Archive for the 'Useful Information' Category

Saturday Meeting: Tackling Large Scale Projects

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Come join us on Saturday, December 15, 2007 to see our very own Pat Narciso discuss Tackling Large Scale Projects.

Although most web projects tend to be small to medium-sized, occasionally a large project will come along. Rather than passing the job on to someone else and loosing income, you may want to consider taking the job. With proper planning, delegation of responsibility, and good ‘ol fashion hard work, just about anything can be accomplished. Pat brings with him much experience with past projects including building and launching Growing Bolder, a social network for the 50+ market.

Be sure to come prepared with questions of your own from projects you are currently working on. This meeting is certainly not one to miss!

This meeting will be held in Room 113 at DeVry University’s Orlando Campus. The meeting will begin at 3:00 PM. We’ll see you there!

RSVP: Facebook, Upcoming

Cup ‘o Code Tonight!

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

This is a reminder to anyone planning on attending tonight’s Cup ‘o Code meet up.

RSVP: Facebook, Upcoming

ZendCon ‘07 Slides

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

If you are bummed out because you missed ZendCon 2007 (myself included), you’re in luck! All the slides are currently making their way up to Zend’s Developer Zone. The list is far from complete, but it is constantly being updated.

http://devzone.zend.com/article/2637-ZendCon-07-Slides

Some of my favorite ones are:

Take some time out today to go over a few presentations that catch your eye. Be sure to open up a discussion with any interesting points you find or questions you have.

PHP 5.3 Is Here!

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

If you are the kind of person who likes to ride the bleeding edge of software (like myself), go get PHP 5.3 from snaps. There are a handful of features that developers have been craving for quite some time; namely:

  •  Namespaces
  •  Improved Static Members and Methods
  • A Brand New INI Parser
  • Better Support for SSL
  • An Updated Version of Perl Compatible Regular Expressions

This is, of course, not an official release but rather a developer preview for testing. The official 5.3 release isn’t scheduled for any time this year. Regardless it’s a wise move to start getting familiar with the new technologies now!

Bring Your Own DB

Friday, October 12th, 2007

Come join Central Florida PHP on Saturday, October 27th for a super spooky Halloween meeting! This month’s topic of discussion is frightening to beginners and professionals alike: Database Normalization.

Continuing with the incredibly successful format that we had last month, this will be more of an open discussion of sorts. Everyone is encouraged to bring a database project they are working on and get advice on how to better organize it.

The meeting will be held at DeVry University near the Mall at Millenia in Orlando. We will begin at 3:00pm in room 108 and will end at 5:00pm. After the meeting you are welcome to join us for dinner at Mimi’s Cafe, just across the street.

See you there!

Discuss or register for this event on:

Extending PHP

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Today, an article was posted on Zend’s Developer zone that caught my eye: Using YAML with PHP and PECL. Although the article itself is specific to an extension for parsing and emitting YAML, I found it interesting because it makes a great example of PHP’s flexibility as a platform.

PHP does not support YAML natively. If a developer wishes to implement YAML for a database migration or for any other reason, they must look to a third party library or roll their own. Several elegant solutions currently exist for YAML consumption, but they are written in PHP and must be interpreted with all other PHP code at runtime. This works almost always without a problem, but when efficiency and speed are of concern, a developer may want to consider a more low-level approach. The article demonstrates this well with the syck PECL package (ext/syck). This provides compiled binding with the Syck library. Since ext/syck is compiled, it is already optimized for the system. When the extension is loaded into PHP, the syck_* functions become directly available to the developer without having to include any third party libraries.

PHP itself is an open source language. As a result, any developer can write code to add additional functionality to the language, or to change the language at it’s core. As a convenience to all the PHP hackers around the world, the PECL project was formed. The project homepage (http://pecl.php.net/) lists many other packages which provide an incredible amount of additional functionality to the core of PHP.

Most of the time, PHP developers are satisfied once they get PHP configured on their web server (if it didn’t come that way already). However, with almost no effort, an entire world of lightning fast functionality can be added to your application. Furthermore, this functionality is modular — it can be turned on and off as necessary by simply editing the php.ini file.

Currently there have been no talks given at our group about extending PHP with PECL libraries. I think it would be great to have someone with some experience give a presentation on the subject. Our next meeting will be held on October 27th. Any takers?

Site Updates

Monday, September 17th, 2007

It’s time for upgrades!

If you have been following the discussions in the group, you already know that many things are in the works. We will be progressively rolling out several upgrades in the coming months. One of the first announcements is the addition of our forum. This is intended to address the limitations of our current discussion on Google Groups. The location of the forum is discuss.cfphp.org. Yes, the general discussion group is still available, and will be until people stop using it all together.

Next in line is a much more organized system of event announcement. Since Yahoo! is developer friendly, we have decided to use the Upcoming.org website to organize the events and to handle notifications. Central Florida PHP has an official Upcoming Group that you can add yourself to if you use the service. There is an RSS feed for those who are interested; however they will be prominently displayed on the website as well.

That segues nicely into the next point of discussion: a new design. As of now, this is the least concrete idea currently in the works. If anyone has something to contribute in this category, please make yourself known.

Flex and PHP

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

Adobe Flex has been capturing a lot of attention in the web development community lately, especially the PHP community. Oftentimes called “Flash for Developers,” Adobe Flex opens up the doors to rich application development for PHP developers.

This Saturday, come out and learn a little about this amazing technology and how it can add another dimension to your development.

Date/Time
Saturday, August 25, 2007 from 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Location
DeVry University - Room 108, 4000 Millenia Blvd, Orlando, FL
Presenter
Michael Girouard, Central Florida PHP

Local Happenings

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

Quite a bit has been brewing over the last few weeks with some of the other local groups. As someone was kind enough to point out at our last meeting, BarCamp Orlando has an official date of Sunday, September 23. Greg from ORUG has put together an awesome video highlighting the details. Now go register for the event!

Also, Orlando now has an official Adobe developer group! The Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando met for the first time this past Tuesday (I wish I would have known sooner!) and will continue to meet on the first Tuesday of every month so make sure to set that repeating appointment!

A Warm Welcome to Hydra

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

Central Florida PHP would like to extend a warm welcome to our newest sponsor, Hydra Studio. Hydra is a design firm based out of Lake Mary, FL and is lead by a good friend, Bobby Jones (the designer, not the bum or the golfer). Bobby will be stopping by during our next meeting to meet us all and to hand out some Hydra swag.

It is also worth mentioning that Hydra is hiring. There home page only lists a few openings, but I have an inside scoop that there may be a few all-php jobs that they want to give us first dibs on. So come out on Saturday ready to learn and to network!

Powered by ScribeFire.