In addition to those changes, we now also provide menus for the non-dining hall locations that have food selections (primarily the Port City Java locations).

Support for the existing (Version 1) API will remain in place until December 31, 2010 at which point, the Version 1 will be decommissioned and Version 2 will become the default version.  Please migrate your clients to utilize Version 2 prior to that date.

Read more detailed information on how to use the API.

Why you ask?  Twitter decided that it would be a good idea to discontinue their Basic Auth service in favor of OAuth (you can read more on twitter’s support site) for their API.  With that in mind, we have updated the code to support the OAuth spec.

Other notable features include

• Install script for easy step-by-step installation
• Packaging of Zend Framework 1.10.6 with the code
• Simplified display implementation allowing for a more direct future upgrade path

The code is available at http://twitter.ncsu.edu/download.php.  If you have questions, let us know at twitter@ncsu.edu.

We have just released a brand spankin’ new version of the NC State Mobile Web, located at http://m.ncsu.edu.  This release represents a complete rewrite of the entire application and infrastructure that manages NC State’s mobile presence.  On top of the rewrite, we also found time to add a few new features.

Most notably, is the new University Dining sub app.  Now, you can see all the menus for the dining halls on campus, as well as their hours.  Our part-timer, Chris, took the lead with the sub-app and did a great job.

We also added a very small sub app to provide links to our various email systems on campus.

To our users, nothing much changed.  To those of us who manage the site and are actively working on new plugins for it, the world changed.  I’ll post the specifics of the project later, but there are some really neat things going on there.  So go check out http://m.ncsu.edu on your mobile device (or on your computer, you can see it that way too) and tell us what you think.

Creating the theme & activating it

1. Using an SVN browsing application like TortoiseSVN, export (not checkout) a copy of one of existing theme folders from the OT Framework repo to your local machine.
   • The existing theme folder is located at: https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/public/themes/ot/default
     • Note: you should change the tag (2.3.4) in that URL to match the version of the framework that your application is using
   • You should end up with the “default” folder in one of your local directories
2. Rename the default folder to “my_awesome_theme”
3. Create a new CSS file named “myAwesomeTheme.css” and save it in the /public/css directory.
   • This should be in the same directory with the other css files for the theme.
4. Open the “config.xml” file and rename the following elements
   • <name>
   • <description>
5. Add the new “myAwesomeTheme.css” path to the <scripts> section of the config.xml, matching the format of the other css lines.
6. Save and close the config.xml file
7. Open Zend Studio (or your preferred IDE), and drag your new theme folder into the /public/themes directory. Do NOT put it inside the /public/themes/ot directory.
8. Open your application in your web browser, login, and browse to the theme management page ( http://localhost/yoursite/ot/theme )
9. Your new theme should be there, and should allow you to activate it. You’ll know it by the name you gave it in the config.xml (the thumbnail will be the same as the default theme though).

Now you have an activated theme that’s all yours to change as much as you want.

Changing the header

1. Inside your theme’s folder, open /views/layouts/layout.phtml
2. Make the changes you want, in accordance with general html/css standards.
3. Save layout.phtml, refresh your web browser and see that your changes were applied.

Changing the footer

1. Inside your theme’s folder, open /views/scripts/footer.phtml
2. Make the changes you want, in accordance with general html/css standards.
3. Save footer.phtml, refresh your web browser and see that your changes were applied.

Changing other styles via the CSS

1. If you’re editing any existing styles, like for the header or footer graphics, then you’ll edit /public/css/layout.css
2. Otherwise, you’ll edit the new CSS file that you made when creating your new theme (myAwesomeTheme.css).

Pro Tip:
When you’ve changed the theme sufficiently, take a screen-shot of your site, and replace the /public/images/theme.png file in your theme folder. This will change the thumbnail that displays on the theme switcher page in your application.

• TortoiseSVN -  http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org
• Zend Studio – http://www.zend.com/products/studio/
• Zend Framework – http://framework.zend.com
• OT Framework – http://ot.ncsu.edu/projects/
• WAMP – http://www.wampserver.com/en/

You must already have:

• WAMP successfully running on your local machine (including MySQL)
• A completely empty SVN Repo ready for your application
• Zend Studio installed
• TortoiseSVN installed
• The ability to follow instructions

There are alternatives for these applications, and you could probably follow along anyway, but these are the applications I used to create this tutorial.

Export a copy of the OT Framework

1. Using TortoiseSVN, export (not checkout) a copy of the OT Framework into a local directory
   • https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4
2. Copy it to your local development folder, and name the folder “projectawesome” (ie: if you’re using WAMP, copy it to c:/wamp/www/projectawesome)
3. Delete these folders and their contents (this will make sense later…trust me)
   • library/Zend
   • library/Ot
   • library/Oauth
   • application/models/Ot
   • application/modules/ot
   • application/languages/ot
   • public/min
   • public/css/ot
   • public/scripts/ot
   • public/images/ot
   • public/themes/ot

Get your repository ready

1. Using TortoiseSVN connect to your SVN repository, and create 3 folders at the root level of your repository:
   • tags
   • branches
   • trunk
2. Close Tortoise SVN

Set up your project in Zend Studio

1. Open Zend Studio, click File–>New–>Project…
2. Choose SVN–>Project from SVN
3. Choose “Create a new repository location”
4. In the URL field, type your repository’s base location
5. Enter any username/password credentials required for your repo
6. You will then be prompted to select a resource that will be checked out as the project. This is where you need to specify the “trunk” folder that you created in your repo to begin with.
   1. You can click browse, or you can just append “/trunk” on the end of your SVN URL
   2. For example, if your repository URL was https://svn.blah.com/projectawesome, you would put “https://svn.blah.com/projectawesome/trunk” in the URL field.
7. Click Finish
8. Choose “Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard”
9. Choose “PHP Project”
10. Name the project “projectawesome” (this is what will show up in the tree inside Zend Studio, so name it something you’ll recognize)
11. Choose “Create Project from existing source”
12. Browse to the location you copied the OT Framework files into (ie: if you’re using WAMP, it would be wamp/www/projectawesome)
13. Click Finish

This will set up the project in Zend Studio, and will be ready to be used. However, you will want to set up the SVN:Externals, to make upgrading easier, and to make it function.

ProTip: Set up SVN:Externals

SVN Externals are files located in other repositories that your application makes use of, but does not need to edit. In this case, it means your repo is a lot smaller, because it does not physically contain the ZF and OTF files. It just accesses them from their original locations. For example, you will tell your repo/application that it should use “OT Framework’s 2.3.4 tag” and “Zend Framework’s 1.9.2 tag,” and it will pull in those files into the correct places. Then when you need to upgrade to a new version, all you do is change the version numbers for the external resource (ie: now use OTF 2.3.5 tag).

1. In the Navigator pane, right-click on your project in Zend Studio, choose Team–>Show Properties
2. Right click on the empty properties window, and click “Add”
3. In the Name field, type “svn:ignore” (no quotes)
4. In the Enter a property value, type “.buildpath” (and on a new line, type) “.project” (no quotes)
5. Click OK. This should add your “svn:ignore” property to the first line of your SVN properties window.
6. Right-click again, and choose “Add”
7. This time, type “svn:externals” in the name field, and then paste this text in the property field below:
   library/Zend http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.9.5/library/Zend
   library/Ot https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/library/Ot
   library/Oauth https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/library/Oauth
   application/models/Ot https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/application/models/Ot
   application/modules/ot https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/application/modules/ot
   application/languages/ot https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/application/languages/ot
   public/min https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/public/min
   public/css/ot https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/public/css/ot
   public/scripts/ot https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/public/scripts/ot
   public/images/ot https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/public/images/ot
   public/themes/ot https://svn.unity.ncsu.edu/svn/otframework/tags/2.3.4/public/themes/ot

   

8. What this will do is map these paths in your local project to the same paths in the OT Framework and Zend Framework repositories.  Whenever you export this project later, the code from these repositories will be downloaded along with the code from you repo.
9. Change any of the versions as necessary. At the time of writing this, the current version for OTF was 2.3.4, and then current version for ZF used by OT Framework was 1.9.5
10. Click OK
11. Right-click on your project name, and choose Team–>Update
    • This will pull down a copy of all the files from the SVN:Externals and put them in your local project folder (but will not add them to your own repo).
12. When this is finished, check your local folder (outside of Zend Studio). You should see all the folders that you deleted, are now in their right place.
13. Now you need to commit these changes to your repo for the first time. Right click on your project, and click Team->Commit
    • Type a commit message like “configured SVN externals”
14. Your repo is now configured to use the external resources, and will be extremely easy to upgrade when new versions of OTF and ZF are released that are compatible with your project.

Set up your application to run for the first time

Now that you have set up the repo and project in Zend Studio, you’ll need to set up the database and file permissions to actually get the application to run. It’s probably a good idea to do some table prefixing of your database, to ensure that your application will work even if you need to move it to a shared database at some time in the future.

Setting up the database

1. Create a new database to house your application. For this example, our database is named “projectawesome.”
2. In a text editor that lets you do “find/replace” open the “ot_framework.sql” file
3. Search for all instances of `ot_ with `projectawesome_
   • IMPORTANT: Make sure you include the back-tick at the beginning, otherwise it will rename the wrong sections of the tables being created.
4. Replace all instances of `ot_ with `projectawesome_ . You should have replaced 73 occurances. Save the file if successful.
5. Import this SQL into your blank database. You should end up with 22 tables, all prefixed with “projectawesome_”

Setting up the application.ini and config.xml to use your database

1. In Zend Studio, open up the application/configs/application.ini file
2. look for the resources.db.adapter section, and change the settings to use your database information. You should end up with something that looks like this:resources.db.adapter = PDO_MYSQL
   resources.db.params.dbname = projectawesome
   resources.db.params.username = projectawesomeuser
   resources.db.params.password = g54g54grw5
   resources.db.params.host = localhost
   resources.db.params.port = 3306
3. Save and close the application.ini file
4. Open the application/config/config.xml file
5. Change the <tablePrefix> property to your table prefix (ie: projectawesome_)
6. Save and close the config.xml file.

Setting up the file system

1. Make these directories writeable (and all sub directories and files within them)
   • /cache
   • /overrides

That’s All Folks!

Your application is now ready to run. Browse to your project’s URL (ie: http://localhost/projectawesome), and if you’ve done everything correctly, you should see a base application layout.

Login with “admin/admin”

“NC State is now officially part of the Apple iPhone Developer Program.  With this program, we can develop, test and distribute applications for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch from within NC State’s App Store.  A committee to manage NC State’s mobile presence is currently being formed.  In the meantime, OIT’s Outreach Technology will be managing the review of applications and the management of the NC State iPhone Developer Program.”

So what does this mean for NC State?  It means that we can being developing and distributing all kinds of applications and distribute them through Apple’s App Store to the millions of folks who own iPhones, iPod touches, and the newly released iPad.  No official announcements yet about what apps are coming, but stay tuned.  This is really exciting and great news!

Basically, Zend Server CE and Snow Leopard don’t really play well together.  Out of the box, Zend Server CE’s management console does not work at all.  We actually found this out a few weeks ago when we were passively using Zend Server CE.  It has to do with the watchdog service in OS X.  Hopefully this will be solved in the next version of Zend Server CE.  Here is a work-around to get past the issue.

1. Stop Everything:  sudo zendctl.sh stop
2. Replace the contents of /usr/local/zend/bin/lighttpdctl.sh with the contents from http://is.gd/2O2om
   
3. Restart Everything:  sudo zendctl.sh start
4. Now your management console should work at http://localhost:10081/

UPDATE: You can also fix this issue by switching out the watchdog binary. More info here: http://forums.zend.com/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=1115&start=30.

Once we got Zend Server CE up and running, we needed more.  PHPUnit, Xdebug, the server running on port 80….all that good stuff.  I had seen Rob Allen’s post a few months back about Zend Server CE configuration, so I headed over to his blog and went through his instructions (great job, btw) for setting up paths, hosting off port 80, installing PHPUnit and installing Xdebug.  Everything went smoothly until I restarted Apache the final time and Xdebug just didn’t show up.  After lots of messing around, here is what I finally did to get Xdebug installed.

1. Go to http://localhost:10081 and pick the Server Setup tab.  Turn off the Zend Debugger and Zend Data Cache.
2. Stop Apache:  sudo zendctl.sh stop-apache
3. Go grab the .tar file from ActiveState Programmer Network for Komodo 5.2 Remote Debugging Packages -> PHP Remote Debugging -> Mac OS X (http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/Komodo/RemoteDebugging)
4. Unzip the package, and go to the 5.3 folder and copy the xdebug.so file to /usr/local/zend/lib/php_extensions/
5. You will need to make sure xdebug.so has the same permissions as the other modules in the file.  From the terminal you can type “ls -l” when in /usr/local/zend/lib/php_extensions/ to see the permissions.  When I did this, I had to do the following commands:  sudo chown :wheel xdebug.so and then sudo chmod 644 xdebug.so
6. Edit /usr/local/zend/etc/php.ini and add above the [zend] section new the bottom:
   

   zend_extension=”/usr/local/zend/lib/php_extensions/xdebug.so”

   [xdebug]
   xdebug.remote_enable=1
   xdebug.remote_host=”localhost”
   xdebug.remote_port=9000
   xdebug.show_local_vars=On
   xdebug.var_display_max_data=10000
   xdebug.var_display_max_depth=20

7. Start Apache:  sudo zendctl.sh start-apache
8. The Server Setup->Extensions section of the admin interface should now show xdebug
9. xDebug is now installed, but if you go to Monitor -> PHP Info in the Zend Server CE management console, it will error out.  The problem is that the php.ini file shipped with Zend Server CE doesn’t include the required option for date.timestamp.
10. Stop Apache again:  sudo zendctl.sh stop-apache
11. Edit /usr/local/zend/etc/php.ini and add the following to the [Date] section of your php.ini file.  Pick the correct timezone for your location.  (You can find a list of the possible timezone options here)  date.timezone = ‘America/New_York’
    
12. Start Apache again:  sudo zendctl.sh start-apache
13. You may have to turn xdebug on.  To do so, in the Zend Server CE management console, go to Server Setup -> Extensions and find xdebug.  If it is not enabled, click “Turn On”.  You will have to restart PHP for the change to take effect.
14. Now if you go to the phpinfo tab, it should work fine.  You should also have an “xdebug” section in the phpinfo page.

UPDATE! Jess from Zend has responded and sent another option for installing Xdebug that has been posted on the Zend Server CE Forums.  Thanks Jess!

So a little explanation.  Rob’s tutorial says to grab the xdebug package from pecl, so I did that the first time and everything compiled just fine, but when I tried to run it, I got nothing.  I looked through the apache logs to see if I could figure out what was going on and I got this problem:

Failed loading /usr/local/zend/lib/php_extensions/xdebug.so: dlopen(/usr/local/zend/lib/php_extensions/xdebug.so, 9): no suitable image found. Did find:
/usr/local/zend/lib/php_extensions/xdebug.so: mach-o, but wrong architecture

After searching numerous blogs and finding no info on Xdebug and Snow Leopard except a bunch of questions, I found some similar issues with other modules.  From what we figure from the “wrong architecture”, there is something wrong with the compiled executable that Snow Leopard generates.  We went on to try to figure out how to compile Xdebug ourselves, but found the ActiveState Programmer site first and used their module.  Some other folks had luck with using this, so we tried it and it worked.

Another thing, Rob’s tutorial says to shut down apache first, then disable Zend Debugger and Cache.  When we tried this, we got an error from Zend Server CE stating that the web server was unreachable.  That is the reason for disabling the Debugger and Cache first, then stopping Apache.

The php.ini file problem cropped up after we got Xdebug installed and working.  It may be possible that you already have date.timezone in your php.ini file, so you may not need that step but we did.

I hope this helps people get Zend Server CE up and running on Snow Leopard.  It really is a powerful tool and combined with Zend Studio for Eclipse, it can do some amazing stuff.

I also tweeted a lot during the conference (#2!) which helped connect me with a host of new followers.  I found myself following the twitter page more than hanging out in the IRC chat room this time.  That is just a great source of information at a conference like this.  Everything from networking to finding what was for dinner was coordinated through twitter.  Good times.

Anyway, on to my review:

What Was Great

Conference Venue – The location was absolutely great.  We were in the middle of downtown San Jose within walking distance to just about everything.  And if you wanted to go elsewhere, there was a lightrail stop right outside the hotel.  The convention center in San Jose seemed to fit our group better than the one in Santa Clara last year, but sometimes it felt too big.

Lunch – The food at the convention center was really good.  Fancy pants all the way.

Wireless Internet – The wifi didn’t go down a single time.  It was rock solid and pretty fast.  The only slowdowns were when lots of people were on it during a keynote or large session.

People – I met more people this time than at any previous ZendCon.  In a lot of ways, twitter was responsible.  I got to put some faces with some twitter folks which was really great.  Also, shout out to Keith Casey, who is the ultimate networking guy.  I’m pretty sure he knows everyone, so if there is someone you want to meet or find, talk to Keith.

Conference Hotel – Free wifi, nice rooms, close to everything, very clean.  Overall it was a really nice place and provided a good lobby for people to gather and hang out after the sessions were over.

Uncon Sessions – Keith Casey did a great job (again) with the Uncon.  I found myself wandering over there more often this year than last.  2 of my favorite sessions (one on PHP Community, one on relating to developers/management) were uncon sessions.  Uncons are really a great idea that I hope Zend keeps up.

Staffing the Zend Booth with Real-word ZFers – This was a great idea that I am not sure was planned or not.  I actually manned the booth for a little bit and it was great to answer questions from people actually implementing some of the same things I did.  Very cool idea which should be continued.

joind.in – I really enjoyed having the option to give feedback to presenters online, and joind.in worked really great.

twitterslurp site – This was wonderful!  I know that I could have just used the twitter search to find all the tweets, but it was really interesting to see who was tweeting and how often.

What was just OK

Breakfast and Receptions - Breakfast was pretty lacking, but it wasn’t bad.  The receptions at night were OK, but not spectacular.  I suppose it is a side effect of the economic downturn, but there wasn’t a Yahoo! party like there has been in years past.  Adobe stepped up and sponsored the receptions both nights, but like I said…they were just OK.

Vendor Fair – Not a lot of SWAG this year.  Also it didn’t seem like many of the people there wanted to engage attendees.  A few times I walked through there and they were on their laptops doing something or looking a bit dis-interested.  However, the folks at GitHub and Blackmesh were pretty cool.

Keynotes – They just weren’t as good as years past.  Not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but previous years have set the bar high for keynotes at ZendCon.

What was missing

Non-Profit Keynote – Every other year at ZendCon, it seems that we have a non-profit organization talk about how they use PHP to further their cause.  Kiva.org was one year, American Cancer Society was another.  I usually enjoy these talks, so I missed not having one this year.

Attendance Figures – Usually Zend announces the attendance figures for the conference.  Maybe they didn’t because attendance was down or whatever (was it?), but I usually like to brag about how many people go.

Yahoo! – Where’d you guys go?  I saw nobody from Yahoo! the whole week, which is sad because it was my impression that they were a still a major player in the PHP game.  Maybe next year?

What was down-right bad

Nothing!  Zip!  Zero!  Zilch!  Nada!  Good job ZendCon!

Conclusion

The conference was 100% successful in my opinion.  I did lots of learning and networking, and managed to have a great time too.  Hopefully next year, Garrison and I will both get to go but we shall see.  The conference does so much for me professionally, but it also reminds me of why I love the kind of work I do.  ZendCon gives me that kick I need to say “Yeah, I do love this and I want to make myself and the community a better place.”  PHPers have a great thing going with the community that has built up around the language.  It is great to see what we have accomplished, but it is even more exciting to see what is to come.  Until next year…

Right Where You Belong: The PHP Community – Chris Cornutt

I met Chris the day before when I was talking to him about joind.in.  His talk was really good for people who are interested in becoming part of the PHP Community (or really any community).  He talked about how to contribute to the community as a whole, even if you are not a strong programmer (documentation FTW).  This topic is really relevant to me as I enjoy being part of the PHP Community a lot.  I find us PHPers are much different than most tech groups.  You don’t often find PHPers who have that holier-than-thou attitude, which I think is because many of us who have been doing PHP for a long time have grown up and matured with the language.  There is not a single person in the PHP community who can claim that they always wrote excellent code, so you don’t typically get people who have an overly high opinion of themselves.  There are exceptions to the rule, but I find PHPers to be some of the best people in the business.  Many of them “get it” and I appreciate that.  Chris’s talk was all about getting involved and I thought he did a great job with it.

How to run an enterprise PHP Shop – Jim Plush

Jim works at Panasonic and they sound like they really have their development process figured out.  He talked all about development cycle, bug fixing, hiring, etc.  It was a great talk to hear.  He even talked a little about how they do development.  There was one mention of creating re-usable modules and distributing those across their applications, which is very similar to what we do with the OT Framework.  Jim also really focused on testing and continuous integration, which I think we need to do a better job with.  I went up to him after the talk and thanked him, then I asked him if he had any suggestions for those of us with a small shop and limited resources.  His advice re: testing was “Just do it.  Tell your clients and management that there is no other option than having unit-tested code.  Work it into the estimate the same way you would any other part of the app.”  This is excellent advice that I am going to make work.

Dependency Injection Round Table – Jeremy Kendall

My good friend Jeremy organized a dependency injection roundtable with some of the key PHP folks working on Zend Framework and Symfony.  I went into the talk thinking I had a pretty good handle on what DI was and why I wanted to use it.  It really isn’t any different than the way we make lots of things already, so I thought I could hang.  I don’t know if it was the content or the pace or what, but I had a hard time following the discussion.  Everyone else in the room seemed to really enjoy the talk, and I did too, I just felt lost at points.  I think I am going to have to look into it some more so that next year I can hang with the discussion better.

Framework Shootout – ZF fearless leader Matthew Weier O’Phinney, David Zülke, Fabien Potencier, Edward Finkler, Nate Abele

This was a really cool idea.  Reps from Zend Framework, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and Agavi had a question and answer session where they talked about the strengths and weaknesses of their respective framework.  The session was very collegial, much to the dismay of most in the audience   I think people wanted bloodshed, but it was actually really informative and super entertaining too.  There were a few “OH SNAP” moments, but nothing to write home about really.  The biggest surprise was that Symfony is not going to rewrite to take advantage of PHP5.3 features, which I think is a very big mistake.  You gotta stay current and you have to push your usebase to stay up with the latest technology.  Everyone in the PHP world did it when PHP5 replaced PHP4.  While PHP5.3 may not be quite the same level of change, it is a big release that will finally give us developers some of the long-requested tools we need.  Anyway, Matthew rocked the house and represented ZF really well.  I hope they continue to have similar “shootouts” in the future as I think it was very intriguing.  And apparently the rest of the community thought so as well since the room was packed (usually, the last session of the day is barely attended).

That is it!  Then end of ZendCon 2009.  I will post my wrap-up later.

Keynote – Standing Out In The Crowd – Kirrily Robert

Kirrily’s keynote was about the importance of diversity and transparency in open source projects.  She talked a lot about the lack of women in Open Source projects (only 1.5% of OS participants are women) and some of the struggles that her and her fellow female programmers go through.  The point of her session was diversity, transparency and acceptance.  And while she did accomplish making her point, she also ruffled some feathers as with a few generalizations of her own.  This hit a nerve with quite a few in the room and you could tell from the tweets coming out of it.  That is all I am really going to say about it since this is not the place, but let’s just say it was controversial and it got people talking…maybe that was the point all along.

Mastering RESTful web services with Zend Framework – Rob Taylor

This was an uncon session that really was excellent.  Rob introduced me to a new way of thinking about providing RESTful web services with Zend Framework.  His approach was very interesting and I can’t wait to get back and try some of what he was doing.  If you are interested in his slides, he posted them up on roboncode.com.

Using Zend Framework and Symfony Together – Fabien Potencier

Fabien is the lead developer for the Symfony framework.  His talk was all about how Symfony and Zend Framework can play well together.  Symfony has some really promising features that ZF doesn’t have, like object escaping and message dispatching.  I had never entertained the idea of using both together, but because both frameworks are so well put together and so decoupled, integration is a snap.

Lunch and Afternoon Keynote

Lunch was wonderful yet again.  The food has been top notch so far.  After lunch, I helped man the Zend booth and talked to people about Zend Framework.  I got to talk shop with Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Rob Allen for a bit, which was great because I’m pretty sure those two have forgotten more about Zend Framework than most people ever learn.

I also got to meet Chris Cornutt who is the Senior Editor for php|architect and the creator of joind.in.  We have been using joind.in a lot at the conference, and I had some ideas in my head, so I posted a tweet asking about an API and he responded back.  We met up in the exhibit hall and I talked to him a little about my ideas.  Turns out that he is getting ready to rework the API a bit, so I volunteered to help him test if he wanted.

Role of a PHP User Group – Michelangelo van Dam, Anna Filina and Bradley Holt

This was another uncon session which delivered.  As part of my job the last year, I have helped manage and direct the NCSU Web Developers list.  It is a lot of fun and a very rewarding project, but I want to take it to the next level so I wanted to get some ideas of how real PHP Users Groups functioned.  Keith Casey, from the DC PHP scene and ZendCon lore, talked a good bit as well about how the DCers organize.  It was as much a round table as anything, which was great because there were lots of cities represented.  While in the session, I started looking for a PHP Users Group in the triangle, and I think I found one but their website doesn’t seem very active at all.  I found a mailing list so I decided to join.  My plan is, if they don’t actually get anything going, I will try to get everyone back together.  The value in User Groups is apparent and immense, and that is something I want to be a part of.

Architecting Your Models – Matthew Weier O’Phinney

Matthew is an excellent speaker.  Over the years at ZendCon I have heard him speak many times, and he never fails to deliver an intelligent, useful, and inspiring talk.  This year it was about models, the often forgot about and rarely hyped step-sister of the MVC paradigm.  He talked about using ORMs and not repeating infrastructure when using APIs (same deal that Rob was talking about earlier with RESTful services).  He gave a little insight into what is on the horizon with Zend_Entity as well, which is ZF’s implementation of an ORM.  Great talk, and I took lots of notes.

Building Desktop RIAs with JavaScript and PHP – Ed Finkler

Ed’s talk was focused on buidling desktop RIAs with javascript and using PHP as a backend.  His examples were based on Adobe AIR and it was all very intriguing.  I haven’t used AIR or any technology like it (Appcelerator is in there too), so it was interesting.  He had some cool code examples that were relevant and it was informative.  Add it to the list of something I want to look into when I get back.

Adobe Reception

At the Adobe reception tonight, I sat and talked with a few folks about the activities of the day.  Immediately the conversation went to the opening keynote (see, lots of people were talking about it…even 10 hours later).  It was a short reception, but it was nice to have something that night.  Nothing originally was planned, but Adobe stepped up and sponsored it so thanks!

Meet the Team

A conference favorite, it is always beneficial to hit up the “Meet the Team” session with the Zend who’s who.  Some really great questions were asked by the audience, the best of which was by my friend Keith Casey about how Zend can support User Groups.  Their response was OK, but I think it is important for Zend to realize that User Groups could really benefit with them getting involved, and not only with financial support.  Presentations, software, and ZendCon trips would be much appreciated I am sure

Thats a wrap on day 2.