Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

I'll be giving a session on the technical aspects of eZ Components in about 20 minutes at the annual eZ Conference here in Skien, Norway. Here are my slides of this presentation for download. It also includes code examples for many new features in our most recent release 2008.1 (hot, just fron Tuesday). I'll write some more about that later.

Update (2008-06-20, 15:13): I messed up with the download link, which is fixed now.

The PHP Usergroup Dortmund will again organize PHP @ FrOSCon this year. As usual this happens in cooperation with the PHP Usergroups Köln/Bonn and Hamburg. The Free and Open Source Conference 2008 is going to happen on August 23rd and 24th. Instead of the past 2 years, we'll not only have a dedicated project room. A dedicated PHP @ FrOSCon track will be a part of the FrOSCon main conference program.

We are looking forward to your application for a session for PHP @ FrOSCon from today on. More information can be found on our dedicated PHP @ FrOSCon website. We are again happily looking forward to this event, which already was extremly nice in the past 2 years. Hope to see you there! :)

As you might remember, FrOSCon and PHP @ FrOSCon are organized completly on a voluntary basis. Therefore we are searching for sponsors who can take over trip and accommodation cost for our speakers. In turn you will receive an individual advertisement package or similar. Thanks in advance!

From May 26th to 28th this year Software & Support organizes a new conference called Dynamic Languages World. In contrast to the usual PHP Conference, which I usually attend, this conference tries to combine the communities around PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy and JavaScript. I'm pretty curious about this kind of composite event and hope to get some cool new inspirations. Despite my interesst in those other languages and the concepts they have in terms of patterns, frameworks and application architecture/design, I'll be giving some talks in the PHP area:

• 6 essential PHP development tools in 60 minutes - A summary of 6 tools that every PHP developer should know of, including short introductions to installing and using those.
• Up-2-date: The State of eZ Components - During this session I'll give an overview on the current state of eZ Components, show some interessting new features and give an outlook on the upcoming version.
• Database Abstraction with eZ Components - While the previous talk shows eZ Components overall, this one will dig deeper into the facilities of database abstraction provided by eZ Components.
• Concepts vs. Flamewar - OOP in PHP, Ruby and Python - This title should tell you everything you need to know. ;)

I'm especially looking forward to the last session, which I'll be giving as a co-speaker for my good friend Carola Kummert (alias Sammy). We'll try to sum up the differences in the OO concepts of PHP, Ruby and Python and hope for some interessting discussion (and possibly flaming) in the attending crowd. Let's see how this concept of a talk turns out.

So far, so good. If you did not order your tickets for Dynamic Languages World, yet, take your heels and catch the early bird before March 27th. I'm sure this will be an interessting and productive conference! See you there! :)

The PHP Unconference 2007 was one of the most amazing events of the past year, head to head with FrOSCon. Therfore I'm pretty much looking forward to the second installment of the conference, which will take place on April 26th and 27th this year. I'm sure that again a large crowd of really nice geeks will attend and I'm especially looking forward to see many good friends there again. While we already traveled there with a good delegation of Dortmund usergroopies last year, it looks like we will be even more this year. Stay tuned for the Ruhrpott invasion, Hamburg! ;)

If you did not register, yet, take your heels and sign up. There are only 120 attendee slots and it will be absolutly worth it! :) Looking forward to see you in Hamburg in April! I hope the weather is as nice as it was last year.

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.

The yearly International PHP Conference in Frankfurt (or like I usually say: the family meeting) is approaching rapidly and I'd like to invite you to join me in my Hands on eZ Components full day workshop. The session will take place on the first workshop day, which is Sunday the 4th of November, and will provide 6 hours of bundled eZ Components knowledge to you.

At the beginning of this workshop I will give you a general overview on eZ Components, show you the most important concepts and illustrate our architecture and design descisions. After that, we will start digging into code and you will see, how different components work in practice. Using a practical example applications to see working code I will explain to you, you are also invited to make me change it and possible exchange or add a feature and show you a different component. Some of the most interessting components - like Mail, Template and Graph - will be shown in detail and give you a good impression what eZ Components can do for you and how you effectively make use of them. Beside that, I will try to give you some insider tipps and tricks for your daily development and will possibly tab some OO design concepts and patters for explaination.

In addition to these learning aspects of my workshop, it should also give you the possibility to provide us with feedback on what you are missing in eZ Components, what you dislike and what you like about the library. Get into discussion with me and potentially other eZ Components development team members (like Derick and Kore), which will also be at IPC. So, seize the chance and tell us, what you think about our work!

And if you don't have a ticket for IPC, yet, take your heels and register now!

The new semester has right begun, which basically means that the semester vacation as it was named earlier (now the lesson free time) is over. While that meant a lot of exams and work on the book for Kore and me at first, we had time for some vacation and finally to take care about a brand new eZ Components project:

Starting by the end of August we spent almost whole September full-time on designing and implementing this component. The goal was to design a flexible WebDAV server component, which can be used to edit whatever data source on an HTTP server through the WebDAV extension of the protocol, with the full lot of concerns in mind.

Who ever read RFC 2518 or even had a slight glance at it, might have noticed its quality. To state it plainly: It's bullshit. Inconsistencies, spongy phrases and un-logical behaviour definition wherever you look. No wonder, that almost every client behaves slightly differnet, so the first major concern was, that we did not now how clients would expect us to react.

The result of the design phase included a custom summarization of the RFC including many other issues we stumbled over and is is a 3 level architecture for the component (as seen in the illustration). The 3 levels incorporate a lot of flexible configuration and adjustment possibilities, as well as a plugin API to realize the many extensions for WebDAV. We are currently working on the necessary client adjustments. While a lot of clients already work, Kore is on reverse engineering the M$ clients constantly, while I'm currently working on the first plugin: Locking.

If you would like to know more about this component and see it in action, come and visit my talk at the International PHP Conference 2007. The family meeting will as usual take place in Mörfelden (near Frankfurt am Main, Germany) from November 4th to 7th. We plan to have an alpha release of the component soon, so I believe you can right forward try it out at the conference and give us feedback.

Looking forward to see you all! :)

Finally, after a long call-for-papers and a 2 weeks decision phase, the PHP Usergroup Dortmund is proud to announce the timetable for the PHP-room at this years Free and Open Source Conference in St. Augustin, near Bonn, Germany.

In contrast to last year, the PHP-room will have a 2 day program of a dedicated PHP and web talks. Speakers include members of the usergroup, like my friend Kore Nordmann who will talk about tagging and problems with it concerning different cultural backgrounds and internationalization issues. Beside that, we have some other prominent community members on board, like my friends Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann, Carola Kummert, Arne Blankerts and Jan Lehnardt.

The topics presented vary between Unicode news and PHP's dirty secrets, by Derick, Sebastians usual introduction on PHPUnit, XUL in theory and praxis by Karola/Arne and a talk about deployment of PHP applications by David Coallier. Beside that, Jan will talk about next generation web storage with CouchDB, Henri Bergius is joining us for session about personal information management with Midgard, Falko Menge will inform us on web services with PHP and Guillaume Jarysta-Dautel will present a session about rich internet applications.

I'm really sad, that I will most propably not able to enjoy this great event, but you will have fun there anyway, I'm sure.

After a long term of proposal time, the call for paper for the PHP room at the FrOSCon conference is finally over. The PHP Usergroup Dortmund will evaluate the received proposals by the end of next week and will inform speakers about their proposal status ASAP. An official time table for the PHP room will be available in about 3-4 weeks.

Just to remind you, if you did not propose a talk yet for PHP@FrOSCon, be sure to hurry! The call for papers will end this Friday, so take your heels and propose something interessting!

We already received a lot of interessting talks, including topics like "PHP goes unicode", "Next generation data storage with CouchDb" and "Testen von PHP-Anwendungen mit PHPUnit". Thanks for all the volunteers who proposed a talk, yet. We will inform you soon about the status of your talk!