TBNL

Today I ordered my ticket for Dutch PHP Conference. Last year’s edition was great and this year it’s twice as long. This year I’ll skip the tutorial day though. For me the money is better spent on reading material. Anyone interested in going can save some money by registering before April 30th. My ‘usability and PHP’ paper didn’t make it but on the less PHP focused topics there is accessibility. And a lot of other interesting topics. Presentations I will probably be attending: All the Little Pieces: Distributed systems with PHP, Secure Programming with the Zend Framework and Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications.

Last night there was a phpGG (dutch php user group) meeting in Utrecht with a presentation by Lorna Jane titled ‘Linux-Fu’. Attended by about 10 people, console basics & tricks were addressed. I’m not unfamiliar with Linux so the basics weren’t that new. For development I mainly use IDE’s so I just use the console to edit the occasional config file, create some symlinks, that kind of stuff. For those tasks I find myself sticking to set of commands I’ve learned and just occasionally taking the time to do an in-depth google search for better ways to get the job done. So with regard to linux shell trickery there are things to learn for me. Neat timesavers:

Switching between current and previous directory:

cd -

Going home can be done without the ~:

cd

How ‘grep’ can beat your IDE. I’ve been playing around a bit and this is really a quick way of finding all classes within a directory that implement an interface (and it’s fast!):

grep -i -r 'class ' . | grep implements

And there’s ‘screen’. Very useful for handling multiple terminal sessions without the risk of losing them all due to a connection hick-up. Lorna has some config examples on her site.

So not all was new but there were definitely some nice starting points to investigate further.

Yesterday I attended a presentation showcasing Drupal. Like Joomla! and WordPress an easy install routine presents the user with a lot of functionality right out of the box. By adding modules as needed one can achieve whatever he wants. So it seems… After the showcase part, the session continued into a case study. The case at hand was a project were all sorts of specific functionality (think: facebook, digg, etc. web 2.0 you know) was required. And it didn’t go as smooth and quick as expected. How come?
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Last week I read an article on webwereld titled ‘2008 was year of the SQL injection attack‘. It was based on an article with the same title on networkworld.com. Apparently SQL injection has taken over the lead from XSS. Not surprisingly the first user-comment stated that almost 100% of the exploits were certainly in PHP applications written by would-be programmers. With things so obvious it’s of course unneccessary to provide factual data backing up such a statement. So, nothing to win in that discussion. Three days ago news came that a customer database of Kaspersky was hacked. By using SQL injection. On a PHP website. Could commenter X be right?
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Last saturday (2009 jan 24th) I attended the phpGG Frontend Special. phpGG stands for ‘PHP Gebruikersgroep’ which translates to ‘PHP user group’. The meeting was held in a nice little theater in The Hague and was attended by what looked like about 50 people. The four main presentations scheduled:

• Microsoft – User Experience on the web
• Adobe – Flex/AIR
• Javascript – 8 Reasons every PHP developer should love it
• The frontend is your friend

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Following my first post on the MSDN inTrack day I’ll now cover the second half of the day. The two topics featured were the presentation side of things and the Microsoft Live platform.
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Last week I attended a one-day Microsoft event about what the Microsoft platform has to offer for PHP developers. Four topics were covered: MS Server 2008 & IIS 7, SQL Server, Presentation and the Live platform. As was explicitly mentioned, the event wasn’t about ‘learning PHP’ but about ‘what’s in store’. It seems like Microsoft takes PHP’s growth seriously . In this first post I’ll cover IIS and SQL Server 2008.

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As applications often need to run on different setups (think: develop, test, production), configuration settings can usually be divided in a static ‘application’ part and a more dynamic ‘environment’ part. Zend Framework offers a very flexible set of classes that help reading and organizing configuration data and making it available throughout the entire application. But, as very often, there is no ‘only way’.

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