October 21st, 2009 | 
Author: As is our yearly tradition, I will be doing a recap of all the sessions I go to at ZendCon 2009. This is the fourth year Outreach Technology has been represented at ZendCon, and I have high expectations of the conference. It is usually a great source of “What’s new” in the PHP community, and the people are great. ZendCon gives you access to the greatest minds in the PHP community which is totally awesome.
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.
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I will be attending ZendCon09 this year on behalf of Outreach Technology. Usually, Garrison and I both get to go, but because of budget issues only one of us can go this year. This year’s conference is shaping up to be a great one. I’m really looking forward to seeing the Framework Showdown on the last day of the conference. And as always, the people are great.
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.
In case you fine folks missed it, you have got to check out NC State’s new twitter site, http://twitter.ncsu.edu. It is a joint project between our group and Web Communications that was launched on September 8th, and we now have over 60 organizations tweeting on campus and you can find them all here.
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.
We have a new system for filing issues for our applications. We have migrated all of our projects to use Redmine, a very cool ruby-based project management/issue tracking/wiki/swiss army knife tool that will help us better serve the folks that use our services.
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/.
We have migrated our website over to a new domain, http://ot.ncsu.edu. All of the old URLs to http://webapps.ncsu.edu should still work, but you should update your bookmarks to the new site.
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.
Ever wondered where you can find the most up-to-date goings on at NC State? Well, we’ve got your answer! NC State on Twitter (http://twitter.ncsu.edu) lists the tweets from all of the official campus Twitter accounts. Everything from the library to WKNC to the Wolfpack Club. Even your very own Outreach Technology! NC State on Twitter allows you to find out what’s happening at NC State right now.
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.
After several months of preparation and planning, we’re proud to announce the launch of the new NC State Mobile website – a collaborative project encompassing the efforts of groups all across campus.
The NC State mobile presence is a convenient place to find campus news and contacts while on the go. You can find the closest bus stop and watch a video on NCSU’s mobile YouTube channel while you wait!
The new NC State mobile site supports any type of web enabled device from the most basic cell phone to the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
No matter where you are, you can get your NC State fix with ease.
We’re already at work on improving your mobile NC State experience, too. Soon, we’ll be adding features like maps, dining hall menu information, and sports scores.
Check it out now at m.ncsu.edu from any mobile device!
In a post last year, we made the comment that we were famous because we were mentioned in a Zend DevZone article that was a roundup of ZendCon 2008. I guess if that made us famous, we are rock stars now! (HA!)
Move That Bus, an article that we wrote, is being featured on Zend’s DevZone site! Head on over and read about how we got our start, how we discovered the right way to work, and why we are skeptical of employees at KFC.
This is another article in our series aimed at introducing our readers to some of the applications that we work on. A lot of the applications we write go unnoticed by the masses because they are aimed at a specific workflow or group, so we thought it would be cool to let everyone know what we are up to!
About a year and a half ago, our central IT organization decided to create a new way for students, staff, and faculty to get help with their computers. Previously, the support model had been to call the Help Desk with a problem, and the Help Desk would schedule a technician to come to the student’s dorm and help them out. While this worked for a good many years, it left out a good chunk of our students didn’t live on campus. It was decided that a new walk-in center (WIC) would be opened where customers could come in, drop off their computers, have technicians fix them, then come pick them up. The walk-in center would also be responsible for more user-facing services like password resets and software pickup, tasks that were normally handled by the Help Desk.
In order to implement the WIC’s new support model, our group was asked to devise a system to help them track computers and keep up with tasks. This system, named Crosswalk, would be totally responsible for managing any and all actions where technicians in the walk-in center helped a customer.
This is the first article in a series introducing our readers to some of the applications that we work on. A lot of the applications we write go unnoticed by the masses because they are targeted at a specific workflow or person, so we thought it would be cool to let everyone know what we are up to!
If you have been building applications long enough, you know that there are some things that you have to do with EVERY app you create. Authentication, authorization, user management, etc. No matter what the purpose of the app, you always have to deal with these things, and you are continually re-creating the same basic functionality with every new app. Perhaps it is a little different from app to app, but the concept is the same.
Perhaps we were totally late to the game, but we noticed this trend soon after we got into the Zend Framework. Zend Framework solved a lot of these problems for us. They had mechanisms for dealing with authentication and authorization, databases, forms, etc. It was great, so we created our first Zend Framework app, Billboard.
After we had totally drank the Zend Framework koolaid, we started working on another new app and realized that we wanted some of the interfaces we created in Billboard for our new app, so we went to the billboard project, copied what we needed, and moved on. That worked great until we found a bug in our login page. We fixed it, but the bug was still in our Billboard project. Quickly we changed projects and fixed the bug there. That is fine if we only have 2 projects, but we were planning to run all our projects with Zend Framework. What to do?