Thinking about trying your hand at submitting a talk to an upcoming PHP conference but aren't exactly sure where to get started? You might want to check out Lorna Mitchell's suggestions on some of the steps.

Speaking at conferences is a great way to share ideas and meet people - but actually getting the opportunity to do is a little more tricky and usually involves proposing a talk. [...] If you want to go to a conference, and there is a topic you'd like to share some thoughts on, then write them down and submit!

She talks about making the most of the submission form - submitting your abstract and including details why you and your talk should be selected for their conference. The comments include a few other suggestions like "don't submit the same one talk over and over", "try for something different" and remember that you always have something to contribute.

Michael Girouard has pointed out that things in the PHP world are one step closer to being able to create an abstract Singleton object via a simple script he's shared.

The singleton is an incredibly useful pattern in PHP for many reasons. I tend to find myself using them when I know I should be using static classes, but can't because of PHP's lack of proper class name discovery in extended static classes.

[...] And that works like a charm every time. The problem is, in one application there may be several classes that need to be singletons. In which case my first thought was to build an abstract singleton.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work like he'd thought it would. He did, however, come up with something that did work - creating an interface and making an abstract implementation of it (code example for this included).

From an announcement on the main PHP.net website today, the official call for papers for this year's DC PHP Conference 2007 has been announced.

Join us at the 2nd Annual DC PHP Conference. Technology experts are invited to participate in the East Coast's premiere forum for PHP's vast number of users. Present your technical concepts, cutting edge applications, or business applications for an opportunity to showcase your ideas in the PHP community.

The abstracts for your talk need to be submitted on or before July 22nd to be considered for inclusion in the conference. Those to be included in the schedule for this year's conference will be notified by August 15th, 2007.

Despite opinions from some of the PHP community, interoperability between PHP applications isn't is such a bad state - at least According to Aaron Wormus:

The fact of the matter is that it's not such a big deal. Porting a plugin from Wordpress to Serendipity is usually trivial, and as we see more web-services based plugins (stuff like the awesome askimet) the task becomes simpler and simpler.

Interoperability is overrated, the more you think of it the more complex it gets. As you start throwing in new factors into the equation (how will this interoperate with a java/c# application) you start to develop monsters like JSR 170 which solve a lot of problems on paper, but in reality are too unwieldy to be truly useful.

He even lists out some of his "steps to interoperability" to help speed things along (like "use as much abstract code as possible" and "use services").

DevShed has posted the final installment of their series looking at the creation and use of the Abstract Factory pattern. In this new part, they focus on the creation of online forms and their handling as the pattern is applied.

In this last installment of the series, I'm going to show you how to use an abstract factory class to create distinct types of form objects, logically depending on the context where they will be utilized. The idea not only sounds interesting, but it can provide you with a better understanding of how this handy pattern can be used in a real situation.

They start by defining their abstract factory form class and extending it to create a required form element and a normal form element. They make input functions for each - required input box, required radio button, required check box - and their "Normal" counterparts. Finally, they tie these all together to create a simple form with sets of an input box, radio set, and checkboxes both required and normal.

With a new addition to their ever-growing list of tutorials looking at design patterns, Devshed sets its sights on abstract factories in this new edition.

Fear not, because in this three-part series, I'm going to show you how to create an abstract factory class with copious friendly hands-on examples. Hopefully, by the end of this series, you should have a more intimate knowledge of how this useful pattern works.

They introduce the pattern - what it is and what it can do for you - before showing how to define a small example of it by creating DIVs on your page.

Recently, Pádraic Brady had to explain some of the design patterns, specifically the Factory and Abstract Factory patterns, to someone (or a group of someones) in his day to day business. To help make it easier for other people out there looking for the same information, he's posted what he said on his blog today.

First, he talks about the Factory pattern:

At some point in developing, developers will discover a need to support switching among various methods of performing an action. The example I used in a forum post earlier was Database Abstraction. Say for a moment you want to separate all the logic needed to create an Abstraction object (say using ADOdb Lite) into a central place for easier control. At this point the Factory Pattern starts rearing its head.

Of course, a bit of sample code is given to illustrate the point, creating the instance of an ADOdb object.

Next up is the Abstract Factory pattern - the difference being that these make it easy to switch between Factories using different resource (such as his example to switch between ADODB and PDO).

In these cases, we will have multiple Factories. However instead of one generically named Factory, we will have several specific Factories. This should (eventually) lead us to impose a parent class, which will allow duplicated code from each specific DatabaseAbstractionFactory to be moved up to the common parent class.

Just as before, they provide example code to illustrate the use of this slightly different pattern.

New from Developer.com today, there's this article dealing with the improvements in the object-oriented functionality of PHP5 and its ability to easily create abstract classes - in this case, a database abstraction layer.

PHP 5 made significant improvements on the Object Orientated programming model of PHP 4 bringing it more in line with languages such as Visual Basic .NET and Java. The improved object model in PHP 5 makes developing applications using OOP much easier and gives you the programmer, greater flexibility.

In this series of articles I will demonstrate the new features of the PHP 5 object and show you how to create a database abstraction layer similar to PEAR DB. I will also introduce you to a few design patterns that can be applied to common OOP related problems.

They introduce a bit about abstraction in PHP5, including examples of abstract classes and how they can be extended easily. With this basic knowledge shared, they show a list of functions they're going to implement in the database layer, making defining them a requirement in any "child" classes. For now, their interface just links the custom function calls back to the normal MySQL functionality in PHP, but will be extended later.

DevShed has posted the last part of their "Abstract Classes in PHP" series today - "Working with PHP5".

In this last part of the series, I'll explain the key points of abstract classes in PHP 5, and additionally provide you with some hands-on examples. This should give you a clear idea of how to utilize them within the powerful Object Model implemented in the latest version of PHP.

They start with an overview of the PHP5 object model and how it make sabstract classes much easier than before. They continue, mentioning a "pointless and unusual" practice of calling class methods out of context. Finally, they set up an example of the use of an abstract class in the structure of the PHP5 object model...

DevShed has posted part two of their "Abstract Classes in PHP" series today, this time focusing on the creation of an example class structure.

Welcome to part two of the series "Abstract classes in PHP." In three tutorials, this series introduces the key concepts of abstract classes in PHP 4-PHP 5, and explores their application and use in different object-oriented development environments. Whether you're an experienced PHP developer wanting to fill in some gaps related to abstract classes, or only a beginner starting to taste the power of object-based programming in PHP, hopefully you'll find this series enjoyable and instructive.

They take a moment and look at how their example will be structured before jumping into the code. After that, they creat subclasses of the parent, defining the resultProcessor and fileProcessor classes. At the end, they combine them, creating a class that can parse data pushed into it (such as parsing out an XML file).