September – 2009 – techPortal

Contribute! September 29, 2009

Speaker: Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Working in isolation is easy. Most developers have long lists of tasks that never get shorter, and it's trivially easy to put on blinders as you slog through the list.

Good developers realize that the only way to get through the list is to start using the work of others: PEAR, Zend Framework, ezComponents, phpClasses.org. Once you do, though, the responsible thing to do is contribute back. This can take the form of documentation, patches, feature implementation, and more.

In this session, we'll look at the various ways you can contribute to open source projects, and some common tools you can use to do so.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (64.9MB)
Introduction to JavaScriptMVC September 23, 2009

So it is 2009 and JavaScript is major. The internet no longer consists of only simple page oriented web sites, but large scale, dynamic web applications as well. An application like Gmail is massive and written completely in JavaScript. So while your project is unlikely to be the size of Gmail, it could be quite close. So how do you architect and develop an application of that calibre in JavaScript? How do you enforce coding standards, test and document it? And of course how do you engineer that application in the super tight deadline all software development has?

Justin Meyer and Brian Moschel set out to create a solution to these problems in JavaScript development. That solution has become JavaScriptMVC. JavaScriptMVC is an open-source JavaScript framework (not library) which enforces strict application structure using the MVC design pattern and promotes best practices by supporting testing and documentation. JavaScriptMVC is based on the concept of convention over configuration providing utilities for many tedious tasks, greatly speeding up your development time.
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Grokking the REST Architecture September 15, 2009

Speaker: Ben Ramsey

REST has become the hip, new buzzword of Web 2.0. But what makes an application RESTful? Pretty URLs? XML over HTTP? Any service that's not SOAP? In all the hype, the definition of REST has become clouded and diluted.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (94.9MB)
Graphs in the database: SQL meets social networks September 7, 2009

Graphs are ubiquitous. Social or P2P networks, thesauri, route planning systems, recommendation systems, collaborative filtering, even the World Wide Web itself is ultimately a graph! Given their importance, it's surely worth spending some time in studying some algorithms and models to represent and work with them effectively. In this short article, we're going to see how we can store a graph in a DBMS. Given how much attention my talk about storing a tree data structure in the db received, it's probably going to be interesting to many. Unfortunately, the Tree models/techniques do not apply to generic graphs, so let's discover how we can deal with them.

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The Easy Problems Are The Hard Problems September 1, 2009

Speaker: Paul Reinheimer

Consider "Easy" problems in web applications, like login forms. On the surface, terribly simple, slap some escaping functions on a query and you're done! Well, not quite, what about brute force login attempts? Locking accounts? Captachas!

This talk will examine a few of those easy problems, how hard they really are, and present specific solutions and methodologies.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (86.0MB)

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