Posts by: Lorna Mitchell

  • DPC 2010: Sessions and Slides June 14, 2010

    The Dutch PHP Conference is over for another year – we had a wonderful time hosting you all in Amsterdam and we were delighted so many people were able to join us for 3 days of serious technical learning (with some beer on the side of course!). While the event itself has finished, the content will live on in our DPC Radio podcast series, where we’ll be broadcasting audio from the main tracks at the conference through the year. Plenty of the speakers have already uploaded their slides, read on for a breakdown of ratings and links to slides for those talks that have them – and don’t forget to rate all the talks you saw on joind.in! (You can leave general event info too – click on the comments tab on the events page)

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  • Web Services for PHP Developers June 1, 2010

    In this world of sharing data, increasing numbers of sites and applications are making information available over web services. Whether we are building a service as a feature of our own development, or pulling in the information published by others, we will need to understand the different service types and how to work with them in PHP. This article aims to give you the tools to do just that.

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  • Tips for Working with DateTime in PHP April 29, 2010

    Recently we published a post about tips for dates and times in PHP, today I thought I’d follow on from Michael and add some more tips. In PHP 5.2 there is an object oriented approach to working with dates and times – the DateTime class! In the newer PHP 5.3 versions even more excellent functionality was added. This is a short post to introduce this functionality with a focus on the methods available in PHP 5.2 showing some simple examples of how we can more easily manipulate and display dates without needing to work with timestamps.

  • DPC Ticket Competition Winner Announced March 22, 2010

    I’m delighted to announce the winner of our competition to win a ticket to DPC – congratulations to randomly-selected winner Andreis Mooij!!

    A huge thank you to everyone who took the time to enter, we were overwhelmed by both the quality and the quantity of the responses on the post – 89 comments in total!! I do hope that some the other commenters will be able to join us in any case – if you’re thinking of coming then do book your tickets soon at http://phpconference.nl/register – Early Bird prices end on April 30th.

  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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