Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

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!

Update 2006-08-17:

I forgot that Wolfgang and me moved the dates for the sessions, because Wolfgang is on vacation and wants to take part in the sessions. Sorry for that! So, here are the correct dates:

After the highly successful first online session about eZ components, which I made in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de, we decided to set up another one. Even better: This time we will have 2 sessions and both for free. As last time, the first session "eZ components I" will give a general introduction to our enterprise PHP library and will guide you to the usage of eZ components. You will learn all necessary basics to get started with eZ components supported development and get to know some interessting components, based on a simple example application. The seconde (new) session "eZ components II" will get into more detail on 2 important components, which are not covered in the first session: eZ Template and eZ Mail. I consider those as 2 of our most important and impressive components, so this looks very promissing. Beside that, the 2nd session will cover more components, that are not shown in the first part.

Since dynamic-webpages.de is a German website, the sessions will again be in German language. If you are interessted, you can simply register for taking part on dynamic-webpages.de and join us. It would be quite cool, to offer those sessions to an international audience, too. So, if you provide online seminars in a similar way, feel free to contact me about this!

Thanks a lot to dynamic-webpages.de for sponsoring the equipment and bandwidth again and to eZ systems for sponsoring my efforts!

I just finished my online session about our enterprise PHP 5 library eZ components, which was sponsored by dynamic-webpages.de and eZ systems. The talk went really good and more than 20 attendees followed my words around the general design of enterprise eZ components and my source code browsing session through our Gallery example application. I really had the feeling, that everyone was quite impressed and very satisfied with the session, at least I was.

So far Wolfgang and me already had a small chat regarding part 2 of this great event, which will probably deal with more components, especially Mail and Template. If possible, we plan to make it available for free again. So far, thanks to Wolfgang for initiating this all!

Have a nice weekend! :)

I'll be giving a free online session about our enterprise PHP library in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de on May 26th, 15:00-16:30. The session will give an overview about the eZ components architecture, as well as practical usage examples. I would love to meet you online then. :) Thanks to Wolfgang Drews from dynamic-webpages.de for providing this session!

Find detailed information here.

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.

Take your heels, time is running out to register for the world first PEAR Online Seminar and to learn everything about PEAR in 6 weeks....

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! :)

I recently uploaded the slides PEAR Powerworkshop Lukas and me hold today. It should be linked on PEARWeb, php.net and my website in the next few days. Feel free to download the stuff here.