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Open Source Your Career, my story - Stefan Koopmanschap
Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:06:48 +0000
About a month ago my good friend Lorna Mitchell put out a call for stories on how working with Open Source has influenced people's careers. Given that a lot of my recent career has been driven by my involvement in Open Source, I shared my story with Lorna. But I also wanted to share some of my story with everyone. So here is my story and opinion on how Open Source can influence your career in a positive way.
July Slides - Brandon Savage
Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:28:37 +0000
July was a month of talks and travel, including speaking at OSCON and user group talks to DCPHP and PDXPHP. For those who saw the “Micro Optimize This!” talk, you can download the slides here. For those looking for the “Five Tips To Make Good Object Oriented Code Better” slides, those are available here.
Speaking at Dallas TechFest 2010 – Building a Web Service API - blog.phpdeveloper.org Â» PHP
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:33:32 +0000
Just a heads up for all of those in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area – there’s a great one-day event coming up this Friday (July 31st) blending PHP, .NET, Java, new media, Joomla and WordPress into one packed day of sessions – Dallas TechFest 2010 at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I’ll be giving a session called “Building a Web Service API” from 10:30 – 11:45am in the PHP track. Here’s a summary of the session:

When is a web application more than just a web application? Hook up an API and you’ll see! I’ll walk you through the basics of what an API is and the concepts behind it as well as key pieces of technology you can use to create both the client and server. There’s a focus on PHP but other languages and tools will be touched on as well.

There’s still time to register for the event – tickets can be purchased for an early bird price (ending today) of $50 or $60 at the door. You can see the full list of sessions here.
Beer Alchemy Integration - Sean Coates
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:48:18 +0000
As I mentioned in my previous post, my beer recipes are now online.

I've had several people ask me how this is done, so I think a post is in order.

While it's entirely possible to brew beer at home without any fancy gadgets, there are several tools I use (such as my refractometer) that make the process easier, more controlled, or both. Brewing software is one of the few instruments that I'm not sure I'd want to brew without. I use a Mac, primarily, so Beer Alchemy (BA) is the obvious choice for recipe formulation, calculation, and logging.

BA has its own html export mechanism for recipes, and I used this for quite a long time, but I was never really satisfied with the results. The markup was hard to style, contained a lot of clutter (occasionally useful, but often redundant information such as style parameters), and simply didn't fit well with the rest of my site.

You can also export from BA in PDF (not suitable for web publishing), ProMash's binary recipe format (a pain to convert, although there do seem to be some tools to help with this), BeerXML (normally the most accessible, but in my opinion, a poorly-designed XML format), or in BA's native .bar ("Beer Alchemy Recipe") format, which is what I chose.

The bar format contains a property list, similar to those found throughout Apple systems. Property lists are either binary or XML (but the XML is very difficult to work with using traditional tools because of the way it employs element peering instead of a hierarchy to manage relationships). Luckily, I found a project called CFPropertyList that allows for easy plist handling in PHP. (I even contributed a minor change to this project, a while ago.)

Once you've run the .bar file's contents through CFPropertyList, layout is very simple. Here's most of the code I use to generate my recipes:
```
isDot()) {
			continue;
		}
		if (substr($f->getFilename(), -4) != '.bar') {
			continue;
		}
		$cfpl = new CFPropertyList($beerPath . '/' . $f->getFilename());
		$recipe = $cfpl->toArray();
		$title = $recipe['RecipeTitle'];
		$recipes[self::slugify($title)] = array(
			'title' => $title,
			'content' => $recipe,
		);
	}
	asort($recipes);
	if ($recipes) {
		apc_store('seancoates_recipes', $recipes, 3600); // 1h
	}
}
```
In addition to displaying the recipe's data, I also wanted to show the approximate (calculated) beer colour. Normally, beer recipes declare their colour in "SRM" (Standard Reference Method). There's no obvious, simple, and direct way to get from SRM (which is a number from 0 to 40—and higher, but above the mid 30s is basically "black") to an html colour.

I found a few tables online, but I wasn't terribly happy with any of them, and keeping a dictionary for lookups was big and ugly. I like the way Beer Alchemy previews its colours, and since it has html output, I emailed the author to see if he'd be willing to share his algorithm. Steve from Kent Place Software graciously sent me an excerpt from his Objective C code, and I translated it to PHP. This might be useful for someone, and since Steve also granted me permission to publish my version of the algorithm, here it is:
```
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2820 bytes)
```
Aloha and the art of semantic web content - Henri Bergius
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:31:28 +0000

To bring CMS editing to the next level, the IKS project is working on a semantic html5 editor. This week we had a hackathon in Helsinki focusing on implementing our ideas with the Aloha Editor. In addition to enjoying the hot summer weather here, we accomplished quite a bit and in the end were able to present the whole pipeline of:
- Loading content from Midgard CMS to Aloha Editor
- Annotating our content with Google-compatible Person RDFa elements
- Saving the content back to Midgard
- ...and finally analysing the content with FISE to find more semantic information
The hackathon participants included developers from Nemein, Gentics, Infigo, Salzburg Research and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Some screenshots:

Editing content with Aloha in Midgard

Annotating persons with the Aloha RDFa plugin

RDFa annotation created with the semantic editor

Additional semantic information suggested by FISE

All the relevant code can be found from GitHub (see also the FISE Midgard integration).
Using HipHop for Static Analysis - Sebastian Bergmann
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:30:00 +0000

HipHop for PHP, the source code transformer that turns PHP code into C++ code that can then be compiled with g++, can also be used for static code analysis to find problems in PHP source code.
sb@vmware Money % hphp -t analyze --input-dir . running hphp... creating temporary directory /tmp/hphp_Zz7AXg ... parsing inputs... parsing inputs took 0'00" (20 ms) wall time inferring types... inferring types took 0'00" (10 ms) wall time saving code errors, dependency graph and stats... all files saved in /tmp/hphp_Zz7AXg ... running hphp took 0'00" (208 ms) wall time
The script below takes a CodeErrors.js file (which is generated by hphp and in the example above is saved to /tmp/hphp_Zz7AXg) as its input and print an XML document in Checkstyle's format (the same XML format that is also used by PHP_CodeSniffer, for instance). This XML logfile can then be used with Hudson, for instance, in a continuous integration context.
<script src="http://gist.github.com/490858.js">
Keynoting at PHPNW10 - Lorna Mitchell
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:55:26 +0000
I'm slightly surprised but mostly wildly excited to announce that I'll be the keynote speaker at the PHP North West Conference in October. It is held in Manchester in the UK, which is about an hour from where I live in Leeds, so it is definitely my "home" conference, and this makes me even more excited since I know I'll be in such great company!

The talk is Teach A Man To Fish: Coaching Development Teams and really it's about how a little investment of time or effort can build your existing team into something better - and how that team can then sustain its improvements and continue to raise its performance and the game of the individual team members. All in all I am pretty excited about this talk - as with most of my conference talks, it started life as a rant in a bar, and I'm now excited to be preparing it for a more formal setting!

The event itself is a must-see for anyone doing PHP or allied technologies that can get there (Manchester is pretty central and pretty cheap - if you're in the UK, you have no excuses!). It's a Saturday event, 9th October 2010 and tickets are on sale - the Early Bird prices are still available and we've held the prices as low as possible again, we don't need frills, we just want lots of people to be able to join in! I hope to see quite a few of you there, let me know if you're coming :)
PHP for Android, PHP 6 canceled, APC in PHP 5.4 - Lately in PHP podcast episode 3 - PHP Classes
Mon, 26 Jul 2010 01:39:44 +0000

PHP for Android, PHP 6 canceled, APC in PHP 5.4 - Lately in PHP podcast episode 3

By Manuel Lemos

On this episode of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert comment on the launch of the PHP for Android project and the consequences for the PHP market.

They also talk about the cancellation of PHP 6 and the inclusion of features planned for PHP 6 in PHP 5.4, like the integration of the APC cache extension in the main PHP distribution bundle.

Some of the most interesting classes nominated for the May edition of the PHP Programming Innovation Award are commented, like the PDF text extract, PHP duplicate files finder, Fast Fourier Transform and splx_graph.
PHP 5.3 at New York PHP this Tuesday - Daniel Krook
Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:49:00 +0000
This month Hans Zaunere and Nate Abele will give us a look at the new features in PHP 5.3 and how they’re used in production today. Specifically, these NYPHP regulars will cover three new major language features: namespaces, late static binding, and closures. RSVP now for the meeting at IBM in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday [...]
⇥ PHP 5.2 support ends just as its adoption begins - Marco Tabini
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:45:06 +0000
In case you missed it, the PHP team has just released 5.2.14, which effectively ends active support for the 5.2 branch¹:

This release marks the end of the active support for PHP 5.2. Following this release the PHP 5.2 series will receive no further active bug maintenance.

The logic behind this decision is… puzzling.

Several large projects—WordPress and Drupal among them—recently announced that they intend to push support for 5.2 into their products with their next major release. For example, Drupal 7 will accept 5.2 features, and the WP folks are just working on EOL’ing their support for PHP 4.

This means that a large number of people are just beginning learning, using and stress-testing PHP 5.2. Remember—these projects have very large user bases, so even moving a small percentage of adopters over to a different platform means a big shift. Perhaps—just perhaps—it might be better to reconsider canning 5.2. If, from a technical perspective, the move from 5.2 to 5.3 is an easy one, there is a huge psychological barrier to finally adopting 5.2 only to have it yanked from under your feet.

The real issue at hand, however, is the fact that these large user communities are not engaged in the PHP world, and vice-versa. Ignoring the hundreds of thousands of Drupal and WordPress integrators and developers is bad for both PHP and for those products; we should, instead, try our best to open a dialogue between all the communities that are centred around PHP and ensure that everyone’s interests are properly represented.

This is not to say that the fact that WP has only now decided to move to PHP 5.2 should necessarily affect the progress of PHP, nor that the PHP developers should take a “we don’t need you” attitude toward projects that are based on the language. Ultimately, it’s up to these projects if they want to actively contribute back to PHP or not, and that is the only way for them to effectively affect the development of the language itself.

However, PHP development is too unevenly connected to downstream adopters. Some—particularly framework makers—have an unusually high level of participation in deciding how PHP evolves, and that needs to change.

At least year’s WDC, a small conference organized by Microsoft, I made this very same point and managed to bring a room full of developers into complete disarray in less than five minutes—which means that, in addition to the fact that my ability to drive a bunch of people up the wall in no time flat has not changed over the years, there is plenty to talk about.

[Update: the latest 5.2.x release is 5.2.14, not 5.2.11 as I originally stated. Thanks to Ilia for pointing that out.]
1. As I understand it, this means no more added features or bug fixed. Presumably, security issues will still be taken care of. ↩