The day after a PHP conference is the day you are most excited about PHP and the community. This statement also applies to me: I am very excited about PHP and the community after a fantastic PHPBenelux Conference (aka phpbnl10). Ter Elst in Edegem (Antwerpen) was the venue and hosting an international PHP conference was the goal.
The enthousiams for me is even greater because for the first time I assisted in organizing a conference. In fact it’s the first time this conference is organized. Continue reading
Character sets are a big thing these days and luckily we’re slowly evolving to a world where UTF-8 rules. In the meanwhile we’re stuck in a transitional phase where the ISO-8859-1 encoding is still used.
MySQL followed this trend and introduced character set support in version 4.1. Importing data from older versions is easy and SET NAMES ‘utf8′ is quite useful to ensure special characters are correctly encoded in the new databases.
But I learned first hand that the SET NAMES ‘utf8 trick is not a cure for every disease. Continue reading
That’s right, the title says it all: we’re having another BugHuntDay. After the success of the previous one, we (PHPBenelux) decided to host another one. Last time around it was all about Zend Framework. This time we feel that we should dedicate some attention to the Symfony framework.
To be perfectly honest, we were discussing it for a while, but we didn’t reach the planning stage. That was until the kind people at Intracto decided to take the lead. I knew they were pretty fond of Symfony, but now they decided it was time to give back to the community by sponsoring and hosting the event.
The event takes place Saturday November 14th at Frame21 in Herentals. More details can be found on the PHPBenelux website. You can still register for this event and we kindly invite you to do so by filling up the following form.
This blog post will assist you in preparing for the actual event. You shouldn’t be a rocket scientist to participate. A good knowledge of PHP and an open mind will get you a long way. Continue reading
It’s been a while: I’ve been busy at work, going on vacation and been lazy when at home. It’s more than about time to get into my blogging routine again.
This one is actually a short one on Tarball archives. You know, the (compressed) archiving you use to pack your files with. For people unaware of this technology: you can compare it to ZIP and RAR archives but with a little more punch. Continue reading
Better late than never: since DPC 09 is coming up this week, this is the ideal occasion for a review of the 2008 edition.
The trip to Amsterdam started off in Gent where I traveled along with Felix De Vliegher & Steve Roelens. Comfortably cruising along the Belgian & Dutch motorways, we where looking for some good times and some expert opinions on common PHP topics. In retrospect, we got both in spades! Continue reading
Last week I was optimizing the caching strategy for one of my projects and I was under the false impression that caching was accelerating my website.
At that time I was using Zend_Cache_Backend_File as my backend and cache files were created. My goal was to boost the performance by implementing the Zend_Cache_Backend_Memcached backend. Again everything seemed to be working fine because my Memcached logging displayed activity of some sort.
I was stunned to hear that in fact all of those cache files where created, but never read. So here I am optimizing everything, but in reality I was creating extra overhead. So I started my quest and found the solution (sorry for the spoiler). Continue reading
I attended PHP Vikinger in Leuven yesterday which was actually a really cool unconference organised by Derick Rethans. According to unconference standards, talks aren’t really planned in advance which sometimes results in somewhat suprising features.Continue reading
Better late the never: I finally put the slides of my presentation called “CLI, the other SAPI”. I did this talk some time ago at the PHPBelgium user group meeting which took place in the COMBELL offices in Gent.
As some of you might have noticed: my blog series “CLI, the other SAPI” is actually based on this talk. There are still some episodes in the making, but you can have sneak preview of what’s yet to come by checking the slides.
A large portion of the presentation contains information on process control. Some people advised me to make a separate presentation on that topic. I might consider that, but in the mean time this is the result:
That’s right folks, in this blog post I’ll show you how you can convert your entire MVC application into a REST-style XML webservice. And I’m not talking about refactoring tons of code … NO, we’ll plug this option in without changing a single thing to your action controllers.
This post will contain a detailed description of the concepts used. The source could of the plugin is also shown and finally how it will look like when using it. Continue reading
Next Wednesday, PHPBelgium is having another user group meeting. This spring edition takes place in Gent again and will feature 2 talks including mine on command line PHP called CLI, the other SAPI. Continue reading
The day after a PHP conference is the day you are most excited about PHP and the community. This statement also applies to me: I am very excited about PHP and the community after a fantastic PHPBenelux Conference (aka phpbnl10). Ter Elst in Edegem (Antwerpen) was the venue and hosting an international PHP conference was the goal.
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