Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

As some other community collegues already announced ^{1 2 3}: Linuxtag X will start on upcoming Wednesday.

The PEAR project will be present with an exhibition booth during the whole conference at the LAMP area. On Wednesday itself Aaron will mainly maintain the booth. On Thursday Stefan N. will also join. I will arrive on Wednesday noon/afternoon, will stay until Saturday evening and give a session on "PEAR and PHP5" on Thursday from 4 to 5 p.m where I will tell you something about the recent steps done in PEAR and what we do in connection to PHP5.

We would be happy to welcome all PEAR / PHP developers attending Linuxtag for a chat at our booth! Beside that we invite every PEAR user to come there to ask questions and give feedback!

I'm pretty much looking forward to one of the best community events in the year and to meeting all of you nice geeks (again)! :)

Yippieh! Just in time for the International PHP Conference 2005 Spring Edition, which will take place from Monday to Wendsday next week in Amsterdam (RAI Conference Center), the __merchandising ballpens__ I ordered arrived^*. Indeed, they are really really cool (much cooler than on this really bad photo)....

Some words on the conference: It'll be again a very cool event (as usual): A nice place to meet all those PHP geeks, to hear and see interessting news from the community and to have some party with friends. See below a little abstract from the Agenda, what you should not miss next week:

• XML and Web services with PHP5 and PEAR (by Stephan Sch. and me)
• PHP 5 - The Perfect Enterprise Integration Platform (by Zeev)
• PHP 5 - The Year After (by Sebastian)
• Say hello to PHP-GTK 2 (by Andrei)
• Go OO! - Real-life patterns in PHP5 (by Stephan Sch.)
• PEAR and PHP5 (by myself)
• Dominating the World (by Derick)
• Web Services in PHP 5 (by John)
• Dynamic Duo: Combining the powers of Flash and PHP (by Christian and Tobias)
• Lies, damn lies and statistics - Making PEAR::Image_Graph work for you (by Stefan N.)

Looking forward to seeing all of you next week again!

^{*PEAR-Devs: Feel invited to come to the Conference in Amsterdam and grab some ballpens for distribution!}

I added some more photos from the PHP Conference in Frankfurt to my gallery. Thanks to Nico Edtinger.

If you have taken photos and have no gallery to publish them, just send me an email with an archive!

Some more photos can be found in the galleries of...

• Sebastian
• Derick

Yeah, I guess I was the one with the shortest way home, today. After bringing Lukas, Marcus, Hartmut and Aaron to the airport, it took me about 15 minutes to get home (because of some after-work traffic on the highway). ;)

It was a pretty successful conference, although I attended the regular conference just today completly and the rest of the time just the inofficial part. From part of the sessions it was quite interessting today. I watched:

• Christian on "XML on Speed - how to write fast and scalable PHP/XML code"
• Andrey with a rant on "Writing parallel applications with PHP"
• Marcus talking about "Functional Programming with SPL Iterators"

and

• Derick with "Enterprise PHP Bananas"

Especially the last talk was pretty neat, since I always wanted to use SRM and it seems like it starts getting usable by now. This project is really worth watching it, if one would ask me. Especially now, that Derick is really using and therefore has a special interesst in the development.

Beside that "official" part of the conference the after-work part was pretty nice, as usual (and stated a lot before). Talking to the community raised a lot of interessting ideas and woke up some which were already called dead in some people's eyes.

The latter one has been the way with the PEAR Core QA Team, which has been created this year in late spring, but did not really get active lately. In Frankfurt we had 5 of 6 members available and hold some very nice discussions in a kind of "unoffical" QA meeting. A summary of what we brainstormed and discussed can be found in our temporary wiki.

Also resulting from this little meeting are some sub projects to be implemented. First of all, we want to automate checking for BC breaks on PEARWeb. This means in detail, that during upload of a new release by a maintainer the BC of his sources is checked. In praxis I'm imagening, that one could simply extract both packages and preg_match() all function prototypes out of the sources. Afterwards one compares declaration by declaration both versions. I don't know yet, if that's a bit too RAM intensive (for large projects like MDB2), but that will appear during testing. I'm currently working on that stuff...

Beside all those productive stuff, party was one of the main goals in the evenings, as usual. Since we discovered the Sauna this year in Frankfurt (which is pretty nice, although a pool is missing a little bit) it reminded me a little of Karlsruhe in June.

All in all I pretty much enjoyed the conference and I'm looking forward to the next one in Amsterdam in May 2005. Hopefully I'll be there again to have some sessions.

I recently put up Aarons photos on my website. There are some nice shots of our workshop (see below) and some other sessions, as well as the after day party, yesterday. Thanks Aaron!

2 days of the Conference have passed and it's time to post a little half-way review. Although I cannot attend the complete conference (yes, there are people who have to work and study), I'm again very impressed of being together with all those geeks you normaly just know from mails and chats.

On the first day (Sunday) I attended more or less completly, cause I gave a power workshop in cooperation with Lukas. Sadly, I missed the best, the after-conference part, at night. Yesterday (Monday) I wasn't able to attend the day sessions, because of university, but I stayed the evening/night. Seeing so many well-knowen friends and getting to know even more new friends is really cool. I guess, most new projects are created on such conferences and it's really an impressive possibility to dig deeper into other peoples projects and start using or even developing them.

Yesterday was the day of the speaker meal, which this time took place in the hotel itself. Last year we went to a restaurant in Mörfelden, which has also been very nice. Of course, this year was cool, too. The food was pretty delicious, the beer even more, and spending the time with so many geeks is really cool.

Sadly I forgot my camera on both days, but I hope not to forget it again today evening, when I will reach the conference again. Until now, I'm still at university and may not leave here until 15:30. Anyway, I'll be there again for the most important part of the day: The evening. :) Today is the famous social event of the conference. I'm pretty curious, what they planned this year (maybe samba girls again?).

In this sense: So far a successful conference. I'm pretty sure, that will last until Wendsday evening. Everyone who has taken photos, please send me a link to your gallery or even the package of photos, if you have non (especially from our workshop on Sunday). Thanks a lot! :)

Today Lukas and me had our second power workshop on PEAR. Like in Amsterdam this year, we introced people into obraining, using and developing PEAR packages. Beside that we developed again an example application, which implemented an interface to Ebay using Services_Ebay. The following packages were also used and therefore presented:

Services_Ebay
XML_Serializer
Cache_Lite
HTML_QuickForm
MDB2
Auth
Text_CAPTCHA
LiveUser
PEAR_Error
PEAR_ErrorStack

The attending crowed was manageable, but not small and beside our presenations we had some interessting questions and discussion points. In this case the attending PEAR devs were extremly helpful and gave support for their packages. Some useful links for further reading resulted on thos discussion and "open parts":

PHP manual
Exceptions manual
PEAR info about exceptions
Ebay developers program
Join Ebay developers program

Some of them even blogged about the workshop before it was finished. See some opinions here:

Stephan Schmidt
Aaron Wormus
Klaus Guenther
more from Aaron

(I will update this list if/when more opinions come.)

Special thanks to Stephan Schmidt, for providing us the needed access data to the Ebay sandbox and support during the development. I hope we managed to teach some useful stuff and created some new PEAR lovers out there. :)

The slides and the example application are as usual available for download and will be linked on the PEAR website soon.

All in all it's been a very good start into the International PHP Conference 2004 in Frankfurt. Meeting all those people (most of the again, some the first time) is a really cool opportunity and the spirit of this conference is as usually great. I'm pretty much looking forward to coming there again tomorrow evening and to spend the night with the community people available there. In this sense: Cheers! :)

On upcoming Sunday (the 7th of November) the International Conference 2004 in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) begins with it's pre-conference part, the power workshops. I hope, that Lukas and my workshop does not get "rasmused" by one of the other interessting ones on Sunday:

• Marcus Börger and Sterling Hughes will talk about "The need for speed" (what is propably a talk, which could make it)
• Christopher Kunz and Peter Prochaska will reflect "Security issues in PHP4 and 5" (this talk is in German language)

Lukas and myself will give an introduction into PEAR, from using the installer over some very interessting packages in reallife to creating own packages. Like in Amsterdam we will develop a little example application during the workshop, to present cool stuff from PEAR. Beside many XML packages we'll show MDB2 and LiveUser, as well as QuickForm many other little usefull tools.

Monday is the second workshop day, with some more cool sessions:

• Björn Schotte speaks about PHP in huge projects (this talks is in German language)
• Georg Richter and Zak Greant share their knowledge about "The next generation: PHP5 and MySQL 4.1/5.0"
• Arjen Lentz shows how to "Optimising MySQL"

The real conference will start on Thuesday and last until Wendsday. There are also some talks which might be pretty interessting, so I will list some up here:

• "Session Server - Maintaining State between several servers" by Stephan Schmidt
• "PHP for your Business" by David Costa
• "New trends in Web-Hacking" (German) by Christian Wenz, Tobias Hauser
• "Building Truly Portable Database Applications" by Daniel Convissor
• "Functional Programming with SPL Iterators" by Marcus Börger
• "Writing parallel applications with PHP" by Andrey Hristov
• "Building Web clients using XUL and SOAP (Part I)" by Dr. Volker Göbbels

Of course there are many other interessting talks, which would blast this blog entry. So you might wanna have a look at them all here.

I'm very much looking forward to this event, cause there are really many PEAR people available at the conf, this time. As there are (in no special order):

• Peter Prochaska
• Lukas Smith
• Alan Knowles
• Arnaud Limbourg
• Stephan Schmidt
• Markus Wolff
• David Costa
• Christian Wenz
• Daniel Convissor
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Klaus Guenther

Update:

• Pierre-Alain Joye

(If I forgot anyone, please forgive me and send me an email!)

Sounds like a pretty funny event for me, also in respect to the famouse social evenings thay organize and the cool location.

The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo ended yesterday. Sadly, I could only attend 2 afternoons, since I have to study right now and didn't want to miss some of my first lectures. Stefan N. and Aaron Wormus maintained the PEAR booth most of the time.

In general, the LinuxWorld is a fair like Systems or CeBit, also it's much smaller and Linux focused. In contrast to the Linuxtag in Karlsruhe it's much much more sales oriented and not so geek. There were several open source'ers presenting their projects (the usual suspects like Debian, KDE and Co.), but the base of exhibitors were companies like IBM and Red Hat. I think this is natural, since Frankfurt is one of the business capitals in Germany.

Nevertheless, it's been a nice fair from my point of view and in the time I was there we had some very interessted people there which will propably start using PEAR and could fix some problems people had. Thanks to Aaron and Stefan for their work at the booth! :)

Update: Aaron gave me his photos and I uploaded them to my gallery.

I think most of you saw it, but since today the "Linux World Conference and Expo" is opened in Frankfurt. Stefan Neufeind, Aaron Wormus and me are available at the PEAR exhibition booth. Hope to see some of you there. I'll be available tomorrow and Thursday from about 4pm CET.