Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

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! :)

I finally added a button for being a "Zend Advisory Board Member" to my blog. I did not have the logo so far.

Now that I saw that some professional PHP developers already took the exam, and considered it much better than the PHP 4 version ^{1 2 3}, I am really proud of beeing part of the creators crew. I think we really created a good certification to make employers decide, if somebody is only a "PHP script kiddie", who thinks to know PHP because he has written his own crappy guestbook, or if someone is a professional PHP developer, who knows what he does.

Thanks to Zend for letting me being part of the certification crew, after I complained about the low level of the last exam! I hope to also be part of the PHP 6 certification creators! :)

^{Hehe, I actually did not take the exam myself, yet, because of a lag of time. Hopefully I will pass my own exam! ;)}

Yesterday way my first anniversary with eZ systems. Exactly 1 year and 1 day ago I signed my contract and started working for our German eZ branch. While being first employed as a freelancer (for my own wish) I soon started to work exclusively for eZ, when I came to the eZ components project at the end of July last year. Sure, I'm also doing some stuff beside (or better: in cooperation with) my work at eZ systems, but the company has evolved to my absolute primary employer.

On August 2nd 2005 we officially announced the development of a new enterprise PHP 5 library, the eZ components. We took more then 3 weeks of full time work of 5 people to get the basis of eZ components designed, before I returned from Norway to Germany again and started developing and documenting, until the first beta of eZ components came to light on November 28th. I never worked on a real company product before (only for custom inter-/intranet solutions) and bringing out a first beta was absolutely exciting. The coolest thing I felt about my job was, that I got payed for what I did as one of my greatest hobbies before. Yeah! That was (and still is) what I always wanted!

Finally, on the 30th of January, we released the first stable version of eZ components and I really had the feeling that we were on a very good way to make a great piece of software. Indeed, so far I did not loose the feeling, but it got only stronger and stronger. I remember having the birthday cake, Kore and me made these days, as if it was yesterday. Now that it's going to be 1.1 final in a few weeks, I feel that I have to thank a lot of people at eZ systems for my time so far.

Thanks to Sandro for telling me I should apply for eZ systems, when moving to Dortmund. Thanks to Ralf for accepting my application. Thanks to Kore and Tobias for so many great times. Thanks to Aleksander and Bard for supporting my personal evolution. Thanks to Amos, Derick, Fred and Ray for really good teamwork and lots of constructive discussions. Also special thanks to Derick for correcting my English over and over, guiding me through Skien and for Nasi! Thanks to Terje and Nina for bringing me to the phpDay in Bari. And finally thanks to Peter, Kristian and all the others for some great party and lots and lots of fun!

All you people at eZ systems: Stay as you are and keep up all the greatnesses! I really enjoy working with you and I hope that this relationship will go on for a long long time...

Sebastian finally signed his contract with eZ systems and will move to our headquarter in Skien - Norway - next month. He will write his diploma thesis there about the new work flow engine for eZ publish 4. I'm really happy to have Sebastian with us. Another member of the open source community in our middle. For that: Welcome on board, Sebastian! Have a lot of fun with the great guys in Skien! :)

This moring someone queried me on IRCNet:

BigPumP Hey
BigPumP kennst du dich mit php aus und mit bugs finden??
BigPumP Kannst dir einen 20iger verdienen

For the english speaking community a free translation:

BigPumP Hey
BigPumP do you know php and how to find bugs??
BigPumP you can earn 20 bucks

I just noticed that we offer an early-bird-discount for all of our trainings. This obviously includes the eZ components workshop I will be giving on March 6th and 7th. If you book until 1 month before the course starts, you still save 10% of the workshop price. So take your heels and join me in March! :)

As Derick already wrote, we release the first RC of our new product eZ components yesterday. Beside the unification of the API, we enhanced several components with additional features and refactored smaller parts here and there since Beta2. I feel highly satisfied about how our work evolved in the past 6 month.

Now it's time to get you finally involved. Therefore, I will give a 2 day workshop on the eZ components on March 6th-7th (6 hrs per day) in our office in Dortmund. The training will give you an overview on the architecture of the eZ components and will dig into most of the exciting components in depth by showing practical examples. You will see how you can perform everyday development tasks very efficient and will learn how to use the neat interface we thought out.

Topics covered of this workshop will be (among others):

• Database abstraction
• Caching
• Image manipulation
• File handling
• Email

and much more...

I can highly recommend this workshop to everyone involved with PHP based development to get an overview on what we did in the past half year and to see how your development can benefit from this. After the workshop you will be able to directly enter highly efficient development using the eZ components.

For more information refer to our announcement of the workshop

• in English language
• in German language.

Since some others already blogged to be within the first 1000 Zend certified engineers, I feel to raise my 2ct, too. I took the exam during the PHP Quebec conference in Montreal last March. I was actually suprised to pass the exam without any kind of preperation, after Marcus, John and some others convinced my to have a try (it was free there, so I took the chance). At least that shows that you should be able to pass the exam with real-world PHP experience.

Congratulations to Zend for making their certification that public!

I'm sure it's a good marketing thing for them and at least the certification allows employers to devide between real developers and script-kiddies in some ways. For those certifieds I'm actually not sure, the 1000 mark means only good. Maybe the certification exam is to easy? One has to concider that, the more certifieds exist, the more it reduces the "level of professionality" attested for them and the more likely the certification looses it's use for them as their own self-marketing instrument.

Anyway, having a certification in place at all is a good thing. I hope that Zend comes up with a more advanced version of the certification (maybe some "Zend certified PHP wizard"?). This would be a great addition and allow people to show their advanced PHP capabilities. Let me know, if there is going on something in that direction.

So long, happy PHP coding! :)

Sadly I'll leave the eZ Systems headquarters in Norway tomorrow direction Dortmund again. It really was an amazing time for me in all aspects: Work, people, country and whatever else matters.

We almost finished the work we planned to do during my stay here (some small peaces will follow on Monday, but that's all) and it was really amazing teamwork. By now, we designed the most important eZ Publish Enterprise Components and discussed every single bit of the design in a 5 people team. The work was amazing fun, since all of us joined the team with a completly different background (like Derick, with the C- and PHP-core-background, Amos, who already dealt with the migration of eZ Publish from version 2 to 3, and me with a PHP library background - meaning PEAR). We sometimes seemed to get lost in endless discussions on sense & nonsense, habits and techniques. But after all it's a very good feeling, if really all of us agreed with the picked solution. You will definitly read more on that, next week, wenn eZ Systems publishes a Community Report on what we did in the past 3 weeks.

Beside that I enjoyed Norway pretty much from a non-tourist perspective, which was really cool, too. I got to see the exciting natural environment here (like I went to watch & try to photograph shooting stars with Derick) and learnt to know many original and choice Norwegians which are all really nice people. We went out for lots of party on the weekend (although alcohol is very expensive here and bars close at 3, people know how to make great party) or for the beach when weather was ok (I never saw a one-time-grill before...*g*).

All in all i really enjoyed the time here and would definitly like to come back for some weeks in the nearer future (if managable). When time fits I'll write some more on this topic later on here. So, stay tuned and remember to visit Norway once in your life! It's an amazing country. So far, have a nice weekend! :)

Time has been running so fast in the past weeks... No it's time for me to travel direction Norway, to visit the eZ Systems (one of my current employers) head quarters. I'll fly tomorrow to Oslo Torp and will arrive at about 5:00pm (I guess) in Skien. I'll stay there for 3 weeks and will return to Dortmund on August 20th.

By now I've implemented customer projects in relation with eZ Publish. In the upcoming 3 weeks I'll be introduced to eZ Publish core development itself. I'm pretty much looking forward to my work and the country (never been to Norway before). Hopefully I will find time in the evenings and during weekends to finally work a bit on my projects.

Beside my work in Norway I will start with my online workshop (in cooperation with ThinkPHP and akademie.de) on August the 16th. If you're interessted in learning everything about PEAR in 6 weeks you should definitly join the course. We'll deal with the PEAR base installation (giving you practical hints on difficulties), package maintainance, the usage of PEAR packages (including best practices) and how to package & distribute your own code using the PEAR Installer.

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