructure issues it addresses, and gives a general opinion on the book and recommends it:

The book was a very pleasant read, not thick and not too thin. It helped me greatly as I prepared to give a presentation on Cloud Computing, allowing me to see different points of view as well as compare other technologies i had not had time or chance to try.

A couple of weeks ago, my dear friend Cal Evans asked me to review the book "PHP Development in the Cloud" written by "Ivo Jansch" and "Vito Chin". I accepted as I was very interesting in exploring more of the cloudy world I just found myself in the middle of. Another reason was that both authors were fellow co-workers at Ibuildings back in the day. I promised this would be an objective review seen through the eyes of a developer just started exploring the mystifying world of cloud solutions.

He briefly covers the focus of the book and how it makes the distinctions between platform types (PaaS, Sass, etc) to help clear a few things up. He liked that the book was written and organized well, but noted that some of the examples provided were hard to get working on the different platforms. He wished there was some sort of disclaimer that came with it that there'd be a learning curve on the examples that might require some additional work outside of the example to get started.

I had a conversation with Ivo at the Claddagh Ring of Hendon and we'd decided to write this book together. We wanted to clarify where cloud computing will intersect with the internet & the WWW; and parts of it that makes having a different term to describe the cloud necessary. We do so from a PHP perspective because it is the language for the web that we like the most.

Here's the book's summary:

Most developers gloss over when they hear "the cloud" as the term has been appropriated by marketing types and has very little true meaning anymore. In this book, Vito and Ivo strip bare the buzzwords and help PHP developers figure out what the cloud is actually about and how they can take advantage of what cloud computing has to offer. After reading this book, you will not only have a clear picture of what cloud computing is, but you'll also be able to utilize the various cloud services that are out there.

Cal asks his traditional "three questions":

• What's your background in programming and how did it lead you to PHP?
• What insight do you have to share with other managers about hiring active PHP community members?
• What advice to do you have community members looking to attract the attention of hiring managers?

You can either listen in-page, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

PHP is used all over the world and for all sorts of interesting projects. So it is no surprise that ZendCon pulls speakers from across the globe. One of the speakers coming to Santa Clara from afar is Ivo Jansch. [...] Since Ivo will be with us again this year for ZendCon, I thought I would catch up with him and ask him...3 Questions.

Topics included in the questions are things like the mobile+PHP work Ivo's doing at Egeniq, the state of PHP in larger companies (yes, sometimes it's just WordPress) and some of the things that they're focusing on in building their mobile applications in the future.

At the [Sogeti's Engineering World conference] there was a coding contest. Contestants could team up and had to write an application that found the shortest route through an arbitrary maze. [...] It wasn't until the second to last session during the conference that Juliette, Erik, Ian and Felix decided to not go see a talk but to attempt the contest.

The solution was presented to a largely non-PHP audience and benchmarked against some of the other entries created with other languages. The results were pretty amazing - while the PHP version didn't work through the problem the fastest, it did have a much shorter development time and lines of code.

Every company starts with a single website or web application, but as a company's online presence grows, many different applications and sites are deployed. With a traditional approach of treating each of these applications as separate solutions, a number of problems occur [...] Service APIs can help you reuse a set of common functionality, which is implemented only once into the service layer. They can also help integrate third party applications in a consistent and robust way, and work around possible performance limitations.

The whitepaper covers the differences between the traditional development model and how the service model changes how you think about your backend. He covers implementation, development, documentation, testing methods and general maintenance down the line.

Do not expect an advanced on PHP programming. As the author says, "this book is about PHP, but it is not about code" and "writing PHP code is only a part of the entire development life-cycle". It is definitely not about coding, neither about technical programming tricks. The book describes best practices, lessons learned, practical experiences, tools, techniques, methodologies and other related knowledge areas that all PHP professionals should follow to develop better enterprise software products.

Mauricio goes on to look at where the book fits in the development process and some of the specific chapters and what they offer to the Software Development Life Cycle process.

Despite it is difficult to focus the scope and the target public of the book writing about an area that encompasses too many topics of interest, Ivo Jansch, the author, did a great job to achieve this result with success.

I consider myself to be a newbie when it comes to profesional PHP web development. Sure I know how to CRUD, procedural-, object oriented development on a limited level, frameworks, functional designs, database designs, technical designs (all on a limited level). So yes, I know something but is my knowledge enough to be able to stand in the world of the real professionals? Therefore I might think and mention some stuff that is not related to enterprise. Please correct me whenever you come across such err.

She frames the review in light of what the titles of the book (the "enterprise" portion mainly) suggests about its contents. She talks about the contents of the book - descriptions of a software life cycle, architecture, quality assurance and optimization. In some of her final thoughts she mentions the quality of the book and some of the things it does well. (There also a Dutch summary for those Dutch PHPers out there.)