June – 2009 – techPortal

Migrating to PHP 5.3 June 30, 2009

As PHP developers download and start testing the biggest change to the language in 7 years, many are wondering not about Santa’s bag full of new toys for them to use in building tomorrow’s applications but about the changes in the language that will affect yesterday’s applications.

The good news is that if you’ve been keeping your applications current with the language and best practices, there are very few things that could affect you. The bad news is that the farther away from the current version of the language you get, the harder it is going to be to port your code. For developers coding against the 5.2 branch, there are a few edge case situations of which, you need to be aware.

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New Memcached Extension for PHP June 22, 2009

Earlier in the year, a new memcache extension was released for PHP by Andrei Zmievski, Core PHP Developer and Open Source Fellow at Digg.com. The extension is for dealing with memcache from PHP, and is called memcached (not to be confused with the existing extension, "memcache"). The idea behind the new extension is to leverage the functionality contained libmemcached - a solution which has been widely adopted across many scripting communities and beyond. The extension is available in PECL and has lots of shiny new functionality. This article looks at how to obtain and work with the new extension, and also shows off a couple of the new features it includes.

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DPC09 Wrap Up June 16, 2009

It is one of the perks of my job that I get to attend several PHP conferences every year. None of them are more fun - and exhausting - for me than the Dutch PHP Conference. This year’s DPC can be summed up in the most used word in the twitter feed last week, “awesome”. From the beginning of the tutorials on Thursday to the final good byes on Saturday, you could feel the excitement in the air as developers from across Europe and around the world gathered to share ideas at the fastest growing PHP conference in the world.

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DPC Sessions and Slides June 15, 2009

The Dutch PHP Conference 2009 is in the history books now but the spirit of sharing that went on there continues. For the attendees, the friendships made are priceless, and the exchange of ideas is a large part of the value of the conference. We can't duplicate the in-person experience, nor would we want to try. However, for those who were not able to attend, or for the attendees that need a refresher on the concepts learned, we are making this central repository available. We will link to the slides as we are made aware of them by the speakers. Not all speakers will release slides or audio and that is fine with us. However, those speakers who do release them, this list will server as the official repository.

We will release the audio from the speakers who have given us permission. They will be released approximately once every two weeks here on techPortal. Check back often to see what is new and take part in the discussion on the sessions that have been released.

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Using CSS Frameworks June 8, 2009

Why CSS Frameworks?

CSS frameworks or libraries are intended to solve the same problems as any programming library - to make certain tasks easier, and to standardise repetitive work. They grew from various front end developers realising they were doing the same cross browser resets and layout setups over and over again, who refined these standard parts of their processes and released them publicly.

These frameworks can be, and have been, used to layout production sites, but they are perfect for prototyping and 'undesigned' areas - the administration pages, web GUIs and intranets that are often left entirely to the developer in terms of the look and feel. They offer easy and straightforward ways of putting together better looking and easier to use sites, by encouraging the use of some basic principles of design.

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PHP Vikinger Session: Notes From the PDM June 5, 2009

On May 30th, 2009, eZComponents hosted the third annual PHP Vikinger Unconference in Leuven, Belgium. Among the speakers there were Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar, both of whom were at the recent two day "PHP Developers Meeting" in Chicago, IL, US.

Scott MacVicar and Derick Rethans discuss the PHP Developers Meeting from Cal Evans on Vimeo.

This 40 minute video is them discussing the notes that were taken at that meeting, and what is coming for the future of PHP.

Andrei Zmievski blogged about the same notes recently in his post titled "PHP Developers Meeting Notes". He finished editing them and they are now available for public review on the php.net wiki.

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Why CSS Frameworks?

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