Dutch PHP (un)Conference 2010

About a week ago Amsterdam was shaking since Ibuildings organized another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference at the RAI, hosted by Lorna Jane (@lornajane).

This year was also the first time uncon sessions were available for the audience to give 15 minutes (lightning) talks or full 45 minutes presentations. Both Stefan Koopmanschap (@skoop) and I (@DragonBe) were given the honor to host these sessions as part of our community involvement with the PHP user group PHPBenelux (@phpbenelux).

Since we were hosting these sessions, most of the awesome tracks I could only follow through Twitter (@dpc_uncon) and IRC, which helped me a lot to get an idea of what I was missing. But on the flip-side I had the privilege of attending the true community at it's best through the uncon sessions.

The thing with uncon sessions is that regular attendees can step up and prove themselves as future conference speaker material. All talks given at these uncon sessions are rated by other attendees on joind.in, and these ratings are looked at by conference organizers to select unknown speakers, especially if they have to invest a lot of money getting these speakers at their gig.

As a result of this feedback system on joind.in, one of our uncon speakers Martin de Keijzer (@martin1982) got himself a spot on next year's Dutch PHP Conference, as was announced at the end of this conference.

All people that talked at these uncon sessions, had interesting stuff to tell and educated the audience in an impressive way. Only a handful of uncon speakers came prepared, but most of them just created some slides during other sessions or had nothing at all, but still got their message out or started a very interesting dialog. If uncon king, Mr. Keith Casey (@CaseySoftware) was with us, he'd say we did a great job.

If you're planning to attend a PHP conference in the future, think about the uncon sessions. They have great content, stir up discussions and can offer you a spot on the main tracks of any given PHP conference.

In my final note I need to thank Stefan Koopmanschap (@skoop)) for covering me during my work related absence. You rock dude!

Big gratitude goes out to Ibuildings, who have given us the room for running the uncon sessions and for providing an uncon main track spot on next year's conference. Clearly you guys set the standard for PHP conferences!

If you attended the Dutch PHP Conference 2010, do give those speaker some feedback on joind.in and don't forget to rate the conference as well. Speakers and conference organizers need your feedback to improve their talks and/organization so they can give you the quality you're paying for.

Looking forward seeing you at DPC11 for your chance to speak !

Location:Rai, Amsterdam

Looking back at Tek-X

When you go to an IT conference, you expect them to be informative, but not too much so you have a relaxing time while attending it. Well, this year's Tek-X (pronounced tek ten) was a "little" bit more then just informative and relaxing: 1 tutorial day, 3 full days of top sessions by the community's best speakers, workshops (hackatons) and hallway sessions were the ingredients to overload your brain while the social events after the sessions drained you from any energy left.

What follows are my chosen talks and my personal experience that these talks has given me. What's listed is not the complete schedule, since there were too many sessions during Tek X, most of them all at the same time (see schedule).

Tuesday, May 18 2010 - Tutorial days
With the rapid speed technology and processes change, you don't always find time to catch up with the flashy new bells and whistles that might make your job easier. These tutorial sessions are there just for that reason: catching up on new, innovative ideas and products.

Kristina Chodorow (@kchodorow) with her tutorial "Converting Your MySQL App to NoSQL with MongoDB" introduced the audience to a new way of storing data that's more flexible and with better performance compared to traditional databases. It has given me enough food for thoughts for learning more about this NoSQL system.

Allegedly it was (one of) Kristina's first appearances on a conference stage and she pulled it of very well having an interactive session with the audience. The quality of her tutorial and her knowledge on the subject made me forgive the "euhms" and the nervous tremble in her voice. I'm positive that she'll get over those "beginners quirks" once she's more comfortable talking to a large crowd.
Slides are not yet available at the moment, but do check out her pre-tek webcast at http://www.phparch.com/2010/04/27/webcast-mongo-scale/.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney (@weierophinney) and Lorna Jane Mitchel (@lornajane) were educating the audience on best practices with their tutorial session "PHP Best Practices". I had already seen this session before, but the both of them keep adding more interesting ideas and better approaches so it's a session I didn't want to miss.
Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/best-practices-tekx.

Wednesday, May 19 2010 - Day 1
Excellent keynote "The Art of Simplicity" was given by Josh Holmes (@joshholmes), technology evangelist at Microsoft, where he was re-educating the crowd about keeping things simple. And he did a lot of damage swinging his clue bat, but he was right the whole time. Don't over-engineer challenges when the solution is right in front of you and perfect in it's simplicity. If you're organizing an IT conference, make sure to get Josh right out there on main stage !
Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/joshholmes/the-lost-art-of-simplicity.

Eli White (@EliW) presented "Anti-spam and anti-gaming" about the challenges you face when you have public facing web applications in regards to spam. In his excellent way, Eli showed simple hints and tips on how to fight off spam, while maintaining a superb user experience. Great content for anyone out there facing similar challenges.
Slides are available at http://eliw.com/presentations/tek-2010/tek-2010-antispamgame.pdf [PDF]

Lorna Jane Mitchel (@lornajane) presented "Subversion in a distributed world" where she compared the simple model of Subversion to the most common distributed versioning systems (GIT, Mercurial, Bazzaar) and how they all have pro's and con's in their distributed nature. An excellent talk that convinced me to at least try-out GIT, just to get a taste of it.
Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/subversion-in-a-distributed-world.

Travis Swicegood followed right after Lorna's talk with his session on "Getting GIT", where he (the author of the book "Pragmatic Version Control with GIT") showed the many capabilities GIT offers in a distributed way. He also offered a more in-depth session on GIT during the Hackaton the next day, which of course I attended. A great session that provides a solution for those that often work in closed network environments or have no network at all (like in an airplane). Another session that convinced me to look at and apply GIT.

Eli White (@EliW) presented "Code & Release Management" where he went into detail about various RM strategies offering pro's and con's with each strategy. It's a real challenge sometimes to find the right strategy in order to maintain your code base and I feel Eli has done a great job explaining each solution in his own pragmatic way. I learned a lot just by being there and listening to a true expert.
Slides are available at http://eliw.com/presentations/tek-2010/tek-2010-coderelease.pdf [PDF]

Thursday, May 20 2010 - Day 2
Keynote of the day was given by Matthew Schmidt (@mpschmid) called "10 Developer Trends in 2010" where he gave the audience an insight to what he discovered at DZone. Although his predictions were basically the same trends followed by the mainstream PHP community (and much of it wasn't really shocking), it was nice to see the same trends appeared on major developer resource sites.
Slides are not yet available.

Next up was Derick Rethans (@derickr) with his insight session on "XDebug". As he is the creator of this powerful debugger tool, it comes without saying he excels at presenting the insides of XDebug. If you really wanna know more about XDebug, don't go looking for the slides on internet but make sure you're at one of his sessions on other conferences ! That's where you'll find the true value of his talk.

Matthew Turland (@elazar) had taken over the torch to promote SPL (the Standard PHP Library) with his session "New SPL Features in 5.3". His session not only gave us an idea on what's new in PHP 5.3, but he also made sure we got to know why we should choose for SPL. Because it's quicker and more memory friendly. After each specific SPL feature, he included graphs about cpu and memory usage to give us a more visual idea how SPL worked with various amounts of data.
Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/tobias382/new-spl-features-in-php-53

In the afternoon I attended hackaton sessions with Travis Swicegood who gave us an real good insight on how to use GIT with a Subversion repository. He showed us how to get code from an SVN repository into GIT, how to use GIT on keeping track of modifications in main branch or sub-branches and how to push those changes back into SVN. It all was a bit quick, but I've made some notes and once I've figured it all out, I'll post my findings right here at my blog.

Since it was also Zend Framework Bug Hunt Day, I stayed the rest of the afternoon in the hackaton sessions to fix bugs listed in the Zend Framework Issue Tracker.

Friday, May 21 2010 - Day 3
Ben Ramsey (@ramsey) was getting things clear in his session "Caching with Memcache and APC" where he described what the benefits are of using a caching engine and showed examples on how to use Memcache and APC.
Slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/benramsey/caching-with-memcached-and-apc.

Lorna Jane Mitchel (@lornajane) presented "Open Source your Career", which was basically the best session given at Tek-X. She used no slides, no fancy graphics. No, she stood there in front of everyone explaining how open source could boost your career. She explained a bit about her own career experiences, but streched out to many people who use open source daily and build a career out of it.
For those of you who weren't at this session, I've heard she's giving this talk again at the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC) next month. If you want to boost your career using open source, get yourself a ticket and make sure you're there !
No slides were used in this presentation.

The community round table was the final session for me during Tek-X, basically since I was up front in the panel alongside Lorna Jane Mitchel (@lornajane), Rafael Dohms (@rdohms) and Ben Ramsey (@ramsey). Moderation was done by the King of Uncon, Mr. Keith Casey (@CaseySoftware).
This whole round table session was a motivational discussion on how to (re)start a PHP User Group in your geographical area, what pitfalls there were and how to get people come to your meeting. People that were attending showed real interest on how to organize and run a user group and how to get sponsorships. I also found that there were already a lot of people who attended our previous round table discussion and had successfully started a user group.
Side note on this: between Tek-X and the publication of this review, two people who attended our session started their own user group. So, a big hand to Chance Garcia (@ChanceGarcia) and Jeremy Kendall (@JeremyKendall) and to others good luck in your setup !
No slides were used in this talk.

Closing keynote was provided by Mr. Marco Tabinni who told us in not so many words that the community drives PHP and PHP the community. #communityworks

Tek-X was an awesome experience ! If you weren't able to come down to Chicago for this event, try better next year. Tek-X seems to me the place where ideas are born, communities are formed and friendships rise. I am happy I was part of it and I'm hoping to see my old and new friends next year for Tex 2011 !

If you're organizing an event, conference or user group meeting, be sure to have it registered at Joind.in so attendees can give valuable feedback to the speakers and other event organizers can see which talk they can accept. For those who were at Tek-X, don't forget to rate your sessions !

Another interesting feature few of the speakers used, was the QRcode barcode, which is basically a 2D barcode containing a URL, a message, an e-mail or a phone number. Using a tool on your mobile phone, you can quickly register the url for the joind.in rating, the link to the page or twitter account and so much more. You might want to try it out. This barcode on the left points back to my main site.

Book review: Expert PHP 5 Tools

Two weeks ago I received a copy of Expert PHP 5 Tools with the request if I could review this book. Improving development processes using PHP tools is something I promote myself (see my slides about PHP Power Tools on Slideshare), so I could not refuse this request.

The book
Expert PHP 5 Tools is a new book from Packt Publishing written by Dirk Merkel. In 10 chapters Dirk introduces the reader with several PHP tools that will improve development processes and quality of code from a single developer or a team of developers. From simply syntax checking and code validation to automated testing and deploying, each chapter discusses each tool in detail and contains sample code to put the theory into practice.

Besides describing in detail tools to validate (PHPLint and PHP_CodeSniffer), test (PHPUnit), debug (XDebug) and manage PHP codebases (Subversion) and improve collaboration between developers, Dirk has dedicated a whole chapter on using UML to describe and structure your applications, a whole chapter on using Eclipse IDE with the PHP Development Tools (PDT) and continuous integration with Cruise Control and PHPUnderControl using both Ant as Phing to continuous build and deploy your PHP projects.

I must say I was impressed by the detailed description of each tool and how Dirk used simple examples in order to show the reader how to use the tool in the best possible manner. I found this book an easy read since I already had experience with the tools Dirk describes in the book, but even if I had not yet worked with them, the examples he has given in each chapter are of great value and give the reader a good insight in what each tool does and how it responds.

Conclusion
With PHP becoming increasingly important as a technology within corporate application development and enterprise development structures, using automated tools to improve quality have become very important for many developers.

Expert PHP 5 Tools is a must-read book for every PHP developer involved in professional PHP application development and wants to improve the quality of his work. Also for PHP development teams, this book will convince the reader why it's important to focus on coding standards, unit testing, automated documentation and even automated builds to structure each step in an automated, repetitive way.

Zend Framework context switching for HTML content

I tried to stay away from using javascript as much as I could, but even I could not escape from developing AJAX feature rich applications. I have chosen jQuery as my poison.

But I had already build my apps using static HTML output generated by Zend Framework, so how could I add this richness to my apps without refactoring most of my code ? Simple, by using Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ContextSwitch, ZendX_JQuery and some minor adjustments to my view scripts.

If you have downloaded the latest Zend Framework package, you'll notice in the extras/library directory the extra jQuery component, so make sure you also include that library path to your application's include path.

The following code was tested with Zend Framework version 1.10.3.

In your controller, you have actions that displays a form and one that processes it. So, to have it processed without refreshing the page in the browser, put the following lines in your controller:

public function init()

{

    $this->_helper->contextSwitch()
         ->setContext(
             'html', array(
                 'suffix'    => 'html',
                 'headers'   => array(

                     'Content-Type' => 'text/html; Charset=UTF-8',

                 ),
             )
         )
         ->addActionContext('index', array('html','xml', 'json'))
         ->setAutoJsonSerialization(true)
         ->initContext();

}

This context switch routine allows me to use my data in HTML, XML and JSON format. Both XML and JSON are default output formats supported by Zend Framework, but the documentation didn't contain a proper example on how to output HTML.

Consider you already have put a lot of time in rendering a table according to the specific form parameters, you don't want to re-do this work to display it again to use XML or JSON formatted data. Easiest (not best) way is to have that data returned in your view without the rest of the layout spoiling your AJAX requests.

Using the context switcher defined above, we only need to add a view template using the "actionname.html.phtml" naming convention. So for indexAction it would have index.phtml for normal displaying, index.xml.phtml for XML generated output, index.json.phtml for json-formated data and index.html.phtml to have your content returned without layout.

In our requesting view template we now only have to add a container where to put that data. Since I return the full generated table, I wrap my "table" tag in a "div" block.

<div id="tableContainer">

<table>...</table>

</div>

In jQuery I use the following function to load data inside that container:

function loadData(link, placeholder)
{
    if (-1 === link.indexOf('/format/html') && -1 === link.indexOf('format=html')) {
        link += '/format/html';
    }
    jQuery.get(link, function(data) {
        var container = '#' + placeholder;
        jQuery(container).html(data);
    });

    return false;
}

A common link like

<a href="/path/to/next/page">next page</a>

becomes

<a onClick="loadData(this.href, 'tableContainer');" href="/path/to/next/page">next page</a>

And with ZendX_JQuery you don't even need to load all the jQuery scripts, Zend Framework does this for you.

First modify your bootstrapper so your view uses the jQuery components:

protected function _initView()
{
    // Initialize view
    $view = new Zend_View();
       
    // Adding jQuery view helpers
    $view->addHelperPath("ZendX/JQuery/View/Helper", "ZendX_JQuery_View_Helper");

    // Add it to the ViewRenderer
    $viewRenderer = Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::getStaticHelper(
        'ViewRenderer'
    );
       
    $view->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT');
    $view->headMeta()->appendHttpEquiv('Content-Type', 'text/html; Charset=UTF-8');


    // Add a stylesheet for JQuery parts, only when it's required
    $view->jQuery()->addStyleSheet(
        $view->baseUrl('/css/ui-lightness/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css')
    );
 
    $viewRenderer->setView($view);
    Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::addHelper($viewRenderer);

    // Return it, so that it can be stored by the bootstrap
    return $view;
}

In your layout template, you can add between the head tags the following call:

<head>

...

    <?php echo $this->JQuery() ?>

...

</head>

That's all there is to it. Now you can add nice date pickers and other awesome jQuery and jQuery UI elments to your apps.

I know it's not the best way to AJAX-ify your apps, but it's the easiest way to convert a non-javascripted app into a more user friendly application. A nice side-effect is your app remains working for non-javascript browsers and web spiders (like those for search engines).

If you want to learn more about ZendX_JQuery, be sure to check out a presentation given by Dennis De Cock at one of the PHPBenelux UG meetings. His session has inspired me to take a deeper look at jQuery as a javascript library and ZendX_JQuery as the tool to master it.

PHPBenelux conference 2010 wrapup

This past weekend, Belgium was buzzing PHP all the way. PHPBenelux organized the first annual international PHP conference in Belgium and it can be called a true success. Attendees and speakers coming from all parts of the world made this event a true international conference and I was truly happy to be a part of it, this time as member of the organization.

Preparation

The months, weeks and certainly the days prior to the conference were hectic, stressful and sometimes energy draining. With lots of things that still needed to be done last minute, we have learned that we still have lots of room to improve ourselves for future events. But, as it is common to PHP development, we met our deadlines and saw everything was running smoothly.

Airport and train station runs

The conference had a few international speakers on the list, for who we had to ensure a smooth ride to the conference hotel. Stefan Koopmanschap picked up Cal Evans at Schiphol. Thijs Feryn went down to Antwerp Central Station to pick up Fabien Potencier, and had to do this 3 times returning each time without Fabien (read his blog article about what happend). I myself went to Brussels International Airport to pick up David Zülke and Rowan Merewood traveling together with Ben Waine.

Speaker's dinner and pre-conference social

As is custom to events like this, we organized as speaker's dinner where we invited our speakers and sponsors to participate in this socializing event where everyone has the opportunity to get to know each other, discuss topics and exchange ideas. We headed out to Da Giovanni, an Italian restaurant in the center of Antwerp that is known for it's overwhelming tacky design. Red-white blocked cloths everywhere: the shirts of the waiters, the tables and lamps. We had a decent meal and a very good laugh.

Following the dinner we also organized a pre-conference social in De Vagant, one of Antwerp's most known Jenever locations. This was open for everyone that was in the area and could make it to the place. But tiredness and pre-conference jitters had this social ended well before midnight.

The conference

Saturday was the big day, and what a day it was ! Sponsors arrived well in time to set up their booths and at about 8:30am the first attendees were coming in. Since it had snowed during the night, most attendees were a bit late so we started the sessions with a delay of 30 minutes (by lunch time we were already back on schedule).

After a short introduction by Stefan Koopmanschap, Derick Rethans officially opened the conference with his keynote talk "The PHP Universe", which was well accepted by the audience (See reviews on http://joind.in/1240). The following talks followed right after and filled the most of the conference.

• Fabien Potencier presented "Dependency Injection in PHP 5.2 and 5.3" (http://joind.in/1241) in track 1 while Rowan Merewood talked about "Living with Legacy Code" (http://joind.in/1242) in track 2
• David Zülke presented "The State of SOAP in PHP" (http://joind.in/1243) in track 1 while Paul Borgermans talked about "Get the most out of Solr search with PHP" (http://joind.in/1244) in track 2
• Juliette Reinders Folmer presented "Reg-Ex Fu" (http://joind.in/1245) in track 1 while Patrick Allaert and Davide Mendolia talked about "PHP applications/environments monitoring: APM & Pinba" (http://joind.in/1246) in track 2
• Maarten Balliauw presented "Just another WordPress weblog, but more cloudy" (http://joind.in/1247) in track 1 while Kore Nordmann talked about "PHPillow & CouchDB & PHP" (http://joind.in/1248) in track 2
• Lorna Mitchell presented "Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World" (http://joind.in/1249) in track 1 while Ivo Jansch talked about "PHP and the Cloud" (http://joind.in/1250) in track 2

Remote presentation

Due to bad weather, Zend's speaker Eric Ritchie couldn't make it to the conference, but by using WebEx we were able to have him present his talk "Generating dynamic PDFs using Zend Framework and JavaBridge" (http://joind.in/1268) from his office as though he was standing in the room. Although it was a bit tough to set up, I have to say it was successful fix for Zend, WebEx and us.

One downside of this approach is that Eric didn't had the chance to interact with the attendees himself during or after his keynote and as shown in the comments on joind.in there were still a few questions that the attendees wanted to clarify with Eric. So, in a technical perspective it can be called a success, but for the conference spirit it has a downside.

Closing Keynote

My personal mentor and dear friend Cal Evans was given the floor to present his closing keynote "Open Teams" (http://joind.in/1251) which was unlike the other talks not a technical subject, but non-the-less a very valuable view on how managers and developers can improve the way they operate. Unfortunately I missed this talk, but I'm looking forward seeing it on an other occasion. You can contact Cal and invite him to give this talk for the managers in your company, so your company can become "Company Awesome" everyone wants to work for.

Ibuildings Conference Social

The people of Ibuildings were really kind to sponsor the after-social event, held in the exhibition hall. Besides drinks and very delicious food, our other sponsors had some goodies to give away and so people walked away with an iPhone and Zend Studio licenses, a ticket for PHPBenelux Conference 2011, a ticket for PHPUK 2010, Windows 7 licenses, a netbook (provided by Nocus) and of course elePHPants. So a big applause to the winners and of course our sponsors for providing these awesome prizes.

Sponsors

This great conference wasn't possible without the help of our sponsors, and we all thank them for making this first conference the best start of 2010. Thank you !!!

Our sponsors: Zend / Dataflow, Microsoft, Ibuildings, Combell, Telenet, Cu.Be, ServerGrove and WEBclusive.

PHP is hot !

Apparently PHP is hot, hotter then ever. At the conference, a lot of people not only attended the great sessions, but they were also looking for new PHP developers to join their teams. And they were not just giving you a great job, they even offered some real nice goodies when you signed up:

• Telenet: HTC Hero (till Friday, February 5 2010) - Apply here
• Ibuildings: Apple iPad (till Friday, March 15 2010) - Apply here
• DataFlow: Apple iPhone and 3 Zend Studio Licenses (only on the conference day) - Apply here

If you're a company and you're looking for PHP Rock stars, see how you can persuade them to at least talk to you. Make sure you have seen the slides of Cal Evans's talk about "Open Teams", cause if you can offer this, you do have the advantage !

PHPBenelux Team

This conference succeeded because of the never-failing, passionate help and support by the whole PHPBenelux team. I have worked in many teams already, but I have to say that working with these guys on a remote basis (all using Skype, Google docs and e-mail as main communication and collaboration tools) worked very well (as to emphasize what Cal Evans stated in his "Open Teams" talk) and everyone was there to see the result.

Teamies, thanks a lot for this wonderful experience and I'm looking forward doing the things we do best: community relations, meetings and events ! You guys rock !!!

PHPBenelux team by @phpcodemonkey

Conclusion

This was the first conference that I not only attended, but was actually involved behind the scenes. It was a great experience and I have now more respect to organizers of bigger conferences now that we know what kind of challenges they have to overcome.

Read what others had to say about our conference:

• Joind.in comments
• What people twittered
• Flickr images
• What google has found about ths conference

I had a blast and I hope you all enjoyed it. See you all next year at the PHPBenelux Conference 2011, and let us know how to improve ourselves for next years' conference at joind.in !!!

A great 2009 !

It's that time of year again where one looks back to all the things that have happened in the past 12 months. 2009 has to be the most thrilling, fastest ride ever and I'm really surprised to see it's nearly the end of this year.

PHP
The most thrilling part of 2009 was the release of PHP 5.3 on June 30. With this release, PHP has risen to a new level of development implementing some long awaited features like DateTime, namespaces, closures, gotos (who wants to use that ?!?), late static binding and an improved garbage collection. Also new extensions were added to this release like ext/phar, ext/fileinfo and ext/intl.
I want to express my gratitude to all those developers who have made this release possible and to all the participants of PHP Test Fest for making their contributions worth the while.

Zend Framework
It's also worth mentioning that Supreme Allied Commander Matthew Weier O' Phinney, his team and all developers around the world have done a great job improving Zend Framework. With the release of Zend Framework 1.8, lot's of things changed within the way applications are being bootstrapped and provided a more flexible way to deploy feature rich applications with a very modular structure.

PHP Conferences
For me personal it was a very exciting year where I was speaking at some great conferences on stage and in uncon sessions (thank you Keith!). If budget allows it, I'll be attending these conferences again in 2010.

• PHP UK (attendee)
• PHP|Tek (uncon speaker)
• DPC (speaker)
• PHP NW (speaker)
• ZendCon (uncon speaker)

One conference will be added to this list in 2010 since I'll be co-organizing it: PHPBenelux Conference.
If you ever want to catch up on the hottest game in PHP, be sure to check out these and other great PHP conferences on the PHP website. You'll learn so much from the conference itself, the speakers and the audience itself, it's really worth the money.


Macq Electronique
Since March of this year I've been working as a PHP/Zend Framework consultant for Macq Electronique, a hardware manufacturer in Brussels that provides hardware solutions for governments (like automated traffic panels, speed enforcement cameras, tunnel control and pump installation monitors). I would like to thank the company for giving me inside view of these infrastructures and I'm excited to work with them again in 2010.


Thank you !
I would like to express my gratitude to the following people who have thought me a few valuable lessons that I can use in my personal and professional life:

• Cal Evans:
  Cal, to you we now have our own PHP conference in January. Without your support, advise and never ending belief in us, we weren't able to pull it off. Thank you !
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney:
  Matthew, although we never had the chance to sit down and discuss things I do want to thank you for all the good work you have done for Zend Framework and the PHP Community. If it wasn't for you, I'd still be stuck writing crappy code with code replication and re-inventing the wheel all over again. Thank you !
• Keith Casey:
  Keith, thanks to you I was able to talk about stuff that matters to me and being able to inspire people to become interested in things like SPL and Unit Testing. Thank you !
• Stefan Koopmanschap:
  Stefan, although it seems I've been giving you lots of advice this year, you have shown me what a true spirit means. With your enormous passion for PHP and your ideas to promote PHP in ways that I never could think possible, I owe you so much. Thank you my friend !
• Chris Cornut:
  Chris, I would like to thank you for giving us Joind.in. With it's simple interface and it's purpose it has given me so much feedback on how to improve my skills as a speaker. Without it, I would never known what areas I could improve myself. So thank you very much for your efforts !

Conclusion
2009 was a great year and I'm sorry to see it end. But a new year is around the corner and who knows, it might bring even more excitement and fulfillment. Anyways, I wish you all a very happy new year and I hope to see you again at a conference somewhere in the world.

Unit testing with Zend Framework 1.8+

I recently gave a presentation at ZendCon 2009 Uncon about "php unit with Zend Framework", which many people liked a lot (see comments on http://joind.in/638). But since then I got a lot of questions how to set up a testing environment for Zend Framework applications that uses version Zend Framework 1.8 or newer.

We start off by setting our environment best fitted for our unit testing. I use a virtual linux system for this, using VMWare, but with some extra background research these global settings can be applied for your own (test) environment as well.

I'm not going to explain how to install PHP here, but I can tell you I'm using PHP 5.3.0 (build from source). With this build, I've installed PHPUnit 3.4.2 and Xdebug 2.0.5. The example application was made using Zend Framework 1.9.5.

First we're creating a new Zend Framework project using Zend_Tool on command line, by issuing the command zf create project zfunit in the workspace directory I use to share my VMWare instance with my workstation.

Ok, we now have a default Zend Framework application running.

We're not going to build a complete application here, but just showing how you can start unit testing your Zend Framework project, so you can implement unit tests on your own applications.

First we need to modify the phpunit.xml file so we can use it as our unit testing configuration.

<phpunit bootstrap="./TestHelper.php" colors="true">

    <testsuite name="Zend Framework Unit Testing">

        <directory>./directory>

    testsuite>

    <filter>

        <whitelist>

            <directory suffix=".php">../library/directory>

            <directory suffix=".php">../application/directory>

            <exclude>

                <directory suffix=".phtml">../application/directory>

            exclude>

        whitelist>

    filter>

    <logging>

        <log type="coverage-html" target="./log/report" charset="UTF-8" yui="true" 

         highlight="true" lowUpperBound="50" highLowerBound="80"/>

        <log type="testdox-html" target="./log/testdox.html" />

    logging>

phpunit>

As you see in the root node of our phpunit.xml file, we include the TestHelper script to aid us setting up the right testing environment. Of course, you can modify this file to fit your own application setup. This is my TestHelper script to set up my test environment, include paths and setting timezones.

// start output buffering

ob_start();

// set our app paths and environments

define('BASE_PATH', realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../'));

define('APPLICATION_PATH', BASE_PATH . '/application');

define('APPLICATION_ENV', 'testing');

// Include path

set_include_path(

    '.'

    . PATH_SEPARATOR . BASE_PATH . '/library'

    . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path()

);

// Set the default timezone !!!

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Brussels');

// We wanna catch all errors en strict warnings

error_reporting(E_ALL|E_STRICT);

require_once 'ControllerTestCase.php';

We create a custom ControllerTestCase that we can extend in all our controller test cases. This proves to be the most convenient way to handle the setup and teardown of the Zend Framework architecture.

require_once 'Zend/Application.php';

require_once 'Zend/Test/PHPUnit/ControllerTestCase.php';

abstract class ControllerTestCase extends Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase

{

    public $application;

    public function setUp()

    {

        $this->application = new Zend_Application(

            APPLICATION_ENV,

            APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/application.ini'

        );

        $this->bootstrap = array($this, 'appBootstrap');

        parent::setUp();

    }

    public function appBootstrap()

    {

        $this->application->bootstrap();

    }

}

And finally we create our first test on the default IndexController.

require_once realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../../ControllerTestCase.php');

class IndexControllerTest extends ControllerTestCase

{

    public function testCallingRootTriggersIndex()

    {

        $this->dispatch('/');

        $this->assertController('index');

        $this->assertAction('index');

    }

  

    public function testCallingBogusTriggersError()

    {

        $this->dispatch('/bogus');

        $this->assertController('error');

        $this->assertAction('error');

        $this->assertResponseCode(404);

    }

}

Running phpunit from commandline will tell you that your assertions succeeded and all is a go.

All green, assertions succeeded and report is generated.

I've setup my test environment that directory log/report is aliased by /report, so I can view the code coverage reports (requires XDebug).
The following code coverage report is the result.

As you can see, with just a minimal effort you've set up your Zend Framework application to be unit tested. So now you don't have any more excuses to leave your applications untested.

Since I don't have all the knowledge, I would like to thank Matthew Weier O' Phinney and Mathias Geat for sharing their knowledge on the subject. Thanks guys !

ZendCon 2009 Review

If you're involved with PHP and you haven't heard of ZendCon before, you have been around the wrong croud!

The past week was reserved for the biggest PHP event of the year bringing you the best of the best the open-source and commercial world have to offer developers and businesses. And it rocked, big time!

With a full day of tutorials and three days of top-notch presentations given by people that make things happen in the PHP ecosystem, you got a real bargain for your money.

Besides these brain overloading sessions, Keith Casey, king of the uncon sessions, hand-picked the best sessions rated and presented by the audience itself. And even though the main conference was mindblowing, Keith made sure that people had a hard time choosing between main tracks and uncon sessions. Job well done Keith !!!

I was scheduled for three uncon sessions myself.

On Monday I talked about unit testing with PHPUnit and Zend Framework.

Php Unit With Zend Framework Zendcon09

View more presentations from Michelangelo van Dam.

On Tuesday Anna Filina, Bradley Holt and I talked about the role of PHP user groups and provided tips on (re)starting a user group, how to get involved with open-sourse projects and how to get sponsorships from local businesses and big enterprises. I made a recording of the session, but sound quality is poor, so I need more work on it to improve it. Stay tuned for more.

On the third day I was scheduled for my "SPL, not a bridge too far" session but I (and others) were a bit too late for such an early schedule due to the fact that Microsoft was giving an awesome party downtown San Francisco to celebrate the release of Windows 7.
Because we parked our rental car in a car park that closed around midnight, we were happy we could join other conference attendees and speakers on a party bus bringing us back to the hotel where we arrived at about 4am.

Conversations on community stuff with Keith Casey and Anna Filina kept us out of bed until way passed 5am leading up to the fact that I arrived late at my own session scheduled for 8am.
Luckily no one was there to miss me, but still… ariving late at your own gig is so 80's.

For those that couldn't make it to San Jose, you could follow along on IRC channel #zendcon, Twitter and Flickr. Even some Google Waves and Youtube movies were spotted here and there.

A few good things were braught to the attention of all attendees.

• people and businesses should get more involved in contributing back to the open source projects they use themselves
• there is no best framework out there so look for the one that best fit your needs
• there's a lot of talent out there that's not supported enough by the company they work for to become educated on advanced topics or even get certified
• beware of the weierophinney !!!
  

Conclusion

ZendCon proved to be the top-notch PHP conference of this year, seeing lots of old and new friends giving the best of themselves. Like the German PHPcc who gave an awesome amount of tutorial, main and uncon sessions, my dear friend and genius Matthew Weier O' Phinney who was more on stage then amongst the audience and of course Keith Casey, who ruled the uncon sessions in a magnificent way.
But to be honnest, ZendCon would not exist without the community that gave us PHP, Zend along with S&S for organizing this event and the sponors that pushed the ticket prizes down to an affordable level. Thank you all and see you next year at ZendCon10.

Spl Not A Bridge Too Far phpNW09

This morning I had the honor to speak at the PHP North West (phpNW09) conference in Manchester (UK) about SPL. It was almost a full room and it was wonderful to see and hear people being impressed what SPL can mean for them, so I believe it was a good session.

For those who attended my talk, you can leave your comments and feedback at http://joind.in/613 and be sure to rate the conference itself at http://joind.in/event/view/70.

Spl Not A Bridge Too Far phpNW09

View more presentations from Michelangelo van Dam.

Bughuntday: yes, you can!

Last week Thursday the start was given to Zend Framework's Bughuntday and it turned out to be a huge success, as mentioned by Chief Architect Matthew Weier O' Phinney on Zend's DevZone website.

Over a hunderd bugs were squashed leading up to the release of Zend Framework 1.9.3.

What is Bughuntday ?
Bughuntday is actually a term to indicate that on a specific day (or days), lots of developers are focussing their attention to fix bugs, often reported by users in a bug tracking tool (like Jira, Mantis or Bugzilla).

Since lots of users have submitted issues and only a few developers have time to investigate them, extra help is always welcome to clear a backlog of reported issues.

So, each year a "Bughuntday" is scheduled to have many developers fix issues in a relative short timeframe.

You can help !
Fixing bugs for Zend Framework is a very good way to learn best coding practices or parts of the framework you're not familiar with.

Go over to the Zend Framework Issue Tracker and look for bugs that are still open.

If you already signed the Zend CLA, you're good to go. If you haven't done this, now is a good time to do so.

Get the latest revision from http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/trunk/, which includes the library, unit tests, external libraries and documentation.

In case of emergency
If you're stuck, or you have created a patch to fix an issue, head over to #zftalk.dev on IRC (freenode) where you can ask for help.

The Zend Framework Bughuntday is held each third Thursday and Friday of the month and each month prizes are given to the top 3 fixers.

If your company uses Zend Framework, see if you cannot make it a company thing. The quality improvement of Zend Framework will be a great benefit for your company as well.

Speaking at PHPNW09

It's almost fall again and it's amazing to see how many great conferences are scheduled. Seems impossible to choose between great talks given by the best developers worldwide.

One of those great conferences is held in Manchester, UK. It's PHPNW09 with an awesome schedule listing well known and lesser known people from the international PHP community (like Stefan Koopmanschap, Derick Rethans, Lorna Mitchel, Rob Allen and many more). This year I'm on stage too talking about the Standard PHP Library or SPL.

Something that I really like about the PHP community is that we all help each other getting better at the things we do. After I gave my SPL talk at DPC 09 earlier this year, I got so many responses and pointers on the presenter rating site Joind.in which were very helpful improving this presentation.

So, if you have a day to spend on PHP, come and join us at PHP North West conference 2009. Prices are reasonable and flights are fairly cheap compared to the massive information overload you're about to absorb there.

Book review: Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1

A couple of weeks ago I received a book from PACKT Publishing titled "Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management" written by Marc Delisle, with the request if I could read it and write a review about it. Why not ? I haven't used phpMyAdmin in whole my career so I might as well read about the tool everyone around me is using. And since phpMyAdmin is also bundled with Zend Server, it can only benefit my day-to-day job.

On the front cover it states "Increase your MySQL productivity and control by discovering the real power of phpMyAdmin 3.1", so the book challenged me from the start. I have been using the MySQL command-line tool since forever so I was really curious about how this book could convince me to use phpMyAdmin from now on.

The first two chapters of this book are explaining what phpMyAdmin is all about and how you should install it, along with a very detailed security configuration part. A remarkable feature is that you can install it for multi-user hosting purposes, giving each user it's own MySQL toolset using just one installation.

Chapter 3 covers a very detailed explanation of each panel you see in the phpMyAdmin interface. Not only a mere statement that explains what each panel is used for, but also how you can modify this panel's behavior by modifying the configuration settings.

A hands-on example is covered in chapters 4, 5 and 6, where Marc takes you on a journey through all the steps of creating, inserting, browsing, modifying and removing tables and data. Although I was already familiar with MySQL's capabilities, I have to admit that by using a tool like phpMyAdmin your whole data management becomes more visible and gives you a certain amount of joy browsing through your data.

With MySQL on command line I could import/export my data and table structures in native SQL and XML, but with phpMyAdmin you can choose between 14 different export types. Although I believe that SQL will remain the main type used by many, it's good to know you have a tool available that can export data anyway you want.

Another cool feature I discovered by reading this book is that phpMyAdmin offers you the ability to manage relations between tables easily using the interface, but you can also create graphical relation diagrams that you can export into PDF.

With it's MySQL 5.0 and MySQL 5.1 support you also have the ability to manage the advanced MySQL toolset like triggers, stored procedures, functions and views. Having the ability to use these advanced MySQL capabilities in a graphical interface can only benefit it's usage amongst many developers.

But the best feature of phpMyAdmin is that you could have in-table MIME-type based transformations. So if you work often with BLOB data, you can now have it appear right in your interface as a download link or as a clickable thumbnail.

If you're new to phpMyAdmin or you just start using MySQL databases, this book gives you step-by-step instructions on how to use the interface to manage your data. But I think this book has even more value to the professional where this book is the perfect reference guide for all those advanced MySQL capabilities. I will certainly use phpMyAdmin more, having this book besides me to guide me the way.

Dutch PHP Conference 2009 wrapup

A couple of days ago I came home from one of the best PHP conferences in the world, Dutch PHP Conference 2009 with again a very elite list of speakers.

Day 0: Tutorial Day

Thursday, June 11 was tutorial day. A whole day dedicated at learning new things by the greatest PHP minds in the world.

I attended the "Zend Framework Workshop" by Matthew Weier O' Phinney, Chief Architect at Zend Framework.

I went to see this tutorial session to see all the goodies that are put in Zend Framework 1.8 and to learn how to do stuff better. Great stuff like Zend_Tool, Zend_Application and other Zend Framework components are worth checking out.

As it appears, I have to look into the Zend_Acl adapter using a configuration file or an external source and contribute my solutions to the Zend Framework wiki.

Afterwards a Belgian delegation went down-town Amsterdam to have dinner at an Italian place and a drink afterwards at "Leidse Plein".

Day 1

Day one was a very hectic day for me since I was scheduled to speak at 10:30am. But we'll get there in a minute.

Opening keynotes

Before the opening keynote of Cal Evans, Director of PCE at Ibuildings, an awesome animated movie was shown to the public.

Cal Evans talked about what everyone could expect at the conference, what the rules of engagement were and what tags to use during the conference (a very important note).

Andrei Zmievski opened the conference officially talking about "PHP: people, code and ideas". Too bad I had to flee the scene half way the presentation to set up my gear for my own talk about SPL.

Morning Sessions

I hosted a talk called "SPL, not a bridge too far" where I discussed on a low level (according to some, a bit too low) the funky features SPL brings to the table. And looking at the comments left on joind.in I actually got people interested in using SPL in their future development projects.
Too bad I cut it short, like most people mentioned, because there's a whole lot to tell about SPL. Thanks everyone for you feedback, I will definitely keep it mind to make my presentation better.

Ben Ramsey showed us that "Grokking the REST architectural style" is worth thinking about when dealing with REST web services. He also talked about ATOM as a protocol, and he really got me interested in it to find out more. Thanks Ben, it was awesome.

Afternoon Sessions

Matthew Weier O' Phinney impressed us all again with another talk about "Contribute" and what we developers could do to make a difference.
For everyone involved in open-source projects, a must see presentation and again lots of kudos to Matthew for bringing this point to the attention of the masses.

Unfortunately I missed Stefan Esser's talk about "Secure Programming with the Zend Framework" and I'm now waiting for the slides to appear online.

Closing talk of the day was Christian Wenz with "Web Accessibility - A Primer" about the directives to make your web applications more accessible. Although I do appreciate the topic, Christian listed many items straight from the W3C Website and read them out to the public.
A good topic but not much new stuff in it, if you've checked out the W3C Website already.

Speakers Dinner

In the evening the DPC crew had organized a speakers dinner, where all the great minds joined together enjoying talking with each other about PHP and other non-PHP related things.

After the dinner, a social event was held at the tiki bar Strand Zuid.

Back at the hotel I was engaged in a few conversations about Zend Framework and PHP in general. Although I enjoyed those conversations, ending up in bed at around 3:30am was certainly not good for getting up in time the following day.

Day 2

Still in a sleepy state of mind, I headed out to the conference for day 2 missing the opening keynote by Owen Byrne on "Digg: The first two years". But the coffee break afterwards I certainly attended.

Morning Sessions

Eli White introduced us to the wonderful world of scalable websites with his presentation "Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications" and believe me, there are a few things that you might want to investigate further !

Then our dear friend, icon of the Dutch and Belgian PHPWomen and most definitely a great host Juliette Reinders Folmer (@jrf_nl) gave by far the best presentation at DPC titled "Everything you always wanted to know about UTF-8 (but never dared to ask)" where she takes you down the road of UTF-8 encoding issues and looks ahead of the nifty features PHP 6 brings to the table with it's Unicode support.

Since everyone rated this talk as "best talk ever", I won't be surprised to see it on the ZendCon 09 scedule (hint for @EliW) or on other major PHP conferences worldwide.

Afternoon sessions

After lunch I went to see Rob Allen to learn more about "Caching for Performance", but right in the middle of this very interesting session I had to bail because a mix-up with the hotel had taken place. Believing my room was booked until the 14^th, I was surprised to hear I had to clean up my room. So I was rushing back to the hotel to get all my stuff.

When I returned, Lorenzo Alberton was already rounding up his talk about "Trees in the Database: Advanced Data Structures". Too bad, since I believe it was also a very good and interesting session.

Closing Keynote: The Cal & Ivo Show

Rounding up the conference, Cal Evans and Ivo Jansch were giving sit-in session where they invited 3 guests on stage to talk about PHP: Andrei Zmievski, Lorna Mitchel and Paul Reinheimer.

Although the discussions were very interesting, most of the attention was drawn to the big screen behind them where tweets and photos were shown that were taken, uploaded and tagged during the conference.

Afterwards drinks were served for attendees, but I had to catch my train ride back home so I couldn't stay to enjoy the good vibes DPC audience was generating, but even in my train I could feel the air buzzing PHP.

Conclusion

Ibuildings has done it again, DPC 2009 will certainly go in the history books as being the best conference ever !

Many thanks to the Cal, Ivo and all organizers, the Ibuildings Design team (for making an awesome video and creating very cool speaker avatars) and to the sponsors of the event (Zend Technologies, Inc., Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) for their participation in this event and lowering the price of the tickets.

If you missed the event, or you want to catch up on great talks and tweets about the talks, I've provided here a small list of important sources where you can find more about DPC 2009:

• Twitter (tag #dpc)
• Hashtag (tag #dpc)
• Twitterslurp by Bivings (tag #dpc)
• Flickr photos (tag dpc09)
• Slideshare slides (tag dpc09)
• Voting on joind.in
• TechPortal Official Listing