Matthias Noback has posted about some of his experimentation with Broadway, a framework of testing helpers and structure to create CQRS/event sourced applications. CQRS is a design pattern (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) that essentially defines the use of a different method for reading data than for working with it (ex: updates or creates).

At the Dutch PHP Conference I attended a workshop by Beau Simensen and Willem-Jan Zijderveld. They showed us some examples of how to work with Broadway, a framework for event sourcing, with full Symfony integration, created by the smart people at Qandidate.

During my two weeks of funemployment, before starting my new job at Ibuildings, I decided to recreate one of my previous projects using Broadway. As it turns out, it's a great framework that's quite easy to use and is very powerful at the same time. Even though it's not a stable package (as in, it's still in the 0.x version range), I think it's safe to depend on it.

Matthias found that one of the main features of the models in Broadway is the serialization of them for storage, but wanted to reduce the amount of time to handle that...so he created this library. He also talks about something that several have pointed out as missing in the Broadway structure: how to use "sagas". He ends the post with an update on his own tool, SimpleBus, that handles eventing and via message busses, noting that it's not going anywhere but if you use Broadway, there's no reason to use SimpleBus too.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post showing how you can use PHP-GTK to generate websites, not just the more traditional desktop applications people associate it with.

es, you read it right, GTK+, the Gnome Toolkit library, normally used to create desktop applications, can now be used to serve the same applications via the Web to a browser that supports HTML 5 canvas objects. PHP-GTK is a PHP extension that uses the GTK+ library to build PHP desktop applications. So it can eventually benefit for this GTK library enhancements to build PHP-GTK based applications that can be served over the Web to HTML 5 browsers.

Manuel starts by explaining a bit about what PHP-GTK (and GTK+) is and a recent update to GTK+ that allows it to generate output to different backends - Wayland (direct graphics rendering) and Broadway (HTML5 canvas support). There's no example code to go along with the post, but there's a good description of how the output of an X Windows session could be pulled in and displayed in a browser (see this video for a cool example using GIMP and Broadway).