The Symfony project has officially announced their own BugHuntDay as a part of the phpBenelux user group targeted just towards the Symfony framework.
On Saturday November 14th from 10.00 until 17.00 you are welcome to join Fabien Potencier, Fabian Lange, Stefan Koopmanschap and the Benelux PHP community in Herentals in Belgium to help improve symfony, learn from each other, and of course have some fun. During the day you will first of all learn how to contribute to symfony by finding and fixing bugs, after which you will actually sit down and, coached by Fabien Potencier, Fabian Lange, Stefan Koopmanschap and of course each other, you will be able to actually pick some bugs and start fixing them.
You can find out more about the event on the symfony blog and more on the location here.
Lukas Smith has formally kicked off a restart of the PDO (PHP Data Objects) abstraction layer, trying to get interest back into this part of the PHP project and get developers back into patching and creating more features on it as a whole.
The problem with PDO’s current state is that there are just so many bugs open that it seems like a maintain. Plus the original creator(s) are busy with other things, which means the learning curve is steep. Which makes it all the more important that we both have new guys as well as experienced core developers on this. I think for too long we have waited for RDBMS vendors to bring in the momentum. However since we decided to not play according to the “rules” they have proposed, its obviously our job and not theirs.
He asks that all that are interested in closing out those bugs and really getting the development of PDO back on track sign up for the mailing list and check out the brainstorming page on the PHP wiki on general ideas and thoughts on where the project should be headed.
Matthew Weier O’Phinney has a new post to his blog looking at using the Zend Framework to create various types of API interfaces – SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON_RPC and AMF.
The hubbub surrounding “Web 2.0″ is around sharing data. In the early iterations, the focus was on “mashups” — consuming existing public APIs in order to mix and match data in unique ways. Now, more often than not, I’m hearing more about exposing services for others to consume. Zend Framework makes this latter trivially easy via its various server classes.
He suggests splitting out the API from the rest of the application, though. The extra overhead caused by the normal MVC process could increase the response time. He proposes a method that moves them out of the main site’s root and uses rewrite rules to get things to the correct place (even for multiple request format types). The mod_rewrite example for this is included as well as a bit of sample code showing how the request would work.
Following on the heels of his previous post, Micro Optimizations that Matter, Brandon Savage has taken on all of the articles out there that tout several common misconceptions about what micro-optimizations make your scripts really run faster.
Last week I wrote about some optimizations you can apply to your code that will improve the performance of your site significantly. I also mentioned that regularly an article pops up talking about ways to shave time off your scripts, and I talked about how these articles mostly are bunk. Like this one. The article I linked above is a run-of-the-mill micro optimization list. The difference here is that the author actually makes use of some benchmarks to make their point. So, let’s go step by step and discover together why this article takes longer to read than the amount of CPU time it saves.
He covers a few different categories including looping, quotes in strings, echo versus print, pathing, timestamps and using the regular expression functions (like ereg_* and preg_*).
Just a quick reminder for all of the PHPers out there looking to attend the next great conference – the PHP Barcelona conference is only days away! (October 30th and 31st)
The PHP Barcelona Conference 2009 is almost here, and it is arriving bigger than ever! Two days, three parallel tracks of talks and workshops, and some of the biggest names and companies in the industry covering the hottest subjects on the line. Come to the Citilab to see Rasmus Lerdorf, Fabien Potencier, Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann and many more open the hood and expose the secrets of PHP and PHP related technologies that make the Internet what it is today, and that power what the Internet will be tomorrow.
You can still register and get a one-day ticket for 30 Euro and a two-day licket for 50 Euro. There’s lots of great sessions to attend and plenty of great things to see and do around the city – sign up while there’s still time!
Matthew Weier O’Phinney has posted the latest results from the just-passed Zend Framework Bug Hunt Day session:
This past Thursday and Friday, 15-16 October 2009, Zend Framework held its second monthly bug hunt. Activity started out slow, but picked up tremendously on Friday, resulting in initially 100 bugs resolved, though a few have been re-opened in the days since. The full list is available on our issue tracker. Thank you, everyone, for the participation, and for keeping this initiative alive and vibrant!
The top three bug hunters from this round were Michael DePetrillo, Dolf Schimmel and Robin Skoglund with a special focus on Michael‘s contributions who also recieved SVN access to fix issues in the future. Over 100 bugs total were resolved this time around.
The conference has only just ended and already those summaries are rolling in – here’s just a few of the many out there:
If you weren’t able to attend or just want to catch back up on the presentations you missed, you can always check them out on Joind.in!
New on the Developer Tutorials site there’s a tutorial from Padraic Brady showing how to create a simple Twitter client (to connect and send a tweet to the timeline) via an OAuth (Zend_OAuth) connection.
I finally got around to patching and finishing Zend_Oauth’s Consumer implementation for the OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A specification. Once I had it finished, I used it to write a quick and simple interface to post some Tweets on Twitter while I was testing it out. [...] In this article I’ll explore how to writea quick Twitter client so you can post tweets (those short messages of less than 140 characters) once authorised across the OAuth protocol.
He briefly covers what OAuth is and how its used to connect to sites in place of the more widespred method of a username/password combination. His script shows how to create the OAuth object with the right credentials and have it send a tweet as that login.