Atlanta PHP

When: Thursday, May 1, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Topic: TestFest 2008

Ever wanted to get involved in the PHP development team but were unsure of where to start? Perhaps you’re not exactly a great C developer, so you weren’t even aware that your help could be valuable? Well, you don’t need to be a C developer to aid the PHP development team, nor do you need to do any fancy compiling or building. You can write phpt tests!

The month of May has been designated as TestFest 2008 for PHP user groups around the world. This month, PHP user groups will work to improve the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. Aside from having the opportunity to help in improving the language itself, PHP.net will also raffle off 10 elePHPants to submitters. Every submission (phpt test) that is considered helpful receives one entry into the raffle. Furthermore, people that show they are capable of writing tests entirely on their own may be given official PHP.net accounts with direct commit access to cvs.php.net and an @php.net email address.

The Atlanta PHP May meeting will be dedicated to TestFest 2008, introducing the concept of phpt tests and how to write them.

Mini-Talk: Easy Loader Generation

We’ve all seen those nifty animated loading images on Ajaxified Web 2.0 sites, but how do we create them? Eric Stewart shows us how with “a neat little tool for making a quick little AJAX loading gif.”

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

Yesterday, php.net announced the TestFest!

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors.

All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite. Please visit the TestFest homepage to get additional details on the TestFest on how to get involved, either as a UG or by setting up the necessary infrastructure.

As a preview for our May 1st meeting, we will have a workshop format catering to two different groups of developers. For beginning PHP developers, we will help you get started developing PHP applications by helping to set up your environment and teaching a few of the basics. For intermediate-to-advanced developers, we will discuss how you can assist the PHP development community by writing phpt tests. More details to come in the future.

Discuss phpt tests and the TestFest in the Atlanta PHP forum.

When: Thursday, April 3, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: I’m a PHP dev! Why should I care about Microsoft?

There are a host of technologies and tools from Microsoft that can add value to your PHP solutions, save you time, and are just plain cool. This presentation will cover server technologies like FastCGI, IIS and the PHP SQL Server Driver, client technologies like the ASP.NET AJAX Library and Silverlight, as well as developer tools. This is not a sales pitch – it’s a technical walkthrough with demos, and will give you pointers to lots of resources for digging deeper.

Glen Gordon is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft who presents free .NET developer training around the Southeast. You can reach Glen through his blog http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon

Mini-Talk: Bug Tracking

Kevin Roberts will do a short presentation about bug tracking.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, March 6, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Robust Batch Processing with PHP

Brian DeShong will present on robust batch processing with PHP, a talk he will also give in May at php|tek in Chicago.

Offline processing is a common practice used in building scalable web applications. Dedicating machines to perform expensive processes, such as video transcoding, image transformation, and sending of emails, helps keep front end webserver resources available to serve requests.

How do you make developers aware of problems with these processes? How do you ensure that your batch processing system can scale to multiple machines? How do you handle failure in a responsible manner? Brian will use real-world examples while illustrating how to build a robust batch processing system.

Mini-Series: PHP IDEs

Alex Peterson will present the Eclipse IDE and the PHP plugin for Eclipse.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, February 7, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: The Tao of MVC

George Jempty demonstrates how to leverage his own BareBonesMVC (Model View Controller) engine, to balance simplicity against over-reliance on CMS and/or MVC frameworks. Mr. Jempty has successfully delivered professional software to prominent multi-national clients using BareBonesMVC, which he made publicly available at http://code.google.com/p/barebonesmvc-php/ in July 2007, and which has been downloaded over 1000 times since.

Mini-Series: Eclipse

Bill Hertz is slated to give a mini-presentation on using the Eclipse IDE as an editor for PHP.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, January 3, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Sphinx Full-text Open Source Search Engine

Zack Huston and Robert Swarthout will present an overview of the capabilities of Sphinx search.

Hear how PaperBackSwap.com used Sphinx to replace MySQL full text searches and run approximately 100 times faster. Also, hear how Sphinx is used on SwapaDVD.com to create suggested searches—similar to Google Suggest.

Key features include:

• The ability to interface with a MySQL database, PostgreSQL database or any XML feed.
• Search any combination of text fields and weight each field differently on the fly.
• Sphinx is published with APIs for PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby.

More information can be found at www.sphinxsearch.com

Mini-Series: TBA

We will announce the new mini-series topic soon. It will either continue with our IDE series or start a new series on frameworks.

PHP Year In Review

Ben Ramsey will lead a discussion about the many decisions made—and those left to be made—over the course of 2007 that will impact the future direction of PHP. Topics will include PHP 5.3 and 6, namespaces, late static binding, garbage collection, Unicode support, etc. What are these features? How will they affect you? Are they important to you? As 2008 begins, we will look ahead to see what lies on the horizon for PHP. This promises to be an interesting discussion that will likely bleed over into our after-meeting dinner/drinks.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, December 6, 2007—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Zend Framework 101

Cal Evans, Editor of Zend Developer Zone, will present a beginner’s introduction to the Zend Framework.

Mini-Series: PHP IDEs

We will showcase the features of another IDE for developing PHP applications. TBD.

Lightning Talks

We’ll round out the meeting with two lightning talks from anyone who’d like to share. Either be prepared with a 3-5 minute presentation, or simply stand up and talk for a few minutes about anything you wish related to PHP or related technologies. (Please, no product pitches, rebuttals, questions, or job inquiries.)

See the lightning talk Wikipedia page for resources on how to give a successful lightning talk.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, November 1, 2007—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: SugarCRM

Steve “Kaz” Kasinetz and David Gearhart of SugarCRM will present on SugarCRM, providing an overview of the new features in version 5.0 and offering insight into the technical changes. There will be plenty of time for Q&A following the presentation.

Mini-Series: PHP IDEs

We will showcase the features of another IDE for developing PHP applications. TBD.

Lightning Talks

We’ll round out the meeting with two lightning talks from anyone who’d like to share. Either be prepared with a 3-5 minute presentation, or simply stand up and talk for a few minutes about anything you wish related to PHP or related technologies. (Please, no product pitches, rebuttals, questions, or job inquiries.)

See the lightning talk Wikipedia page for resources on how to give a successful lightning talk.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, October 4, 2007—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: The Grown-Up Company’s Guide to Development

Brian DeShong will present “The Grown-Up Company’s Guide to Development:”

Speaking from first-hand experience, the challenges and pitfalls of growing your dot-com into a mature software development shop, or your little agency into a multi-office organization with a large development team will be explored. The benefits of coding standards and best practices will be touted, along with the implementation of code reviews, accountability, and the methods used to increase quality of deliverables across a software development team. Avoiding the reinvention of the wheel leads to common code bases across projects, and the adoption/authoring of frameworks and toolkits, thus leading to a more efficient, nimble development team. Common development mistakes are eliminated with proper planning and the availability of tools allowing developers to dig deeper into their work. Quality products and successful, on-time delivery are the end result. How can this be brought to your organization?

Mini-Series: PHP IDEs

We will showcase the features of another IDE for developing PHP applications. TBD.

Lightning Talks

We’ll round out the meeting with two lightning talks from anyone who’d like to share. Either be prepared with a 3-5 minute presentation, or simply stand up and talk for a few minutes about anything you wish related to PHP or related technologies. (Please, no product pitches, rebuttals, questions, or job inquiries.)

See the lightning talk Wikipedia page for resources on how to give a successful lightning talk.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

Atlanta PHP is proud to welcome php|works to Atlanta, GA on September 12-14!

php|architect invites you to Harness the Power of PHP, at this year’s php|works conference.

This year’s edition of php|works will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, home of the Braves and of the Atlanta PHP user group, on September 13th and 14th, with an extra tutorial day on September 12th.

The conference once again promises to be an excellent event for PHP developers of all levels, with talks from top PHP experts such as Derick Rethans, Chris Shiflett, Andrei Zmievski, Sara Golemon, and many more (and plenty of new faces, as well).

Sign up today before the conference sells out!