In a new post to the Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has taken a look at the productivity that PHP allows developers (from a development perspective) and a case that he's come across that proves his point.

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.

Mentioned on the Ibuildings blog today is a new white paper (contact details required for download) from Ivo Jansch, the CTO of Ibuildings about creating service APIs for your web-based applications.

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.

PHPClasses.org has released a book review of the php|architect "Guide to Enterprise PHP Development" (Ivo Jansch) reviewed by Mauricio Garcia Nascimento.

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.

Kana Yeh has posted a review of Ivo Jansch's "Guide to Enterprise PHP Development" (from php|architect):

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.)

On the Ibuildings blog there's a quick new post from Joni Overbosch looking at Ivo Jansch's recently released new book, php|architect's Guide to Enterprise PHP Development.

Last year he confided in me, said he wanted to write a book. And he actually did, within the year, 275 pages describing the complete development life cycle. For each phase in the development cycle, Ivo describes the common pitfalls, ways to get around them and tools others use to keep things running smoothly.

You can find out more about the book on its website including a link to order a copy of your very own ($36 CAD for print and PDF, $32 CAD for just the PDF).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review (from Ivo Jansch) about a recently release offering from Packt Publishing - "Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management" (by Marc Delisle).

I mainly use phpMyAdmin for 2 things: browsing the data in the database, and changing the structure of a database. Those are pretty straightforward features, so when packt publishing asked me to review a book on phpMyAdmin, I initially wondered how they could write an entire book on phpmyadmin.

Ivo was pleasantly surprised at the features of the popular database management tool the book covered and notes that it does a great job of explaining the features a config options the tool has to offer. He notes that there's a pretty broad target audience for the book - everyone from the beginner out to the experienced developer wanting to know know about this popular application.

Ivo Jansch has posted about the official release of his book hot from php|architect's presses, the Guide to Enterprise PHP Development.

It's true that it's one of the few books that's not about PHP code, but about the entire development life cycle. I owe a lot of thanks to Elizabeth Naramore and Marco Tabini of php|architect, for getting this book out. If you order the book, also check out its companion website. I will collect feedback on that site, and will regularly post errata or other updates.

Get more information (and grab yourself a copy) from the php|architect website - the print/PDF will cost about $30 CAD and the PDF only runs about $27 CAD.

Paul Wander has posted to the Ibuildings blog today about a new seminar (non-web) one of their CTO, Ivo Jansch, will be giving on the 10th of June at the King's College London:

Are you a sophisticated PHP developer, or a newbie? Either way, you need to make the best of your resources, be they people delivering projects, or hardware serving your customers. Take this opportunity to learn from the industry experts the importance of PHP best practices.

Ivo will be talking PHP in the Enterprise - how good developers are hard to find, keeping code up and running well and how important scalability is to you and your business.

If you would like to attend, you can find contact information at the bottom of this page.

On the PHP London conference website (from the recently passed PHP London 2008) has posted the first of many mp3s of the session that happened there. This first one comes from Ivo Jansch.

His presentation is titled Enterprise PHP Development and looks at things like whether or not PHP is "enterprise ready", how PHP's role in the online world has changed and some steps to take to be sure your application is ready to serve your enterprise.

The slides can be found here and the mp3 of the presentation is here.

The PHP London Conference for 2008 is behind us now and, from what the bloggers are saying, it went off wonderfully. Here's a bit from Mikko Koppanen:

To summarize it: I had fun. [...] I met quite a lot of new people at the conference and of course it was nice to see the familiar faces from other conferences and PHPLondon meetings. [...] A huge thanks to the organizers for making this day possible!

From Ivo Jansch:

I've attended the first PHPLondon conference 2 years ago, and it was great to see the progress that they made since then. The venue, the presentations, the catering, the organization, everything was improved significantly and contributed to a great conference.

And from Rob Allen:

The PHP UK Conference in London is over for another year and this year's event was another evolutionary improvement on last year's. [...] All in all it was a great conference and I'm looking forward to next year's.

David Goodwin has posted some of his own thoughts too.