Johannes Schlüter
PHP developers usually don't have to care about the inner workings of PHP and the Zend Engine as it simply works. This presentation will present some of the inner workings, like teaching the truth about references. Additionally it will present basics of PHP's opcode, the internal representation of a script, and it's consequences for opcode caching, autoloading and other related issues.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (94.5MB)
In a nutshell, Less CSS is a tool that lets you simplify your CSS style sheet and allows you to extend limited CSS functionality by introducing variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. The original implementation is written in Ruby; however, there is a PHP solution based on LESS CSS called lessphp. The definition of lessphp from the project's website is as follows:
lessphp is a compiler that generates css from a small superset language that adds many additional features seen in other languages. It is based off an original Ruby implementation called LESS (http://lesscss.org/). For the most part, lessphp is syntactically compatible with LESS, with the exception of a few things...
So why use lessphp? Because it can speed up CSS development, mainly by using the features of less. Your CSS code is much simpler, cleaner and nicely structured and better organised. The tradeoff is the fact that lesscss code needs to be compiled after each change is introduced. Moreover, on one project, we found out that web designers do not always write CSS with DRY principles in mind, and lack of time to work with designers on that introduced some problems.
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With the Call for Papers open and the for the Dutch PHP Conference 2011, it seems like a good time to bring in this interview from last year's host, Lorna Mitchell. Watch this short video for her impressions of the overall event, and some top tips for getting your talks accepted this year!
Video Interview: Lorna Jane Mitchell from Ibuildings on Vimeo.
It's that time of year again! For the fifth year in a row, Ibuildings is organising the Dutch PHP Conference, and the new website is back online at http://www.phpconference.nl. The event will be held in Amsterdam from 19th to 21st May 2011. Thursday 19th is tutorial day, and Friday 20th and Saturday 21st are the main conference days. Mark those days in your calendar!
The Dutch PHP Conference is *the* place to be when you want to broaden your PHP skill set, so we’re looking for high-quality, technical sessions from speakers who can cover advanced topics and keep our demanding audience inspired. Tutorials are 3 or 6 hours in length (note that 6 hours is our preference) and the standard conference sessions should be 45 minutes.
Testing the database layer is a fundamental step during application development. It allows us to ensure that all data operations behave properly, without data loss or corruption. In this article, we are going to describe a simple way to test the database layer of our applications, using PHPUnit database classes, Zend Framework extensions and some custom reusable code to facilitate the process for all the domain models. This article will walk you through, step by step, for each of the tasks needed to achieve this.
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