Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

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!

On November 20th dynamic-webpages.de will start with the first "Professional PHP" online training. This series of online sessions offers you "24 hours of PHP knowledge, from professionals, to professionals". Topics covered in this series of talks are:

• Object orientation and patterns
• Regular Expressions
• Object-Relational-Mapping
• Security
• XML and Webservices
• Testing with PHPUnit
• AJAX and PHP
• Debugging using Xdebug
• Image manipulation
• PEAR
• Zend Framework
• eZ Components

Several speakers will take care about the different topics, among those are Kore Nordmann (Regex, Images and PHPUnit), Christian Wenz (Security, XML, Webservices), Stephan Schmidt for the OO and patterns section and other community known experts. I myself will present the topics "Xdebug" and "eZ Components".

All talks will last about 2 hours (possibly a bit longer) and will take place on a dedicated day so you are not too filled up with knowledge afterwards. The sessions are presented in German language using a professional online training system, that allows you to interact with the presenter and other attendees in writing and speaking.

Since it is the first time this course is scheduled, you will receive a 200,- € discount when booking right now, so take your heels and jump over to the dynamic-webpages.de training and certification page and save your seat!

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.

A couple of weeks after the International PHP Conference Spring Editition, which was held in Ludwigsburg (near Stuttgart) - Germany -, I managed to upload the slides. Here you go:

• PHPotter - Doing magic with PHP
• eZ Components Roundup

While I have not been to any conference since last november, the time of the conferences seems to come again. So, here I go:

• May 5th and 6th: PHP Unconference Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. I'll be there to meet up with the German community and a lot of friends from Hamburg and all over Germany and to possible give some talks, if there is interesst. A large portion of the PHP Usergroup Dortmund will attend, too.
• May 21st to 23rd: International PHP Conference Spring Edition, Ludwigsburg, Germany. Kore and me will be giving 2 talks here and the usually meetup with the international PHP community will take place. I'm quite currious on how this new location will be. Our talks are:
  • The eZ Components roundup, an overview on the status of eZ Components (in German language).
  • PHPotter - Doing magic with PHP, some kind of suprise talk about lots of magic you can do in the PHP language (in English language).
• June 7th and 8th: eZ Conference & eZ Awards, Skien, Norway. This annual Open Source event at the eZ headquaters is one of my favorite events. Beside different talks about open source and CMS topics, there will be an exhibition and the eZ Awards show, which is a great evening event. I'll be giving a talk there, too:
  • eZ Components, a deeper look at the status of eZ Components (in English language).
• June 9th: PHP Vikinger, Skien, Norway. After the success of last year, the PHP Vikinger will again take place directly after the eZ Conference in Skien. This Unconference is especially nice, because of its nice environment (Norway is beautifull!). I'm sure a lot of the usual suspects will attend and we will have a great time!

So, if you are interessted, have any questions or just want to have a beer or 2 with the community, don't hesitate to join us on one of the conferences! :)

The PHP Usergroup Dortmund is proud to announce the call for papers for this years PHP room at the "Free and OpenSource Conference". The conference, which is organized purely by open source enthusiasts on a voluntary basis, will take place from 2007-08-25 and 26. Location of the FrOSCon will again be the University of St. Augustin (near Bonn), Germany.

As last year, we are organizing a session program in the PHP room (2 days, this year!), which is independant from the FrOSCon talks program. We hope to receive a lot of session proposals for this really great event. So take your heels and propose some interesting topic! :)

For further details, please take a look at our official PHP room website (including our call for sponsors and papers).

^{If you have any questions, feedback of information, do not hesistate to comment here or contact me directly!}

Just a little reminder. Jan Lehnardt will give a talk on HTTP(S) Load Balancing und High Availability mit Wackamole today at the PHP Usergroup meeting in Dortmund. As usual, attending the talk is free of charge. If you are interessted to come around, please give us a short note via email, IRC (#phpug@EUIRC) or as a comment here.

Facts:

For more information about coming here, please take a look at our map on the website.

Kore will give a session about "3D-Rendering Algorithms" on our upcoming usergroup meeting here in Dortmund, this Thursday (14th). He will go into detail of some of the algorithms used in Image_3D and introduce us to 3D rendering in general.

Every interessted geek is welcome (as usual). The presentation will start at 18:30 in the rooms of eZ Systems Germany (see a map here).