• PHP and the Cloud March 31, 2009

    Introduction

    Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. So, analogously, we now have the shared wonders of Hyde Park, where everyone and anyone can chill on the bench, throw some Frisbee, instead of having to financially pool money to buy a private park to shoot rabbits.
    (more…)

  • Announcing the European WinPHP Challenge March 23, 2009

     

    Microsoft, Ibuildings and Leaseweb are proud to announce the European WinPHP Challenge.

    We love giving stuff away to developers. So we are really happy to be able to announce that our friends at DPC09, Microsoft, and Leaseweb have come together with us to sponsor the first ever European WinPHP Challenge.

    We want you to build your next Open Source project on IIS7/PHP and win prizes.

    First prize is airfare, hotel and a ticket to MIX10 in Las Vegas, NV-US!

    Come help us celebrate the great progress that the PHP Windows team has made in making PHP a First Class citizen on Windows. Be a part of what I’m sure will be an annual event for years to come.

    Details can be found here on the DPC09 Wiki

    Registration opens April 2nd and you must register before April 15th to participate.  Winners will be announced during the closing keynote at DPC09.

    Check out the wiki for full details and contest rules and please help us spread the word.

    =C=

  • Debugging Development March 16, 2009

    Programming, as much as it is about machines, is conducted by humans, and is as susceptible to human error as any process. These bugs can be frustrating, particularly when found by a client, but they can give an insight into underlying problems, and sometime suggest solutions – or at least ways of catching errors early. This article looks at four different classes of bugs: mechanical, mental, social and environmental, their causes, and some preventative steps.

    Before discussing these, it is worth noting a couple of points. Bugs and errors are problems where the result is not what the programmer had intended – where if you asked the developer whether they expected X to happen, they would say no. This is quite different from the, equally common, problem of the functionality not being what the client desired, or missing some unspoken assumption – in both those cases the wrong thing was built right, rather than the right thing being built wrong.
    It’s also worth mentioning that bugs will be much more likely if a programmer is tired, hungry, unmotivated, distracted, or stressed, either from the project or in their personal life. These problems don’t have a technical solution, but addressing them might yield better dividends than all the rest of the techniques put together.

    (more…)

  • Getting started with phpUnderControl March 3, 2009

    In any decent sized project, the more times you commit code, the bigger the chance is that you will break something. Call it the law of unintended consequences or the butterfly effect, but the fact is that in complex systems, we cannot anticipate all the effects of a change. To deal with this we can either adopt the “release and pay” method of software control, or we can setup systems to help us find the consequences of our actions, so we that can correct them before they become a problem. We usually call these systems Continuous Integration systems.

    (more…)