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.

So here is my recap of day 1 at ZendCon 2009.

Keynote – Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend

Andy gave a good Keynote again this year.  I always think of his keynote as a “State of the PHP Community” address.  He introduced Zend Server 5 which has an awesome “Black Box” feature that goes in depth to the PHP stack when an error occurs on your site.  I assume this feature will make it to the CE version of Zend Server as I can see the feature being very helpful in dev environments as well as production ones.  Andy also announced that Zend Studio was getting upgraded to version 7.1.  I really hope some of the nuances of 7.0 have been worked out, especially the code completion.  A lot of these issues are supposedly addressed in the 7.1 upgrade (I plan to install it a little later today so we will see).  Other than product announcements, there were a few guest speakers who are using Zend in enterprise environments.  The most shocking thing I saw was the long list of companies using Zend Framework (American Idol?).  It just shows you that the PHP world is a force to be reckoned with and we have grown up significantly over the past few years.

Preparing for Synchronization with Browser-local Databases – Eric Farrar, Product Manager for Sybase iAnywhere

Eric gave a really interesting presentation about syncing offline applications with central data stores.  He talked alot of strategy regarding how to keep your data synced properly.  This seems like a really relevant topic because it seems web apps are moving to an arena where they may not always be connected to the web (Google Gears-esque).  I took some really great notes on maintaining database integrity and generating primary keys correctly.  Very cool stuff.  We also learned that PHP support for Google Gears is the most requested feature, and the Gears team will develop new features based on votes.  So if you have a second, head over to the Google Gears project and vote for PHP support!

Doctrine 2.0 – Enterprise Persistence Layer for PHP – Guilherme Blanco

This was an uncon session, which means it is not part of the standard track of presentations at the conference.  That in no way means that uncon sessions are any less awesome, because Guilherme did a great talk.  I don’t really know much about Doctrine, but the phrase of the conference this year has to be ORM, so I figured I should go and figure out what it was all about.  Unfortunately, I probably didn’t know enough about Doctrine to really get my moneys worth out of the talk.  It all looked absolutely awesome, but I need to study up on Doctrine some more and actually understand what it gets me before I figure out why Doctrine 2.0 rocks.

Lunch

I had a special invitation to the ZCE luncheon where we got some awesome food and chatted with other ZCEs.  I don’t know if there were just not many ZCEs here or what, but the room was half empty so who knows.  We did have some good lunchtime conversation though.

Developing in the Cloud – Lots of people

I am not ashamed to admit that I was totally lost in this presentation.  I was really hoping to get some basic “this is what it means to work in the cloud” but I didn’t really get it.  It was less introductory and more for a seasoned crowd.  A lot of talk about Cloud computing at the conference, which I expected with Zend’s announcement about their involvement in the SimpleCloud API a few weeks ago.

Intro to NOLOH: Easier and more powerful than your current Framework – Asher Snyder

The premise behind this talk was intriguing.  NOLOH stands for “No Lines Of HTML”, so I was hooked in to see what exactly this was about.  The presentation as a whole wasn’t bad at all.  Asher showed his product and did some code examples, but I guess I just don’t get the purpose of the product at all.  The whole concept is that you can programatically build the HTML and Javascript of your website with PHP, which sounds cool.  But after seeing the execution, I don’t see how this would save me any time at all.  It just seems way too involved.  I also don’t really see how it would integrate with Zend Framework’s MVC environment, which is what we use exclusively.  They also charge for the use of their product, which seems counter-productive.  Why would I develop an open-source app on their framework if everyone who downloaded it needed to purchase a license?  It was free for education, but not so much for everyone else.

Cool PHP Objects Sleep on the Couch – Sebastian Bergmann

This was the most informative talk of the day.  Sebastian gave a great talk about serializing objects with CouchDB, which I had never heard of until getting to ZendCon.  CouchDB looks awesome because it uses JSON as it’s transfer mechanism so it is really easy to integrate with.  I added that to my Google Wave of stuff to look at after ZendCon.  I also saw a little app Sebastian was using in his talk called phploc which will run stats on your PHP app.  It was pretty sweet…yet another thing to add to the Wave.

Encouraging Developers – Lots of people

Another uncon session, this was more of a roundtable.  There were managers and developers in the room, and we had some great conversation about everything from hiring to team building to compensation.  Since I wear the developer hat and the project manager hat a good bit, this session was one where I felt like I could contribute and learn from all at the same time.  It was really great to hear what had worked for other people and to share our stories as well.

Welcome Reception – Sponsored by Adobe

Thanks to Adobe for sponsoring food and beverage for the opening reception.  I walked around the sponsor area and talked to the guys from GitHub and BlackMESH hosting.  Good times were had, and I met a lot of cool people.

With day one in the books, I was beat, so after dinner I went straight to bed.  Then proceeded to wake up at 4AM local time, which is when I started writing this blog post

I will be blogging every day about the sessions I go to and the people I meet.  You can look back through the blog and see our posts from previous years.

If you are coming to ZendCon this year, be sure to find me and say hello!  And if I only know you from the internet, make sure you tell me who you are and how I know you.

While everyone working on the project thought it was really cool, I think we were all pleasantly surprised by the awesome reaction that we have gotten from other folks in the Higher Education community.  The day after we launched the site, the twitterverse was buzzing about the site.  Here are just a few tweets that I found particularly encouraging.

skirubbi: Green with envy. Loving NCSU’s Twitter page: http://twitter.ncsu.edu/

shayfrendt: This school obviously understands the meaning of online presence: RT @skirubbi: Loving NCSU’s Twitter page: http://twitter.ncsu.edu/

matthew_darby: I really like NC State’s new Twitter mashup http://twitter.ncsu.edu/. Very effective to group their official tweets.

Not only did we get love from the twitterverse, this past week Inigral (@inigral) did a blog post about us being “ahead of the game” when it comes to twitter.

On top of the outstanding utility, it’s a beautiful page – simple in its design and very user-friendly. This is a great example of using social media smartly.  Make it simple, useful, organic, and make it easy for your authors and your audience to keep up.

Thanks guys!  (see I told you I would blog about you blogging about us)

Given the success of the site, and the fact twitter is all about sharing, we figured that we should do some sharing too.  That is why we are releasing the code that runs the NC State twitter site to anyone for free.  Head on over to http://twitter.ncsu.edu/download.php to download the code and start your own organization’s twitter site.  And most importantly, tell us about it!  We love a good story…

With this migration, we say goodbye to our old trusty system, Lifecycle.  Lifecycle was a good project, but one that we just didn’t need anymore, so we have moved on to bigger and better things.  To check out our projects, file issues, or download our code, visit our new site at http://ot.ncsu.edu/code/.

The purpose of the migration was to move our team over to servers that are part of the web hosting initiative that we have been working on for a few months.  The web hosting initiative allows us to manage our own web space, databases, scripting languages, etc. all through CPanel!  This is a great project that has lots of potential down the road.

Also, we have changed our theme over to be more like our parent organization, OIT.

Visit twitter.ncsu.edu now and start following NC State!

If you’re in charge of a campus organization that has a Twitter account and isn’t listed on the “Campus is Tweeting” page, make sure you email web_feedback@ncsu.edu to get your organization listed.