June 24, 2008
Posted in News at 4:57 am by lornajane
We are pleased to announce a competition here on the phpwomen.org site! As our regular users will know, most of our content is on our forums – and its here that the competition will run.
To enter the competition all you have to do is submit a short article to our Best Practices forum before the end of July 2008. This area of the site is dedicated to little tips and pointers of how to improve your PHP coding – here is a good example which covers using constants. The competition is open to everyone, regardless of gender, age, location, or any other criteria I haven’t thought of. You will need to register in order to post on the forums; you can post a short article on any topic you like, and post as many entries as you like. Anything offensive, lame, irrelevant or otherwise inappropriate will be removed by our moderators.
At the end of July we will pick the best two submissions and the authors will each receive a Zend Studio for Eclipse perpetual license as their prize. We would like to thank Zend for generously donating the prizes for this competition, thanks guys!
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June 19, 2008
Posted in News at 7:53 am by lornajane
Meet Ghica van Emde Boas. Ghica is one of our Dutch members, herself a published author. She attended the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam last weekend, and was generous enough to donate three signed copies of her own book which went to assist some of the local ladies in their learning. Here is Ghica’s account of her day:
The Dutch PHP Conference, Amsterdam, June 14th, 2008
A prime example of Women’s Strength in Unity can be found in Athens: six Caryatids holding the roof of the Erechtheion temple on the Acropolis. That is where I took my PHP elephant to be photographed to fulfill my obligation for receiving one. I was yelled and whistled away few times trying to take the picture because it was apparently forbidden to put the elephant down anywhere, not even on a fence.
In the Greek sun Amsterdam sees far away two days later. What is it that survived this distance in my memory from the PHP conference? First of all, the relaxed atmosphere and the feeling that being one of the very few women did not matter.
PHPWomen.org had a great presence at the conference and the number of T-shirts worn was growing steadily during the day.
To my surprise, most speakers acted as if PHP still had to prove itself to the world. Sneering at Twitter and Ruby-on-Rails was the favorite sport of the day. Because unsuitable design for the task can be done in any language, the PHP community is just fortunate that it was not PHP that was used, otherwise PHP would have been laughed a just as much. At similar Java events, this type of discussion seems past, in favor of discussions about design patterns, frameworks etc.
Zeev Suraski
Of course I knew that Rasmus Lerdorf first developed PHP, and that Zeev gave the first two letters of his first name to Zend, but I did not know the details of PHP history he was telling: the real PHP resulted from a student project. Now I know.
It is always interesting to see people on stage who made a definite mark on the computing landscape and Zeev is certainly one of them.
Zeev was also talking about development trends: Simplicity makes a comeback. The opposite of simplicity seems to be J2EE (more speakers were referring to J2EE as an example of ways you can torture developers). He quoted that PHP was the second most popular project in Eclipse. His examples of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) are Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg. He said that PHP is currently not well equipped to develop RIA’s. Zend is partnering with Dojo, a well known Ajax toolkit, therefore this may change soon. The thing to watch according to Zeev is cloud computing, which I understand to be a mixture of SOA and dashboards.
Software and the taste of mayo, Marco Tabini, publisher php|architect
Twenty years ago, I used to do that: making mayo from olive oil, eggs and lemon juice. These days you are not supposed to eat raw eggs because you risk a salmonella infection. After hearing today what commercial mayo contains, I may reconsider 
Further, I know now that PHP cannot be used to calculate the first 100 million prime numbers and that you can write bad code in any language.
Marco said that you should think big at design, choose the right tools and scale everything, always. And with lots of hand-waving statistics he made plausible that there is a range of characteristics for a site: adsense, add driven, subscription or e-commerce – where there is also a range of page clicks you need, to become profitable. The cost per page click should be in-line with this. I still do not know what Mayo is.
eZ components, Derick Rethans
This was an overview of eZ Components. What I got out of this talk is that I should look into this framework. Derick was stressing that their persistence strategy is not derived from the active record pattern, like Rails (Twitter…), but from Hibernate (a Java persistence framework).
PHP Deployment with Subversion, Lorna Jane Mitchell
This was a very clear overview of what you can and should do with Subversion. As a daily user of Subversion, I knew the concepts, but it was useful to hear advice about making deployment plans and rollback plans, preferably automated. I realized that I did not consider DB versioning for a project I am working on, where I maybe should have done so. And there was more useful advice, such as reference to practical deployment tools.
I liked to see a real Nabaztag! Can’t they talk also? I knew about them, because of a volunteer project where they are using them in children’s hospitals to let parents communicate via the internet.
PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 – A look ahead, Stefan Priebsch
What is going to be new in PHP 5.3 and PHP 6?
Unicode
Garbage Collection
SPL improvements: double linked list, stack, queue, priority queue
Namespaces: with lots of discussion, Stefan didi not seem to like the current plans.
something about magic calls and about late static binding.
ereg will be deprecate in favor of preg
SQLite3
There was a lively discussion because there were some people in the room that were closely involved with PHP development.
The Internet is an Ogre: Finding Art in the Internet Architecture, Terry Chay
We were warned that we would get fireworks, and indeed we got fireworks. The essence of what he was saying was about the pyramid-like layers that internet sites have and that you should observe when developing a site: start with stability and look at security lst.
make it rich security
make it fast speed
keep it running scale
make it work stability
Sound advice. The movie snippets Terry used were funny. The language he used was not.
After the last talk there was a reception and we all received a PHP Conference T-shirt. I ran away to catch my plane, my suitcase heavier with two books: PHP design patterns and PHP security, very useful. And my head full with interesting PHP impressions. Thanks PHP Women, for inviting me!
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June 16, 2008
Posted in News at 5:11 am by lornajane
At the weekend there was the Dutch PHP Conference, at which phpwomen were able to have a stand. Out of 370 or so attendees we counted 8 women, which is a very low ratio indeed, lower than any other event I’ve seen so far. I had taken 50 t-shirts to give away, but in contrast to other events where we are very popular and we run out of shirts quite quickly, I actually have some left which perhaps illustrates the different attitudes in different geographical areas. We did get quite a few visitors to our stand though, helped by the fact that we had three fabulous booth babes hanging out with us. Huge thanks go to Marco Tabini, Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Ivo Jansch for helping us out with this – all three were either speaking, running the conference, or doing both so we really appreciate the time they took to help us out.
The conference itself was a great success and enjoyed by all – we’ll have a write-up of the day to add here soon. I’d also like to thank Marion and Juliette for helping on the stand and all the guys who dropped by and offered their support too. Hopefully next year there will be a few more women attending!
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