BrightonPHP

Thanks to everyone that came down for November’s meetup – some good discussion was had, and James’s talk was extremely interesting. For December’s meeting, we’re excited to announce that Mark Baker will be speaking to the group, on the power of PHP 5.5 generators:

One of the new features that was introduced in PHP 5.5: Generators provide an iterable alternative to arrays, or to classes that implement the Iterator interface. At the simplest level, they don’t add anything new to PHP that you couldn’t already do before, simply returning values or key/value pairs to a loop; though they do give you options to perform certain iterative functions without the memory overheads of an array, or without the complexities of lots of boilerplate code that an Iterator class requires.

But look more closely at Generators, and they can be used for much more complex purposes: from simulating arrays with duplicate keys, or keys that aren’t simple integer or string values, to accepting new data each iteration rather than simply returning it, so that you can actually modify their behaviour dynamically, or build Cooperative subroutines, even to simulate parallel processing.

Generators add real power to PHP.

Mark’s biography:

Mark is the Head of Design and Development at Innoved (Innovative Solutions for Education) based in Wigan; a company which (coincidentally) shares offices with his favourite Rugby League team, the 2013 Challenge Cup winners, and which occasionally gets him free tickets to attend Warriors games.

He has been working in the computer software industry since before symbolics.com was registered as a domain name, before the term “cyberspace” was first used in fiction, when Linus Torvalds and Rasmus Lerdorf were still at high school, and Mrs. Zuckerberg had yet to give birth to a bouncing baby social network enabler; and has been developing for the Web in a variety of languages since the days when the Tim Berners-Lee’s creation comprised less than 1,000 sites.

Over those years, he has contributed to a number of open source projects: some still extant, others lost to history. Currently he is coordinator and lead developer for the PHPExcel library, and a coordinator and developer on the PHPPowerpoint, PHPWord, PHPProject and PHPVisio libraries – all part of the PHPOffice library suite. He has also managed to squeeze his name into the credits for PHP 5.5 by contributing a new method to SPL Doubly-Linked Lists. Most recently, he has been working on new datastructures such as Tries, hoping that he’ll be able to get them included in SPL.

His particular interests include PHP integration with office suites, Textual analysis, Geodata and geographic information systems, and “big data” and data analysis.

If you’re interested in coming down, please let us know on the Lanyrd event, even if you’re a regular – it just helps plan how many chairs I need to put out each month, and roughly how many people to expect!

Also a reminder that we’re trialling joind.in for feedback on meetings and presentations – this month’s meeting is on joind.in as an event, as was November’s meeting. Please take the time to add your feedback :-)

Thanks to those of you that came to last month’s talk! This month’s talk is by James Titcumb, on “Low Latency Logging“:

Logging is an absolute must for any API or web application, but when starting out, questions such as “how can we do it without disrupting everything else” and “what is the easiest way to log” often come out. I’m going to explore a couple of infrastructure ideas to carry out what I call “high-performance, low-latency” logging to ensure minimal impact to the performance of the runtime application. The talk will show you that a really great logging architecture is a low-cost investment in your application that will definitely pay off in the long run.

Speaker bio: I’ve been doing coding since I got an Amiga 500 and got to grips with my first AmigaBASIC program. Eventually I moved into the wonderful world of the PC and eventually the internet, where I started coding with CGI, Perl and ultimately PHP. PHP struck a chord with me and I’ve been doing it for the past 11 years (circa PHP 4.1 era). Fast forward to today, I’m the Development Manager at Protected.co.uk and I also run the PHP Hampshire user group, based in Portsmouth. I also dabble in open source projects, currently the Browscap Project (Browser Capabilities Project).

As usual following the presentation we’ll head to the North Laine brewery/pub around the corner for a drink.

If you’re interested in coming, please sign up to the event over at Lanyrd. We’re also trialling using joind.in to get feedback – see the joind.in event page

See you there!

This month’s talk is presented by Jason Bailey, and is on Finding patterns in Google Analytics with PHP.Jason will present methods of crunching big data from Google Analytics via PHP, and visualising it with d3.js afterwards.

Bio: Jason Bailey is a web developer at the University of Sussex. Jason works on web applications for students and staff at the university. Jason is a slightly obsessive fan of Pop Will Eat Itself and will attempt to mention them in any conversation. Jason likes tinkering with data. Jason’s interests include cinema, reading and looking pensive on a new chair which matches the sofa.

As usual, the talk will start at 7.15pm. Following the talk we’ll head to the pub. This month is also the 1 year anniversary of BrightonPHP, so there’ll be cake as well!

If you’re thinking of coming, please mark yourself as attending over on the Lanyrd event page

This month we’re pleased to welcome Jakub Zalas from Sensio Labs UK, to present. Jakub is one of the first few certified Symfony developers. Being focused on the code quality he’s a big enthusiast of behaviour driven development. He’s also an active member of the Symfony community sending pull requests, writing documentation and promoting Symfony and BDD/Behat on local meetings. In his spare time Jakub blogs on www.zalas.eu. You can also find him on twitter: @jakub_zalas

Jakub will be presenting “Building the quality in“:

Agile methodologies are very popular these days. Writing user stories with acceptance criteria, standup meetings and other agile ceremonies are nothing new to the most of us.

Going one step further and automating the acceptance criteria with tools like Behat, improves the outer quality of the software we write, by focusing the development on the business goals from the very beginning.

On the other hand, tools like PhpSpec aim to ensure the inner quality of code, supporting the developer at every step by almost suggesting next actions to take.

During the talk Jakub will present development practices for developers focused on building quality into the application with a test-first approach.

The meeting will be Monday 16th September, 7pm for 7.15pm start, at The Skiff as usual. Please sign up on Lanyrd if you’re thinking of attending :-)

Thanks to those of you that came to last month’s social event! This month we welcome Alick Mighall from Brighton-based web agency Miggle. Alick’s presentation is titled “Why use a framework?”

Alick Mighall has been working as a digital producer since 1994.

He is currently MD of miggle.co.uk, a Brighton based web agency which he founded in 2007, after seven years’ international and board level experience at Yahoo!

Miggle’s success has largely been driven by the fact that it understands web audiences. Everyday, millions of UK Internet users engage with content that has been created by, or sites that have been planned and built by the team.

Alick’s talk looks at why and how miggle.co.uk have made the choices they have around using open source content management systems and frameworks – in particular Drupal.

It’s delivered from a Product Manager’s perspective and should be relevant to anyone who’s thinking of moving away from a proprietary approach to web development.

The venue is as usual The Skiff. Arrive 7pm for a 7.15pm kickoff. Please let us know over at the event listing on Lanyrd if you’re thinking of coming!

This month we welcome Lars Janssen to present. Lars is a new member to the group, and his talk will be on “Introduction to the Symfony Content Management Framework” – abstract as follows:

When it comes to content management systems, one size definitely doesn’t fit all. The Symfony CMF provides building blocks to add CMS functionality to your own project. Not only for users of the Symfony framework, this talk will give you an update on the project’s progress towards its first stable release, and show the many ways in which it can be used.

Lars is currently a software architect working at the conference calling provider, Powwownow, and has been using the Symfony 2 framework for around 9 months. Prior to that he worked for a mobile agency in London on a variety of projects for well-known brands.

As usual, following the talk we’ll head to the pub. If you’re thinking of coming, please let us know over at Lanyrd.

Last month we welcomed Derick Rethans of 10gen to the group, to present an introduction and some more advanced concepts on MongoDB. Derick is probably best known in the PHP community for contributing Xdebug to the community, and currently works at 10gen on their PHP driver for MongoDB. Derick gave a great overview to start with on MongoDB, its applications and uses, and then demonstrated the many features that the NoSQL solution has to offer. Following the meeting, we headed to the pub where the first round of drinks was generously sponsored by 10gen – thanks!

Slides are available from Derick’s talk over on his site. There’s also a video – details to follow shortly when I’ve finished editing it :-)

Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday 15th April – arrive 7pm for 7.15pm kickoff. This month’s speaker is Derick Rethans, who is probably best known for authoring the debugging tool Xdebug. Derick is currently at 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, and is responsible for developing and supporting the PHP MongoDB driver through development of the driver itself as well as community support and developer advocacy. He’ll be talking to us about MongoDB – what it is, where best to use it, some examples and some further advanced usage.

10gen have also very kindly offered to sponsor the first round of drinks following the meeting!

Also thanks to those of you that came to Stu Herbert’s talk at the last meeting – it provoked some interesting discussion and Q&A afterwards! Stu spoke about how DataSift use PHP to handle (in various methods) every piece of data that comes into the DataSift application. DataSift are one of only three companies worldwide to have access to the full Twitter firehose, so this is large large amounts of data. It was interesting to see how PHP managed this, and the way in which DataSift employ PHP alongside other technologies to deliver real-time information and statistics.

Update: Stu has published his slides from the presentation – you can find them at http://www.slideshare.net/stuartherbert/php-and-the-firehose-2013.

See you there :-)

We’re excited to announce that this month’s presentation is from Stuart Herbert. Stuart will be presenting “More Than Websites: PHP And The Firehose”. Stuart is currently at big data company Datasift, has presented at a number of conferences including PHP UK and PHPNW, and is well known in the PHP community.

The meeting is Monday 18th March, arrive 7pm for a 7.15pm kickoff, and it’s at The Skiff as usual. Following the meeting and discussion we’ll head to the pub.

The Lanyrd event for this is available here – if you’re planning to attend, please mark yourself as such here.

See you there!

On 18th February, BrightonPHP and Drupal Brighton joined forces and met at The Skiff for an evening of Drupal-based presentations. Since we both meet on the same night around 200 yards away from each other, it seemed a natural thing to combine forces for one night!

Steve Purkiss got things off to a great start with a brief history of the Drupal project, some history about Drupal Brighton and a good overview of Drupal for those perhaps not so familiar with it. Jeni Tehan then took over the baton and demonstrated the power and flexibility of Drupal with a few clicks of the mouse, creating a backend for an example music review site. Jeni presents the “Tasty Backend” series of talks at various Drupal conferences, and it was great to see some real-world examples of Drupal in action and how easy it can be to get a basic management area up and running quickly.

Following the presentations, much discussion ensued, with the evening ending at the North Laine for drinks and further discussion.

Hopefully this can be the first of many collaborations with Drupal Brighton – thanks for coming along!

Our next meeting is on Monday 18th March 2013, 7pm for a 7.15pm start

A belated happy new year! January’s meeting took place on the 21st Jan at The Skiff, where we had a presentation by Emmanuel Ide on the state of PHP microframeworks. Emmanuel started off by giving us some background on frameworks within PHP and then moved onto the requirement for a micro framework. He covered some code examples including some from a real-world application, and then rounded off with some pointers to further information, and a good Q&A at the end.

If you’re interested, Emmanuel’s slides are available over at Slideshare.

Following the meeting we headed to The North Laine pub/microbrewery a few doors down from the venue. It was good to see a few new faces this month also!

February’s presentation will take place on Monday 18th February 2013, again at The Skiff. This month we’re joined by the Drupal Brighton members, who’ll present a few talks on Drupal and the project’s current status and direction, why people have moved to Drupal from vanilla PHP/MySQL and similar talks. This should be a great set of presentations! Following the presentation and discussions, we’ll head to the pub.