Lorna Mitchell has a new post today about using a popular backend processing tool, Gearman, from inside of PHP. Her example gives a full overview of how to add a new job and write the worker for it to make things happen.

Basically, this application generates some PDFs from a variety of data sources, makes images, and emails it. Since the whole data processing, image handling, PDF generation process is fairly heavy, I'm putting the requests to generate these onto a gearman queue and having some workers process the jobs.

You'll need to have the Gearman server and extension installed (sample instructions here for Ubuntu) to use the sample code she gives using the Gearman_Client and GearmanWorker objects to create the pieces of the puzzle. You can find out more about the Gearman PECL extension here.

As most people involved in the IT sector know, demand is growing all the time for qualified people to fill the spots companies really need. In a new article from NetworkWorld.com they talk about some of the current trends as to what skills companies are really looking for right now including people with solid experience with Open Source development and tools.

Industry watchers report that while an economic recovery won't guarantee that IT jobs return to pre-recession levels, increased interest in emerging and existing technologies will drive internal training and external hiring decisions. [...] Here we examine 10 IT job titles that could gain traction in 2010 as new technology demands require evolving IT skills.

The list includes specializations like security specialists, capacity planning, network engineers, business process engineers and Open Source specialists that have the knowledge and the skills to either create or bring in the Open Source tools that would fit the need the best. They even quote Dice.com about the increase in popularity those sorts of postings/searches have been getting lately.

2008 was a great year for the PHP community - lots of growth, enhancements and improvements have lead us to where we are today. The language is stronger than ever and attracting more developers than it ever has. Let's take a look at just some of the things that made 2008 what it was:

• Plenty of criticism and comparisons of PHP
• The rise in popularity of the elePHPants
• Growth in the PHP Women group (like the article contest and their 2nd brithday)
• 2008 - the Year of the Framework
• PEAR Bug Traige event
• Zend Framework's Dojo and AMF integration
• A growing emphasis on unit testing and debugging
• The last release in the PHP 4 series
• Ibuildings launches their Center for Expertise (and Cal Evans is appointed Director)
• Several major companies - like Microsoft and Adobe - show more interest in the PHP community
• Lukas Smith launched his emPHPower iniative
• php|architect launched their C7Y community website
• this site made the move to the Solar Framework
• PHPers participated once again in Google's Summer of Code
• PEAR elctions were held
• The Great Namespace Debate of 2008
• Plenty of podcasts were released - PHP Abstract and the P3 Podcast
• php|architect got a major overhaul of the site, the magazine and the structure of the company
• Zend launched a new certification - Zend Framework Certified Engineer
• Zend buyout rumors (no, it didn't happen)
• the elePHPant World Tour
• Continuing development on PHP 5.3

Conferences

• CakeFest
• PHP Brasil
• PHP London
• Dutch PHP Conference
• Zend/PHP Conference & Expo
• php|tek
• php|works/PyWorks
• PHP Quebec
• PHP Appalachia
• FrOSCon
• International PHP Conference
• PHP Camp
• OpenExpo
• PHP North West
• SymfonyCamp
• PHP Barcelona
• PHP Security Camp

Our own job postings

• Included companies like: CNet Networks, Ibuildings, Ning, InvestorGuide.com, Yahoo! and Schematic
• In places like: Paris, UK, Nashville, Barcelona, New York, Zurich, Dallas and Chicago

I just wanted to take a second and get some opinions from the readers out there around the job postings that this site has been doing for a while now. They've become more popular in the recent months and I'm concerned that they might be "interrupting the flow" of the news around them.

I wanted to get your thoughts on them and on an idea I'm considering - splitting them off into their own sub-site sort of thing. Right now, you can go to jobs.phpdeveloper.org and get to the latest job postings without the news items. Do you, opinionated readers, think that they should stay over there and not be included with the news? Or do you like having them all in one place, all in one feed?

Post your opinions in the comments - I'll be interested to see what you think...

UPDATE: Several people in the comments have mentioned it, but I wanted to point out one option on the RSS feed - the filtering I have built in. It's tag based, so if you didn't want the job posts in there, you could subscribe to this feed: http://phpdeveloper.org/feed/tag/-job-post. That filters out the job posts for you. It wouldn't be hard to translate this into another "jobless" feed.

• Job Posting: Library House Seeks Web Developer (Cambridge, UK)
• Job Posting: SQLFusion Seeks Senior PHP/Javascript Software Dev (Redondo Beach, CA/Telecommute)

• Site News: Job Postings for the week of 02.02.2008
• Job Posting: Technology Resources, Inc Seeks Senior PHP Developer (New York, NY)

• Job Posting: Weatherly Technologies (Recruiter) Seeks Senior PHP Developer (NYC MEtro)
• Job Posting: Maryland Company Seeks Web Application Developer (Frederick, MD)
• Job Posting: MODE Visual Seeks PHP Developer (Charlotte, NC)

Laura Thomson has posted this note on her blog today about job offerings over at OmniTI (employer of her, George Schlossnagle, Chris Shiflett, and Theo Schlossnagle) for junior to mid-level web developers.

She lists the requirements (including good PHP/SQL/UNIX/HTML & CSS skills, and knowledge of database design/Ajax/web services/etc).

To apply, send off a resume and code samples to jobs@omniti.com.

OmniTI, the company that employs such PHP notables as Wez Furlong, Laura Thomson, and George Schlossnagle, is hiring according to this new post from Laura.

We are currently in need of four people:

• A junior PHP dev
• A junior-ish web designer (Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Javascript + ideally some coding)
• An Oracle DBA
• A PostgreSQL DBA

The job ads will be up on our website shortly, but if you are eager to act before then, please email me your resume at jobs@omniti.com.

You can find out more about OmniTI as a company from their site and more about previous jobs and how they hire from these two links.

PHP developers all over the world can rejoice now if what Jim Plush is predicting in his new post will be coming soon - a major resurgence of major companies looking for skilled PHP developers.

With this rush right out on the horizion, Jim recommends a little preparation - getting your ceritification, contributing to an open source project, know your basics, make a name for yourself somewhere on google, and get out as much in the PHP-related media as you can.