I have not been that active on the conference scene in the past few years, but the ones where I did attend I also tried to take a peek at what others are doing. Also this post is kind of exploratory to see what other people think, hopefully without inviting a flame fest upon myself. So with this disclaimer out of the way, I think the big 3 frameworks for the next few years will be Lithium, Zend Framework 2 and Symfony2.

He looks at each of his "winners" and explains his rationale behind their selection including community support, features offered and the overall structure and feel of the framework. He mentions two other interesting frameworks of note that have come out of other projects - Flow3 and Nooku. Comments on the post suggest even more frameworks to look to in the future including Yii and mentions of Nette and CodeIgniter.

I recently had a chance to catch up via e-mail with Ben Waine, winner of the 2011 PHP on Azure contest. [...] I only followed the contest from a distance while it was happening, but after hearing that Ben had won the contest (I had the good fortune of meeting Ben in person at the 2010 Dutch PHP Conference) and after reading a bayesian filter he developed to help filter out some of the twitter spam.

]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:44:39 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/16417 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/16417 As a part of this year's php|tek conference, the folks at php|architect once again put together their choices for the "Impact Awards", a special recognition for projects that have really made a mark over the last year in a few different categories.

As part of the grand finale of php|tek '11, Keith Casey announced the winners of the first annual php|architect Impact Awards. These awards are selected by the subscribers of php|architect magazine. They represent the projects that have had the most impact on the day-to-day lives of PHP developers. php|architect is proud to announce the winners of this year's Impact Awards.

Winners this year included the Frapi (in Up & Coming), MySQL (in Data Management), Xdebug (in Integration/Development) and the Best Overall Product winner - the Zend Framework.

]]> Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:02:46 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/16290 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/16290 On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the results of their Ibuildings challenge where the developer had to create a script able to play "Four in a Line" based on an abstract Player class provided.

Four in a Line as game has been mathematically solved and the advantage lies with the player taking the first turn. To level the playing field, we allowed each player to fight against all the others; in this way, any player had the chance to begin with the first move advantage playing against all the other opponents at least once, sharing the elements of luck and making it easier to spot skill.

There were three different categories - junior, medium and senior - and one winner for each:

• Junior: Xavier Van Herpe (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Medium: Piotr Mlocek (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Senior: Tomas Creemes (won the iPad)

They also include some observations about the code submitted to the competition including adherence to coding standards and overall performance.

]]> Tue, 03 May 2011 13:36:14 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/14523 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/14523 Ibuildings has officially wrapped up their "Elephpant Challenge" contest they were holding to solve a routing problem that involved a globe-trotting PHP ElePHPant. Their latest post (from Ivo Jansch) reveals the results.

Contestants had to write a script that calculated the shortest route for the Elephpant. The contest has several side goals: entries were not not only validated against the given landmarks and a second secret set of landmarks, they also were scored based on their performance, code complexity and code size.

The shorted route, found using the Haversine Formula, involved stops in Mexico City, Cupertino, Hawaii and the Tower of Pisa. The winner for the Medium category was Andy Thompson with an average of 10 landmarks with 38 lines of code (in 333 seconds). The winner in the Senior category was Michiel Brandenburg with coming out on top with a runtime of 50 seconds in 46 lines of code.

The post also includes some interesting observations they found about the event including contestants' general adherence to the specs, how the choices the developers made really made a difference in the outcome and how difficult running a contest like this could really be. Congrats to the winners!

]]> Mon, 17 May 2010 15:56:27 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12965 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12965 The PHP.net website has posted the official winner results from this year's TestFest event:

A group of winners of PHP elePHPhants or TestFest mugs have been picked at random from the people that contributed the 887 tests during the 2009 PHP TestFest.

Winners of the elePHPants included Patrick Allaert, Fabio Fabbrucci and Jason Easter. Winners receiving a mug including Havard Eide, Francesco Fullone, Daniel Convissor. Congrats to all winners and many thanks go out to everyone who helped make the event such a success!

]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:37:39 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12072 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12072 The PHP Women have announced the winner of their "I am..." competition - an entry coming from a user of their forums going by the name Rowd.

We're delighted to announce the winner of our "I am" competition. Entrants were asked to complete the sentence "I am a PHPWoman because..." Rowd wins a $50 gift certificate to spend over at php|architect - if you want to read the other entries then check out the competition thread in the forums.

So what was Rowd's entry? Short and sweet: "I am a PHPWomen member because...I enjoy coding in PHP and discussions with people who know what being a woman in IT means."

]]> Thu, 05 Mar 2009 08:45:44 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/10750 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/10750 The PHP Women have officially announced the winners of their "Best Practices" article contest:

Well its been an exciting few weeks on the phpwomen forums as we've been running an article contest for new articles contributed to our "Best Practices" section. We've been overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions and of the follow up comments added by other users - thanks to everyone who has joined in!

The winners are Akrabat for his look at recursion and gerard for his article on CLI tips and tricks. They both have won their own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse, a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro magazine and a chance to have their article published on the magazine's site.

]]> Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:58:33 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9680 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9680 The PHPClasses.org site has announced the winner of their "PHP Programming Award 2007" - Cesar Rodas:

Since the beginning of February, the ranking of PHP Programming Award winners of 2007 is available As you may see Cesar Rodas is top ranked of all authors that were nominated to the award during 2007.

His prize was a stuffed PHP friend of his very own - an elePHPant (as created by Vincent Pointier and Damien Seguy). There's also an interview with Cesar included.

]]> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:09:00 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/8306 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/8306 Nick Halstead has posted the winner of the PHP programming competition - Todd Pinel:

Where do I start with my praise for Todd's entry? So much effort has been put into this entry its amazing. As a starting point you should first go have a look yourselves, Todd has helpfully already hosted it here. Let the praise begin..

Nick goes through the presentation of the application, the documentation provided with it, some sample code of the main portion of the app (a priorityQueue class) and the rankings that each judge gave it.

You can download your application and try it out for yourself.

]]> Mon, 23 Jul 2007 11:15:00 -0500