The PHP Women site has a new post today - "Experiences of a Conference Virgin", a piece written up by Tess Barnes on her attendance at this year's PHP Northwest conference.
Up until November 2008 I was a conference virgin: no jollies, no hotel booking panic and no development talks. As I've been self employed as a website developer for three years I decided it was about time to break the mould, invest the profits and head up to Manchester.
She talks about the parts of the process - getting there, her concerns and her experiences there. She talks a bit about the conference and some of the talks and events and even sums it up with a few assumptions (like "Women can get exactly where they want to in the industry with hard work and determination").
After taking part in this year's PHP Brasil conference, Chris Jones has issued a challenge to the PHP group members and developers there - do everything you can to be a part of the global PHP community.
At PHP Brasil '08, one of the themes I saw was community involvement. [...] In post-conference conversation, Luke Crouch (SourceForge) and I touched on what is gained from attending conferences, and how quickly technology is picked up in Brazil. So, one thing I specifically did during the conference was to encourage the organizers and presenters to make the English speaking world more aware of their activities.
He points out a talk that's already been translated to English and some of the people he met that are part of global PHP-using companies.
Nathan Good has posted five tips PHP developers should use in their work to develop good programming habits to the IBM developerWorks site today.
Just like any language, developers can write code in PHP that ranges in quality from truly awful to very good. Learn good programming habits that can help you bridge the productivity gap. [...] Bad coding habits seem to accompany defects in code and can cause code to be difficult to change without introducing new defects. The following five good habits, when applied to your PHP code, will help you avoid these pitfalls.
In this new post to his blog Padraic Brady looks at why models are "misunderstood and unappreciated" in a Model/View/Controller sort of world.
By the time I'd finished both chapters [of my Zend Framework book] I realised I had spent a lot of space explaining the Model, most of it discussing how the Zend Framework does not actually give you one. In fact, no web application framework offers a complete Model (for reasons I'll explain later). However nearly all frameworks manage to avoid making that perfectly obvious. Instead they continually link the concept of a Model to the related, but not identical, concept of data access. This is quite misleading.
He looks at two things models are good for (maintaining state and enforcing rules on the data in the current state), how it seems most PHP developers perceive them, how controllers can be turned into "mutated models" and the idea that models should be classes and controllers are just processes (handlers for requests).
The symfony blog has start up their own "advent calendar" of sorts (similar to what they've done in previous years) - creating an entire application in a single month, from December 1st through 31st. This time its the jobeet.org jobs website. Here's the list of each day:
On the PHPBuilder.com site today there's a new tutorial talking about using PHP to dynamically create SVG images in a simple application.
As with many of the pages on my Web site, my SVG images are in fact generated by PHP scripts. I end up including many of the same images in other pages, but not always with the same size or colors, so making them customizable on a case-by-case basis is a useful thing. Attributes such as size, scale, colour, rotation, and position are obtained from arguments in the URL.
His example creates a SVG image using a class (UIControl) to create the content for the image. This content is dropped into the typical XML structure to display it. He also includes some extra attributes/methods you can use with the UIControl class to alter the resulting image.
On the NETTUTS.com website today Alex Villmannwalks you through setting up a dedicated web server running Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
All great websites have a great server behind them. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up a dedicated web server (with Apache, MySQL, and PHP) using that old computer you have lying around the house and some free software.
The tutorial comes with plenty of screenshots for the Ubuntu install as well as the changes you'll need to make to the configuration files for the software to get things up and running. In the end you'll have a dedicated server you can drop anywhere and use to host your site.
According to this new article from Hiveminds magazine PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 are "at risk of becoming vaporware".
Today was supposed to see the release of PHP 5.3 Alpha 3. But it is not done and by the looks of the things that have not been done and the fact that no official release have come since Alpha 1 PHP risk becoming vaporware. Not vaporware in its true sense but in essence PHP 5.3 and PHP6 is on a similar road the PERL6 has taken.
According to them, PHP6 is at the same risk as Perl 6 with no roadmap and no vision and a "ready when its ready attitude" the developers seem to have. Of course, this isn't the case - there has been plenty of development work since alpha1 on PHP 5.3 (an alpha2 has even been released!). Maybe if the author of this article had done a bit more checking, they would have seen these things.
Chuck Burgess has posted a discovery he made while working with Eclipse PDT and a command line script that he needed to debug:
This week, I found a need to do this same kind of remote debugging, but for a command-line PHP script. This seems to be something that Eclipse is not already designed to do, as there is no "perpetual listener" available for its debug client. Instructions for remote CLI debugging are available, which showed me that environment variables might be the missing link to getting it working with Eclipse. It turned out to be one of two missing links. The other link was tricking Eclipse into keeping a debug session open (and therefore "listening").
He found that by loading up the PHP file in a shell script with the XDEBUG_CONFIG and XDEBUG_SESSION variables defined, it allows the Eclipse listener to connect and work through the file like a normal web page request.
