Wednesday, December 31. 2008
Wow, what a rollercoaster ride 2008 was; in so many ways. The world faced the biggest financial crisis most of us have ever seen in our lives, the balance of power in the world shifted significantly and fuel prices both had an all time high and a 5 year low in the same year. Crazy times. And I think we haven't seen the end of it yet.
It's hard to analyse what the exact effect of all of this is on our own industry. If you look at TechCrunch's layoff tracker, it is clear that IT was not left unaffected. Several companies that are close to the PHP community have seen layoffs: SUN, current owner of MySQL, laid off about 5000 jobs; Yahoo, the biggest PHP user on the planet, laid off 1500 and even Zend was troubled by layoffs this year.
Thursday, December 18. 2008
 Back in November Adobe invited a representative of Ibuildings over (thanks Mike!) to attend Adobe MAX North America, amongst a small group of 13 other PHP and AJAX influencers.
The main reason to invite us, was to start a discussion on the direction they go in respect to their Flex and AIR development and to receive feedback on some of the plans they have.
Because of my fitting name, previous experience and current interest in Adobe products like Flex, AIR and Flash Catalyst (Previously known as Thermo), I was the chosen one to represent Ibuildings!
Continue reading "Adobe MAX conference report"
Monday, December 8. 2008
For the second year in a row, Chris Shiflett is publishing the PHP Advent Calender. This year, with the help of Sean Coats and the design genius of Jon Tan and Jon Gibbins, the PHP Advent Calender has it's own site. (Last year's calender is still available on Chris' blog)
Among the well known PHP community members contributing this year are Chris Cornutt, Lorna Mitchell, and Matthew Weier O'Phinney. Each author participating has volunteered their time and effort to contribute a thought-provoking article to the PHP community.
Wednesday, December 3. 2008
The first day of december started well: It meant the release of the new symfony 1.2.0 version. Aside from the additions and improvements in the code, this new branch of symfony also reinstates an old tradition in symfony: It comes paired with a huge amount of documentation in many forms. Let's have a look at what symfony 1.2 has to offer.
Continue reading "symfony 1.2: It's not just about code"
Monday, December 1. 2008
I have been working on a fun project recently which is built on Zend Framework. While looking at options for paginating a large result set, I came across a Zend Framework module called Zend_Paginator ... and it does just what it says on the tin!
The idea of this module is to allow collections of data to be paginated. It takes the set, restricts the results, and can also generate the page numbers you need to move around between the resulting paginated data. Basically it saves me writing the same pagination code multiple times and then having to fix the bug where the last result on the previous page appears on the next ... all this has been thought of already.
Continue reading "Zend_Paginator: First Impressions"
Thursday, November 27. 2008
Occam's razor is a principle that upholds simplicity. In a pragmatic manner, it can be interpreted as advocating that the simplest solution is best. This principle, historically attributed to William of Ockham (a real village in Surrey, and hence the name Occam's Razor) is often extensible to minimalism in software design and related decisions. Occam's razor is widely, and albeit implicitly, used in almost all scientific and engineering endeavors as a tool to scope and analyse complex systems, to 'shave off' the frills, noise and variables that are are irrelevant to the proper visualisation of the context in the pursuit of forming the best solution for a defined objective. The idea of decomposition with object-orientation is a kind of razor for software engineering. Building on this principle is the philosophy of software minimalism which adds an extra dimension by requiring that software be built to conform to its role while striving to consume the least resource in its execution.
For a feel of Occam's razor, and consequently, minimalism in action, consider the following situation in a game of Pingus:
Continue reading "PHP, minimalism and Occam's razor"
Wednesday, November 12. 2008
In February 2007 I started to work at Ibuildings, at the servicedesk. At that time the servicedesk was moving from our Sittard to our Vlissingen office, and after an intro week in Sittard together with fellow newcomer Rué, we started to work for the servicedesk.
Now, about one and a half year later, there have been a lot of changes. Ibuildings is growing larger and larger, from a software development company with 30 employees to a much larger company which has over 80 employees that not only create software but also provide security audits, training and consultancy. We are not only located in the Netherlands but also in the United Kingdom.
Continue reading "Life at the Support Team"
Friday, November 7. 2008
Last week I attended this year's fall edition of the International PHP Conference in Mainz, Germany. Aside from speaking there, I attended quite a few sessions, and met up with a lot of people from the community. I had a great time, and definitely learned quite some interesting stuff.
I made a schedule up-front and even though usually I hardly follow such a schedule, at this conference I actually did for the most part. The reason I usually don't follow the schedule is because I want to meet people and tight conference schedule's make that impossible. The International PHP Conference luckily offers enough and long enough breaks to meet up with people and talk to them.
Monday, November 3. 2008
With more than 1 million visitors a week Kieskeurig.nl is the largest dutch product comparison platform. Kieskeurig allows users to do a product and or price comparison on almost any type of product on the (Dutch) market. Users are able to review and rank both products and shops. Its main goal is to help other users to make the right purchase. Kieskeurig recently launched their renewed website.
If you're familiar with the site you'll notice the difference immediately. Not only the design has changed but also the interface got many improvements. The new interface is more consistent and well-organized.
Thursday, October 30. 2008
 "PHP5 CMS Framework Development", a book written by Martin Brampton, explores how to approach the typical requirements of a PHP5-based Content Management System and underlying framework.
After contributing for a while to projects like Joomla! and Mambo, Martin took on the role of a lead developer of Mambo 4.6.1. The six months spent leading the project gave him a good understanding of its functionalities and limitations. Martin left Mambo (before they announced to drop support for PHP4 last September) to write his own CMS and "evolve out of the Mambo history", by taking advantage of PHP5 OO enhancements. The result is Aliro: a CMS, a framework and an extension project with traits and genes of the Mambo family. Aliro code is used throughout the book to support and illustrate his presentation.
Continue reading "Review: PHP5 CMS Framework Development"
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