Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

After some heavy discussions with Kore and others I researched about German law in respect to individual rights on photos yesterday. Thanks to Arne, who gave me a good starting point (German) for my research. In the end, Kore was mostly right with his interpretation, what made me remove about 1100 photos from my Flickr gallery. All of those showing people dedicatedly where I do not feel to have the explicit permission to publish their pictures. I'll try to explain the reasons, my personal issues and possibly solutions in this article.

Yesterday night I returned from the yearly International PHP Conference in Frankfurt. As usual this was an amazing event, because you get the chance to meet all those people in real live that you usually only talk to by mail and chat. I really like the ambiance in Mörfelden (where the Conference actually is, not far from Frankfurt), but as Lars stated, it's a good thing that IPC is only 4 days, since a lot of community members would need to detox from alcohol afterwards, if it was longer. ;) You see, we had some great party nights, again.

Beside the usually discussions and party, I attended some interessting sessions and hope that I also held some. My slides of the Hands on eZ Components workshop and the Webdav with eZ Components talk are online for you to download and should be online on the conference website soonish, too.

Now I definitly need some relaxing, so its good the weekend is right in front of the door. Looking forward to seeing you at the next conf, mates! Stay tuned.

Almost 1 year ago I blogged about Ohloh, and eZ Components being registered there. Those days I just found it funny to see how they measure the project cost of open source projects based on the ammount of code contained and things. Recently I am actively watching Ohloh and I think, by now it becomes a serious project with real value for every involved party. The maintainers added many new features to Ohloh, since I last blogged about it, and many contributors started participating in the service. So, I want to revise my "review" of Ohloh from the last year and explain how I see it by now.

If you are familiar with Ohloh, you can skip the next section and just start with the "Where is my value?" part, if you like.

Ohlo features

Ohloh still measures open source projects and still has a cost and effort estimation for each project. Additionally, stats on documentation and size, respectively activity, of the involved development team are automatically measured from the projects source code repositories. Based on these statistics and statistics of similar projects, e.g. those which are using the same platform or programming language, Ohloh tries to automatically assign rating statements, so called factoids, to the project. For example eZ Components is rated as being "Mostly written in PHP", "Large, active development team" and "Extremely well-commented source code".

While I can confirm all of this statements and the first rating is quite obvious, the rating basis of the latter 2 factoids is not that clear at a first glance. But quoting the Ohloh website should give you a hint, how Ohloh legetimates these statements: "Over the past twelve months, 12 developers contributed new code to eZ Components. This is a relatively large team, putting this project among the top 10% of all project teams on Ohloh." and "Across all PHP projects on Ohloh, 10% of all source code lines are comments. For eZ Components, this figure is 33%. This very impressive number of comments puts eZ Components among the best 10% of all PHP projects on Ohloh. A high number of comments might indicate that the code is well-documented and organized, and could be a sign of a helpful and disciplined development team.".

In addition to the automatically calculated project stats and ratings, registered users can now write reviews about projects, give ratings about them and assign tags. It is also possible to register links, that provide additional information about the project, to add further source code repositories and to get RSS feeds about the project aggregated. While these are the usual Web 2.0 features, which you just expect in any upcoming web project nowerdays, there are some specialities, which I consider really useful and unique (mostly because the project is unique :).

As a user you can create a stack of open source projects you are actively using. Based on this, Ohloh tries to recommend projects you might also be interessted in, and presents users to you, which own similar stacks. While this seems just again to be the typical social aspect of Web 2.0 applications (quite senseless in itself, but fun to use), there are some really useful aspects here. I'll come back to this later. In addition, you get the chance to assign yourself as a contributor to a project and map the username you are using in the source code repository to your Ohloh user. This way, all your contributions to open source projects in are aggregated in a single place. Ohloh does not only provide information about your commit stats and your activity on the project, but also estimates your experience level with certain technologies, based on your commits.

Another important social feature is that you can give kudos to contributors for their contributions to a specific project. While kudos always existed in the open source world, this is the first time (AFAIK) that you can officially state your appreciation for the work of a contributor. Ohloh uses a quite complex algorithm to measure the kudo level of a contributor, which implies the kudo level of the user giving the kudo, the ammount of kudos he gave to people overall and also the ammount of users that stacked your project and some more.

You can enhance your own profile, by adding location information to it, so that users near to you will be shown in a Google map and users / contributors of a project, who are located near to you, are shown, too. The latest feature is, that you may add further information about the projects you contribute to, like the position you had/have in the project, the tools you gathered experience with during your work and the languages you used, which might possibly not be visible in the commit stats.

There are still lots of more features I could list here, but I'll leave this to your own experience with Ohloh. My main intention was just to give you a short overview, what the tool is capable to do. I guess that worked?

Where is my value?

So, this is just the usual Web 2.0 hype thingie, you propably think by now. There is nothing really usefull there, at least nothing which is more useful than, for example, Flickr. No, I think there is a difference here. The Ohloh project can become (and is already in some ways) a really sensible tool for different groups of people.

First of all, it is extremly valueable for users which are new to open source. Try to imagine that you are searching for a tool, which performs a specific task. Most propably you will be stunned by the variaty of projects that can perform the task or are related to it. In this case, Ohloh can give you a nice overview about the different projects and their activity state, which helps you to not get trapped by unmaintained or crappy projects. Additionally, you can get to know interessting new projects, by the recommendations of Ohlohs stacks and possible get in touch with other open source users and developers near you.

I expect you are not that new to open source, so this might propably not be a good reason for you. Additionally, there are different other websites, where new users can collect all those information, so it is not really a unique value, but only a nice enhancement to get the information in a single place. So let's look at another group of potential users, that Ohloh offers value for: Management people. Let's try the thought experiment again. Imagine you are an IT manager or software architect of a company, no matter if a small, medium or large size one. You now need to decide for a new tool to be introduced in your company for a specific purpose. What will your decision be based on?

Sure, commercial vendors will bomb you with marketing arguments, but you still need to research if there is enough truth behind those and it is often difficult to get some hard facts about the product you might choose. With open source projects you have at least the possibility to dig into the source code yourself (or possibly delegate this task to some developer). You can try to examine the code quality and dig into mailinglist archives to collect other users impressions. You can also try to estimate the size and skills of the development team. But all of this consumes a lot of time and if you need to decide among several projects, the task is almost impossible to solve. Ohloh solves at least some parts for you here and provides a well-thought basis for you, with many important facts in 1 central place. Beside that, you can directly see, if a contributor is possibly located near to you, which is propably interessted in providing commercial support and consulting for the project to you. You will also get an impression of the key contributors and can estimate the skills of a possible consultant.

Ok, let's finally stop with though experiments. I asume you are an open source developer. So, what the heck is the sense behind Ohloh for you? I mean, except the kudo thingy, which can propably boost your ego? At first, you get the chance to have all your project contributions aggregated in a central place. This is nice to look at. But beside that, it can also give potential employers a nice overview of your skills and engagements. Not only about your experience level with certain programming languages, environments and tools, but also about your way of working in respect to documentation and continuity and about experiences with tools. Furthermore you will receive feedback from your users and possibly an overview about other projects, your users make use of, for possible interaction or integration with these.

Good, I hope you identified with at least 1 of the above described people? You did not? Hmmm... then at least Ohloh can give you a nice impression about how much worth open source already is and a cool example how a cool Web 2.0 application looks like. ;)

^{I would appreciate if you try out Ohloh and possibly give me some hints on how you see things, here on my blog. Thanks in advance!}

The Mozilla Development Center has a new mascot called "developer kit":

Really sweet and a nice slogan! :)

Derick pointed me to these funny cards, yesterday. Really cool work, I think, and propably quite useful, if you go to a conference without knowing anybody. ;) Thanks to Cal for this great piece of artwork!

^{I hope I'll receive a version of the printed deck, somewhen... ;)}

Yes, it's true, exactly 3 years ago I wrote my first blog entry. By that time I would never have imagined, that I would keep blogging for more than 3 years and that more or less constantly. My weblog now contains 458 entries. Surely, there is some bulshit in it and if I go back, I sometimes wonder, why a specific entry was worth blogging to me. Anyway, in this entry, I want to make a little journey with you and give you some links to the most interessting / annoying / funny / useful / useless / ... blurbs on this site. But before we start, here some more or less actual stats:

Of the 11 categories in my blog, PHP is the largest one, with 167 entries, followed by PEAR (91), Geek (78), Community related (55) and Private (36) and eZ (34). The category with the feewest entries is University with just 3 entries. I recieved 540 comments so far (no, no spam counted) and the most commented entry was my discussion about the sponsored link practices of phpfreaks.com with 28 comments, directly followed by Comfortable PHP editing with VIM -3- with 20 comments. Aaron and Derick wrote the most comments on my weblog, followed by John Doe (the annonymous poster), altogether with 38 comments. All of my blurbs together contain 592764 characters.

But that should be all with boring figures. Let's start a little journey through the past 3 years...

On October 25th 2003 I announced my first talk at the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt. I still remember that I attended it for the first time the year before and was really exciteted to go there as a speaker. This year this is not really anything special anymore, since I've been there every year now since 2003 and will again give some cool talks there. Shortly after that, I already proposed a talk at the PHP Quebec Conference... ;)

On January 17th 2004 I switched from KDE to Gnome, which was a very wise decision... I'm still with Gnome. 1 week later Chregu and me opened Planet-PHP. While the site is hosted and was mostly built by him, we together hold the dominion about the aggregated blogs. Another day later, I announced PEPr, the PEAR Proposal System, which is still in use in the PEAR project to accept/reject new packages. Browsing through the blurbs I remeber again how my car was broken a few days later *damn*.

A somewhat rediculous discussion was the issue, whether PHP5s new OO extensions should use studlyCaps or underscores. But that was already clearified, when a few days later IBM took over Zend. It still scares me, that I predicted something like that... ;) It's almost akward, that I asked what the PHP CLI switch -a means on April 13th 2004... I wouldn't want to live without it anymore, now!

While on the 14th of June 2004 I announced the election of the PEAR QA team, I'm still sad, that I did not have enough time to work on it. A very funny and useful event a few weeks later, was the Anti-Software-Patents-Demo at Linuxtag 2004. I still remeber as if it was yesterday, as we went at the front of the demonstration, dressed like prisoners. I was quite happy, when my employer these times warned for software patents, a few days later.

I think a great day for the whole PHP community was the 14th of July 2004, when PHP 5 was released stable. Quite funny was the discussion about GOTO in PHP some weeks later. In relation to programming, I loved to read "Mastering Regular Expressions", these days. There are still one of my favorite languages, what maybe somewhat related to my usage of VIM. :)

The PHP World congress I attended in 2004 was kinda akward for me. I was used to geek conferences and therefore just took Jeans and T-Shirts with me to Munich... That was a mistake... All of the speakers wear suites and I was the only geek-looking guy around... ;) On October 4th 2004 I blogged about 1 year of blogging. Since I'm now half through my blog, it seems my blogging frequency became less in the past years.

On November 11th 2004 I wrote my first "Comfortable PHP editing with VIM" post, which became a really cool series of entries and I recently posted part 5 of it. VIM is really a cool editor and if you get used to its features once, you can be much more productive with it, than with any fully blown IDE.

PEAR turned 5 on November 21st 2004. You remeber that I wrote I applied for the PHP Quebec Conference? It did not happen in 2004, but I was there in 2005 and it really was a great event! :) On the 18th of March 2005 it was Unix time 1111111111. A few days later in Canada (forgive me that it's sometime Kanada in my blog, thats the Germany spelling), I took the Zend Certification exam, which turned out to be a success a few weeks later, not even thinking about, that I will be part of the certification team in 2006.

Being back from Canada, I joined the PHP Usergroup Dortmund. The usergroup was not very active these days, but more than 1 year later I can say, that we have a really cool core group of about 8 people who meat every week and a wider circle of about 15-20 people who turn around occasionally. With this, please do not forget to sign up for our first large PHP event, the PHP Weekender!

On June the 6th 2005 I started with eZ systems, where I still work happily on the eZ components project. A few days later we celebrated a decade of PHP online, while we had a somewhat official real-life celebration some days later on Linuxtag.

These days Kore Nordmann (yes the guy who made Image_3D) also convinced me to switch to Gentoo, which I'm now happily using for more than a year. On July 30th 2005 I went to Norway for the first time, to visit the eZ systems headquaters and to get the eZ components project started. During that time I also wrote Pearadise (the PEAR channel aggregator), which is still in beta phase, since I had no more time to work on it... Hope I will find time during the next semester!

September 2005 was a quite busy month. Greg Beaver released the PEAR Installer in version 1.4 stable, which allowed people to distribute their own applications with it. During that month I also went to San Francisco, which is one of the cities in the world I like most. I really enjoyed that trip. A month later I recieved a really great gift from my Amazon wishlist from Vidyut Luther.

During the PHP Conference 2005 in Frankfurt Sebastian Nohn drew a quite nice picture of Kore and me in Dortmund. December 2005 and January 2006 were a quite busy time, since we headed forward to the eZ components release 1.0 (30th of January), for which Kore and me baked a nice birthday cake.

In March this year, we celebrated the 1st anniversary of the PHP Usergroup Dortmund. In April Kore made some more cool 3D stuff and Sebastian Bergmann joined us at eZ systems. In May I went ot Bari for an italian PHP conference. Also a very very great trip!

So, and with a larger jump we are here, today, with blog post number 458. You might be wondering, how I can blog right now, because I'm currently on vacation. I have to admit, that I here used Serendipities time-driven publishing feature for the first time. Anyway, it was quite funny to browse through my whole blog one time yesterday and I hope I continue blogging for another 3 years.

So long...

Kore just returned from his Canada vacation and gave me a hand-signed copy of the book he co-authored, "Exploring PHP" - "Von Insidern lernen". Although I did not read it, yet, I'd like to recommend it to you, since I think to know the authors good enough to believe they write good books. The book is (beside others) written by my friends Markus Nix, Sandro Groganz, Kore Nordmann, Stephan Schmidt and Christian Wenz, all of them well-known experts from the PHP community.

In short, "Exploring PHP" is a roundup about advanced PHP programming experiences, covering different topics like:

• Event driven programming in PHP
• Generation of 3D graphics
• Testing with SimpleTest
• Refactoring and Migration
• PHP 6

If you are actively developing with PHP and don't have the time to read cutting-edge news and latest techniques, the book should give you a good roundup on the named topics.

I'm really looking forward to digging into it. Thanks a lot to Kore for the nice example! :)