Posts by: Lorna Mitchell

• Win Tickets to the Dutch PHP Conference February 18, 2010

  In addition to my role as editor-in-chief here at techPortal, I am lucky enough to be able to get involved with some of the other cool things that Ibuildings does. This year that includes the opportunity to host the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam in June, which is very exciting! We’ve been busy putting everything in place for the event and our schedule is now available over at http://phpconference.nl/schedule (go check it out, I’ll wait).

  So now you’ve seen the schedule, you probably want to join us! The tickets are on sale over at http://phpconference.nl/register – the early bird tickets run until the end of April and I hope many of the readers of techPortal will be able to make it. Since its an Ibuildings event there will be plenty of familiar faces from the authors you see posting here, and some of them will also be speaking at the event! We’ve also got a special opportunity for techportal readers …
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• phploc: PHP Lines of Code January 28, 2010

  With the growing use of continuous integration and static analysis tools hooked into those processes, there is a particular analysis tool that is very useful but rarely mentioned: phploc, the PHP Lines of Code tool. This has been a feature of PHPUnit for some time but has been released as a separate project in the phpunit pear channel. The nature of PHPUnit means that many of these statistics can be collected while the tests are running, which is why it was added to that tool in the first instance.

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• New Editor-in-Chief at techPortal November 4, 2009

  Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Lorna Mitchell and I’m your new Editor-in-Chief here at techPortal. This site was grown from an ambition by Ibuildings to allow great content, mostly from Ibuildings developers, to be collected into one place and shared with the wider community. Over time this has grown to include the content from the sessions at DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) in 2009, as well as some shorter technical posts.

  This portal was created and managed by Cal Evans and at Ibuildings we will always thank him for doing such a wonderful job in getting this venture set up and pointed in the right direction. As he moves on to new challenges, I will be stepping up to continue this initiative and see it grow further. Cal is a tough act to follow but I am delighted to have the opportunity to try.

  If you have any comments about the site or would like to contact me, I can be reached at techportal@ibuildings.com and I’m always pleased to received feedback. Before I sign off, I’d like to say a big thanks to all our readers – I hope you continue to enjoy techPortal!
• Using PHP_Code_Sniffer October 12, 2009

   

  PHP Code Sniffer (PHPCS) is a package for syntax checking, available from PEAR. It can check code against defined rules covering anything from whitespace through doc comments to variable naming conventions and beyond. In this article we’ll look at getting started with PHPCS, using it to syntax check our files, and go further to look at how the rules are create and the standards defined.

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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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• Getting Started with Memcached February 16, 2009

  Memcache is a tool which can cache objects in memory – and is often used for speeding up dynamic web applications. PHP has a built-in module for working with memcache, and its a simple and convenient way of introducing caching to your application.

  PHP has a PECL module for talking to memcached – look up how to install for your system, but be aware that it isn’t bundled. It’s a good module to include on your system however, quite a few apps will take advantage of it where available.

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