While at the PHP UK Conference, O'Reilly had a stand. A new series of books caught my attention because they were not the standard "animal on white cover" book I had come to expect from O'Reilly. After looking at those books, I made my pick and went for Neal Ford's The Productive Programmer. A wise choice, as it soon turned out.
While Paris had Symfony Live and Nieuwegein had Joomla!Days, Amsterdam had the Dutch PHP Conference last weekend. Three days completely packed with the most amazing content from speakers that flew in from around the world. Let's have a look back at this amazing event.
Much has been said already in the past days and weeks about the PHP standards initiative that was started by a group of PHP developers at the php|tek conference two weeks ago. As I was there but have not really given my opinion on this in public, I will do that now.
Last week I attended the php|tek conference in Chicago. It was one hell of a great conference, definitely one of the best conferences I've ever been to. I got to meet many people I'd only spoken to online, got to attend some great sessions and got to do some nice presentations.
Last year's TestFest was a huge success. The worldwide initiatives by usergroups and individuals gave a nice addition to the code coverage for PHP itself. This year, the TestFest period has been extended to 3 months, starting the beginning of this month and ending end of june. But a nice bunch of European usergroups including the Dutch usergroup are combining TestFest on may 9th!
Last week we had a usergroup meeting in Amersfoort, and quite unexpectedly we announced that we'll have another one next week. This is slightly unusual, but you got to recognize opportunities as they arise.
For quite some time I've been struggling to set up the backend of a symfony application to be served from a subdomain that is being served by the same document root, to no avail. My backend subdomain would keep serving my frontend. Today, by accident, I found out which stupid mistake prevented this from working, so I thought I'd share.
Here are the slides for my PHPCon Italia sessions. Both sets of slides are slightly altered versions of the presentations I did at PHP UK Conference and 4developers .
As we all know by now, we're living in times of crisis. A recession is hitting us, and it's hitting us hard. Even here in The Netherlands, where at first it seemed we'd be avoiding the biggest hit, we're now getting reports that the recession is the biggest since WWII. The crisis seems to be hitting bigtime in many places. So how does it affect open source and PHP?
This week is the week of PHPCon Italia. It already starts on wednesday with workshops, and has two conference days after that. I'll be speaking twice on thursday, in the morning I'll talk about the symfony framework in my myphpbusters talk, and in the afternoon I'll go into refactoring.
So, only two days have passed since PHP UK Conference 2009, so let's look at the conference (and my slides for the myphp-busters: symfony framework talk).
phpUnderControl is a continuous integration setup for automatically running certain tasks on a project such as testing, documentation building, code sniffing and more. It is based on CruiseControl and uses PHPUnit by default. The default symfony unit testing framework is not PHPUnit, so it was time to enable continuous integration for that.
Ever since starting with PHP 5 object oriented development, all documentation I read on the topic seemed to suggest that the only way to write the method keywords is "public static". I've been following along those lines, and for a while I really thought any other order would trigger errors. Only recently I found out the other way round is actually nicer.
This year's edition of the Dutch PHP Conference will be taking place on June 11-13, and the Call for Papers is now open. So all of you, I know you have something interesting to say, now it's time to let the DPC know!
As I did last year, I wanted to have a look at this year. This year was quite the year for me, with the birth of our second child, a lot of conferences, the reviving of the dutch PHP Usergroup and new symfony versions.
As I've written earlier I've been helping out with the symfony Jobeet tutorial. The tutorial runs for another two days, but my work is done. Well, sort of. So time to look back at Jobeet...
I've been really busy lately hence it being quiet here. My TODO list has quite a few topics I want to write about, I just need to find the time. So what have I been up to? Mainly Jobeet, work and Spore
Francois Zaninotto, one of the two authors of the symfony book and a former core team member of symfony, announced yesterday that he is fully stopping active contributions to symfony. Even though it is always a shame to have less contributors, it is not the disaster that some people may think.
posted on October 31, 2008 - 4 comment(s) - tags: symfony
Continuous Integration. It is something that a lot of companies don't actively work on. It is very useful though. I am currently working on bringing CI to symfony in the form of phpUnderControl. This message is a short status update for those who already knew I was working on this.
With symfony 1.0, one of the nice features was the freeze option, which allowed you to package the symfony libraries inside your project quite easily. This was very useful, for instance when deploying your project on a server where you couldn't install symfony. With symfony 1.1, it is apparently not advised anymore to use the freeze option (even though it is still available). So how should this be done then? Let's have a look...
So today was a good day. The only thing bad was the fact that FC Utrecht lost in the dutch cup and is thereby thrown out. By Ajax, nonetheless. However, that is quickly forgotten when I think of all the good things.
After having organized the event last year, I am very happy to announce that I will be speaking at this years edition of the SymfonyCamp in Leusden, The Netherlands. SymfonyCamp is one of the best ways of getting in touch with the symfony community - and you'll learn something in the process.
Today I tried the DbFinderPlugin for the first time. I am truely impressed. Using this plugin, it is not necessary anymore to really care about which ORM you pick for your project. It's the thought behind symfony 1.1 taken into the symfony ORM-selection.
Last week, I put online the new version of my dutch symfony advocacy website: symfony-framework.nl. The main focus is not advocacy anymore though, I feel that even though that still needs to be done, it's not anymore the main thing needed in The Netherlands.
While playing around with the Zemanta API today, I bumped into a small problem. I first attempted to do it in symfony using the sfWebBrowserPlugin, but as I kept running into a 403 Developer Inactive error, I decided to try other tools, to see if the problem was on my side or on Zemanta's side. The problem, as it turned out, was on my side.
Last year, back then I was not yet employed by Ibuildings, I spoke highly of the Dutch PHP Conference. It was an excellent event, with enough variation in speakers and topics. This friday and saturday, this year's installment of the same conference is taking place.
Even though in this day and age of Javascript, most people do not really think about this anymore, it can still be important to have your site working when someone either has no javascript or has it turned off. It does happen, so you better think about it a bit. Symfony has some neat features for graceful degradation.
Recently I wrote a review of Getting Real , the book by the guys from 37signals. But how, if at all, does this apply to, for instance, symfony ? Let's take some points from the book and see how symfony does...
When I recently did a presentation at pfCongrez , as a thank you I got the book Getting Real by the people of 37Signals. I had until then not heard of the book yet, but it's an excellent view on software development.
I just did a quite big update of the software running this site, adding some new features. Some are as easy as putting a little script on a page, others are quite a bit harder. Let's have a look at what I added.
I started using symfony by taking a single workday to walk through the first seven steps of the Askeet tutorial. After that, as time was scarce, we dived into the project we were planning to use symfony on. Here I'll present you with some tips that I either found or experienced myself.
posted on March 1, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, tips
Aside from the earlier announced Dutch PHP Conference , symfony will get more attention during dutch events the coming months. Because of this, I decided to make a small event calendar on this site.
Last year, while I was not yet working for Ibuildings, I did an introductory session on symfony at the Dutch PHP Conference. I was really looking forward to the event , and it turned out to be the success I expected . Ibuildings proved beyond a doubt that they organize a killer conference! This year, the DPC is back, and stronger than ever!
You can configure a lot of caching in symfony, so rarely do you need to cache things yourself, but it may happen that one day you decide you need it. I came to that point when I wanted to cache certain results from external web services. I could have used the Function caching, but in this case I wanted to keep a bit more control, possibly altering the cache etc.
posted on February 19, 2008 - 4 comment(s) - tags: symfony, caching, php
In the development lifecycle of web applications, I think deployment is something that doesn't get nearly enough attention of developers. But where you can test your code, testing deployment is a bit harder. A good system for deploying applications is therefore a useful thing to have. Symfony has a very easy and strong system for deploying applications based on rsync.
Steer CMS is a new open source application based on symfony. It offers a CMS for websites in a way similar to other open source CMS'es, yet is based on symfony and so quite a bit more interesting to me.
Due to yesterday's happy news I only picked up on another joyful thing happening yesterday somewhere very late in the evening. So let me announce it today: The episode I recorded for the PHP Abstract Podcast on symfony was published yesterday.
Lately there seems to be an increase in the #symfony room on freenode of people asking how to go about working with symfony 1.1. Let me give a short status of the new version of the framework.
posted on January 8, 2008 - 1 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php
On december 20, the symfony team organizes a symfony sprint : A full day of work on just symfony. From fixing bugs to getting the documentation up to speed. And I will also be working on symfony that day, helping out with this symfony sprint.
posted on December 11, 2007 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfony
Second Life is gaining popularity these days, amongst geeks and non-geeks. It's taken me a while to stand and understand the use of Second Life, but especially for knowledge sharing I see the use after attending a presentation inside Second Life. And since my wife is very good at creating things in Second Life, the idea for a hangout place for symfony enthousiasts was born.
posted on November 11, 2007 - 3 comment(s) - tags: symfony
As you can see, I've created a tag cloud implementation here on my website. For this, I actually started writing a plugin, and I'm actually still working with that one here. But since the functionality was already implemented in another plugin as well, after a short discussion it was decided that my more limited implementation (just the tag cloud) would be moved to the snippets part of the symfony website as a helper.
posted on October 28, 2007 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfony
Last week, I automatically updated my PHP installation to the latest version dotdeb was offering me (which usually poses no problems). However, this time around I ended up with two problems.
posted on September 24, 2007 - 2 comment(s) - tags: symfony
For a client, I had to present a bunch of select boxes where users could select a genre, then a sub-genre based on your genre of choice, then a second level of sub-genres based on the selected sub-genre.
posted on August 13, 2007 - 6 comment(s) - tags: symfony
Earlier this year we organized PHP Bootcamp, a one-day event in which we had discussions about several frameworks. It was a huge success. It was an afterthought after another idea though.
posted on July 18, 2007 - 3 comment(s) - tags: symfony