Derick Rethans - tag: conference

Joind.in's API

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:27:00 +0000

Joind.in's API

Friday, February 12th 2010, 22:27 GMT

I speak at many conferences and more and more of those conferences are using a service called joind.in. The joind.in website allows attendees of conferences to leave feedback for the speakers, organisers and sponsors. For me as a speaker this feedback by attendees is very important (as long as the comments are constructive). I use those comments to tweak and improve my presentations if I give them at a later moment.

The joind.in website also provides an API that allows you to talk to the service from other applications and sites. I've now integrated this in my site (at the talks page). It uses JQuery's ajax functionality to talk to the backend which queries (and caches) the joind.in API requests. In order to make API calls, you need to make POST requests to a specific URL. The URL depends on what type of object you want to use. For example, there is http://joind.in/api/talk for requesting information about talks, and http://joind.in/api/user for fetching information about users.

Requests can be either made in XML, or with JSON. A simple example to request all comments for a specific talk can be done with something like:

The do_post_request() code I lifted from Wez' page, and looks like:

 array(
                        'method' => 'POST',
                        'content' => $data
                )
        );
        if ( $optional_headers !== null) {
                $params['http']['header'] = $optional_headers;
        }
        $ctx = stream_context_create( $params );
        $fp = fopen( $url, 'rb', false, $ctx );
        $response = stream_get_contents( $fp );
        return $response;
}
?>

I am also fetching the full name for each user. Because this could mean that I have to do a lot of requests I am caching them with eZ Components' Cache component.

You can see the code operational on the talks page, by clicking on the little joind.in logo after each talk that is on the site. If JavaScript is disabled, the logo turns into a link that takes you to the joind.in site with all the comments.

CodeWorks and ZendCon

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:46:00 +0000

CodeWorks and ZendCon

London, UK

Monday, October 19th 2009, 05:46 BST

CodeWorks was a blast, I recorded a few talks that I will be publishing through Vimeo. As teaser I have a recording of Scott MacVicar's PECL picks talk. I also have recordings of Brian Moon's Memcached talk, Chris Shiflett's Security-Centered Design talk and Sharon Levy's Web-Based Retrieval Demystified talk. With all the other random video material I am creating a compilation as well, but that will have to wait a bit more.

At the moment I am on my way to San Jose where I will speak on Xdebug and PHP's DateTime support. Xdebug 2.1 is now feature complete, and I will be working on getting all the open bugs resolved. A release before the end of the year seems likely.

pfcongrez, P2P Конференция, php|tek, PHP Vikinger, DPC and eZ Conference and Awards

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:45:00 +0000

pfcongrez, P2P Конференция, php|tek, PHP Vikinger, DPC and eZ Conference and Awards

London, UK

Friday, April 10th 2009, 01:45 CEST

The above mentioned conferences all have one thing in common: I'll be speaking. At the first conference, pfcongrez I will be talking on implementing Test Driven Development as a model for software development. A modified version of this talk I will also give at the next conference, P2P Конференция (P2P Conference) in Bulgaria. At this same conference I will be talking on using PHP as development language for GSM based applications on mobile computing platforms running Linux, where I will use the pecl/dbus extension to talk to the interface framework available on the OpenMoko platform. This same talk I will also give at DPC in Amsterdam. In between however I will go to Chicago to speak at php|tek on search technologies in my "Haystacks and Needles" talk and on simple architecture in my KISS talk. Before DPC I will also go to Leuven for PHP Vikinger , an unconference that I'll be organizing for the 3rd time. This year it is no longer in Norway, but instead we moved to Leuven in Belgium. It is also de-coupled from the eZ Conference and Awards which will be in Paris.

PHP Vikinger 2009

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:36:00 +0000

PHP Vikinger 2009

London, UK

Monday, April 6th 2009, 12:36 BST

I'll be organizing PHP Vikinger again this year. It will not be in Norway, but instead we'll be moving to Leuven in Belgium. It will be held on May 30th, very close to Leuven's central station at Café Sport (known from the PHP Belgium meetings). For the full invitation, see the website .

Conferences in Winter/Spring 2009

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:47:00 +0000

Conferences in Winter/Spring 2009

Skien, Norway

Tuesday, January 13th 2009, 10:47 CET

In the next five months I've lined up quite a few conferences. First of all, there is Web Programcıları Platformu in Istanbul, where I will be giving the closing keynote to inspire Turkish talent on January 24th.

The week after that I'll be traveling to Barcelona for the eZ International Winter Conference to give a tutorial to the new MvcTools component.

In March I will speak at PHP Quebec Conference on searching with PHP , simple application design and eZ Components .

In April I will travel to Veliko Tŭrnovo in Bulgaria to speak at the WebTech conference on PHP-on-DBUS and Test Driven Development.

The line-up ends with a trip to Chicago to give a talk on searching with PHP , simple application design .

Microsoft Web Developer Summit wrap-up

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:56:00 +0000

Microsoft Web Developer Summit wrap-up

Redmond, US

Wednesday, December 17th 2008, 15:56 CET

About a month ago I visited Microsoft's Web Developers Summit to come and talk with many other people from the PHP Community on how to get closer together and make the PHP experience better on Windows and with other Microsoft products. Although I was quite skeptical about the whole event and was slightly worried about it having only marketing and brainwashing sessions I set off just after php|works to Redmond (or actually Bellevue).

The first day started with Sam Ramji introducing the event, and Microsoft's strategy and "dedication" towards Open Source and open standards. Of course as part of this, OOXML was mentioned which caused some small discussion about the standardization process of it. Also mentioned was the grant to the Apache foundation as well as that Microsoft (or at least parts of it) now see that being open about things could mean growth in revenue. Some of the feedback that he got included making sure that it's actually easier for Unixy people to remotely maintain a Windows server — for example by providing the set of Unix tools from the /bin directory as well as providing built-in SSH support.

The OOXML thing got a follow up later in the day, where a member of the Office team tried to debunk the myths that the OOXML standard process was all messed up. Instead however, we were more interested in seeing how we could get a C-library to deal with office documents. Unfortunately we didn't really go into that specific topic.

Lauren Cooney introduced the Microsoft Web Platform and installer that can install a whole web stack. At the moment PHP isn't part of this yet but it will come soon. One of the things we discussed here was which extensions should be bundled. To which the obvious answer should be: "at least everything that PHP has enabled by default". Besides the installer, they're also working on a Web application installer with which also PHP applications that can be installed. This could also be something that we would like to see eZ Publish in for example.

IIS now also features a "mod_rewrite" extension that can also import Apache mod_rewrite rules from .htaccess files. It would also be nice if php_value settings could be imported and applied as well through this extension, just like the mod_rewrite rules.

The SQL Server team was demoing the new SQL-server driver for PHP. However, they got sort of grilled about not listening to what the users want. At the moment, there are the following "irritating" issues: There is no PDO driver, UTF-8 is not supported and it only works on Windows. The first two are definitely deal-breakers for us if we'd want to support MS SQL Server properly in our software. We discussed those issues later and it seems mostly a resource issue. Let's hope they can prioritize those points soon.

Juan Rivera introduced a Visual Studio plugin for editing PHP: VS.Php . I had spoken to Juan before regarding Xdebug that he integrated into VS.Php.

There were many other talks, but they didn't qualify for writing notes about. What I found most interesting were the interactions with the developers, and the least interesting where the attendee show cases. I think it was very worthwhile to see what kind of direction Microsoft is going, especially the parts where they want to be part of the community. There's still quite a road to go, especially because of legal issues, but they're at least on the road. Contact has been made :)

Upcoming conferences: php|works and PHP Northwest

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:01:00 +0000

Upcoming conferences: php|works and PHP Northwest

Skien, Norway

Monday, November 3rd 2008, 11:01 CET

In the upcoming two weeks I'll be embarking on a little trip, where I'll be speaking at php|works in Atlanta on Test Driven Development and on Date and Time handling with PHP. The latter subject is also the topic of a new book that I've been working on in the past months. Before going home and after visiting Redmond I'll head to Manchester to give a keynote titled "K.I.S.S." at the PHP Northwest conference. Looking forwards to see all my PHP friends again!

Fall Conferences

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:30:00 +0000

Fall Conferences

Skien, Norway

Thursday, September 11th 2008, 09:30 CEST

Fall is coming up, and the means plenty of conferences. Next week there is ZendCon , where I will be speaking on search solutions for PHP and Test Driven Development.

On September 27th I will be speaking on Debugging with Xdebug at the Barcelona PHP Conference .

At the International PHP Conference (no longer in Frankfurt^WMörfelden, but in Mainz) I will be speaking on PHP Myths Defused and Xdebug -- I will also give a keynote on the "K.I.S.S." principle.

At php|works in Atlanta I will speak on Test Driven Development and Xdebug, and at the last planned conference of the year, PHP North West I will also give a keynote on the "K.I.S.S." principle.

PHP Vikinger 2008 Wrap-up

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:45:00 +0000

PHP Vikinger 2008 Wrap-up

Skien, Norway

Monday, June 23rd 2008, 10:45 CEST

PHP Vikinger is over again. With about 35 attendees, I would think it was a great success. After opening the event, we figured out which topics people were interested in. After voting for the topics, we came up with a nice couple of topics. First we had a little discussion on QA and Testing, which Thomas Nuninnger moderated. I include my (raw) notes from this:

Selenium takes a long time to run tests, so Thomas only uses it for front end only, whereas phpunit is used for as much as possible backend code. Selenium apparently has some functionality for parallizing ( selenium grid ), but there are some issues as well as you can not tell it to run specific tests parallel. WebDriver does exactly the same, except for running it in the same browser. But it's going away from actually using a real browser... which sorta defeats the point of Selenium. Thomas also mentions that sometimes a fixed value as recorded by the IDE is not good... but you can "fix" that yourself in the PHPUnit tests that Selenium can export. The IDE is getting better BTW. CruiseControl , phpUnderControl , phing (phing is not gnu make) - a port of Ant .

After this, we had a discussion about the deployment of web applications, where we discussed some different approaches such as "svn check-out", but also tools for doing so such as Capistrano .

Sebastian then explained a little bit about the PHP Object Model . We also tried to figure out a strange profiling issue in one of Zoë Slattery's applications with Xdebug , but we could not manage to figure out what it was just yet. The last talk before lunch was from Kore Nordmann about CouchDb .

After the pizza lunch provided by Klosterøya, we continued with presentations on Project Zero , by Ant Philips of IBM; the new lexer in PHP by Scott MacVicar and a talk by Sebastian Bergmann on the eZ Components' Workflow component. The last talk of the day was by Tobias Schlitt on database abstraction with eZ Components .

I will put the slides online at the PHP Vikinger website once I receive all of them.

Namespaces in PHP

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 11:53:00 +0000

Namespaces in PHP

Dieren, the Netherlands

Sunday, June 15th 2008, 13:53 CEST

During Stefan Priebsch' session at the Dutch PHP Conference on PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 - A look ahead a discussion popped up about PHP's namespace support. One of the things that came up is the conflicts that can arise with internal classes.

Take for example this code:

In PHP 5.3 this would alias the class Interval in the namespace PEAR::Date to the class Interval. For now, this code would work just fine. However, if PHP would introduce a class "Interval" at some point in the future (and PHP can do this as it owns the global namespace ) then the above code would suddenly stop working. So in order to use namespaces properly, you always need to have at least two elements left, like:

You need to make sure of course that the short name that you pick is something that does not sound to much like a class name otherwise you'll have exactly the same issue. It's not very likely that PHP will introduce a class pd though.

Location for PHP Vikinger

Fri, 02 May 2008 08:54:00 +0000

Location for PHP Vikinger

Skien, Norway

Friday, May 2nd 2008, 10:54 CEST

We've now found a definite location for PHP Vikinger . It will be at one of the old factory buildings here at Klosterøya , close to eZ Systems' offices. The room has about space for 80 people, and has a nice view over the river southwards. About 20 people from Norway, Iceland, the UK, Germany and Denmark have signed up so far. This means there is still plenty of space for you! See http://phpvikinger.org for more information, and the invitation .

PHP Vikinger unconference open for registration

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:38:00 +0000

PHP Vikinger unconference open for registration

Skien, Norway

Sunday, April 27th 2008, 10:38 CEST

The PHP Vikinger unconference, to be held in Skien, Norway on June 21st is now open for registration . You can find the full invitation and announcement here , but I will repeat the highlights.

First of all, this is a free event, but we do require you to register for it to see whether we would have enough space. Places to sleep, and getting to Skien should be arranged by yourself. We made a information page with some suggestions though. The Norwegian PHP User group has reports and videos from last year . The unconference open for all, from beginners to advanced PHP users. At the moment there are about 12 registrations, from people from Norway, Germany, Iceland and the UK. Hope to see you here!

Announcing PHP Vikinger 2008

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:13:00 +0000

Announcing PHP Vikinger 2008

Vancouver, Canada

Friday, April 18th 2008, 20:13 CEST

The PHP Vikinger unconference will be held for the third year in Skien, Norway . Just like previous years it follows directly after eZ Systems conference which puts this year's PHP Vikinger on June 21st, the longest day of the year.

Flickr features some pictures from previous years . And PHP Norge has a report from last year . Let me know (through the e-mail on the PHP Vikinger website) if you're interested, and if you want to suggest topics.

British date format parsing

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:25:00 +0000

British date format parsing

London, UK

Sunday, March 2nd 2008, 20:25 GMT

During the PHP London conference (slides are here as usual), a number of British people were "complaining" that PHP's strtotime() and date_create() /new DateTime() functions do not understand the British date format "dd/mm/yyyy". Historically, the "English" text to date parsers in PHP only accept the illogical American format of "mm/dd/yyyy". Having seen this problem before, I recently added a new function/method to PHP's Date/Time support to address exactly this issue. From PHP 5.3 the new date_create_from_format() function and the DateTime::createFromFormat() factory method are available. As first argument they accept the expected format, and as second argument the string to parse. To parse a British date string, you would for example use:

format( 'd/m/Y' ), "\n";
?>

In case the passed string does not match the format, the function will return false. With the also new function date_get_last_errors() method you then can request more information about which part of the string could not be passed. The following example illustrates that:

The $errors contains a list of errors, indexed by the position in the string where the error was found. The above script would produce:

array(3) {
  [2]=>
  string(22) "Unexpected data found."
  [5]=>
  string(22) "Unexpected data found."
  [8]=>
  string(13) "Trailing data"
}

The format specifiers are mostly similar to the ones used for the date() function. Documentation on the new functions should make it into the documentation soon.

Speaking in Oslo and London

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:45:00 +0000

Speaking in Oslo and London

Skien, Norway

Tuesday, January 22nd 2008, 15:45 CET

On a rather short notice (from myself), I will be speaking the coming Thursday at PHP Norge 's user group meeting in Oslo on PHP 6 . PHP Norge organizes a bi-monthly gathering with once in a month a talk on a specific topic. Attendance is free.

On a somewhat longer time frame I will be speaking at the phplondon conference . On leap year day (February 29th) I will provide the closing keynote. In this keynote I will go over the last 12 years of development of and with PHP. I will especially focus on how people perceive development with PHP, and in the mean while share some insight knowledge of specific events during PHP's development.