Last night the CNMA awards were held here in Toronto, and I turned out to go home with an award!

Although I still feel I didn't really deserve such a prize, I feel honored and proud of the team.

Thanks guys! Its been an amazing ride so far, and also thanks to the CNMA organization and judges.

I admit I don't follow Zend Framework very closely, since I haven't been using it for any serious work. But I did write a piece about testing a Zend Framework action controller with View Helpers.

This might need updating, since the testing capabilities of the Zend Framework have grown substantially since then. In particular, there is now a component called Zend_Test. I haven't had time to study it closely yet, but I hope to do so soon.

Surprising that this is still cropping up. It's quite simple really, PHP references are not pointers. You don't need to take my word for it though, the manual puts it just as succinctly: http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/language.references.arent.php I quote: "As said before, references aren't pointers." I'll reiterate: PHP4 passed objects around by value. This was fun. (?) PHP5 corrected this and passes things around by reference, which (I think) is more intuitive, and saves a lot of puzzlers. In PHP4 you could use this: =& to get things passed by reference, which in some cases, in particular with objects, was necessary. But with PHP5 you don't have to use this operator so much. Which is nice, since you don't have to think as much, which is always a boon.

Maemo.org, the community site for Nokia's mobile Linux environment has this week been upgraded to 8.09.2 Ragnaroek, the much faster and long-term supported version of the Midgard framework. Thanks to Niels and Piotras for working with me on this!

in October, I spent quite a bit of time optimizing this release, shaving off an estimated 60-70% of queries through some smart caching and removed redundancies. In addition, a new database server is now in place. Together, these should get us quite far in the "Fast Server" agenda.

We're however still not done, and now we will do more optimizations that will be part of 8.09.3, due next week, and will move static files (images and javascript) to a separate lighttpd instance to remove that load from the normal Apache. When all this is done, the Maemo community should have infrastructure that will be able to serve it for a long time.

In addition to optimization, we've been working on some other features related to the website:

• Many new activities, such as Internet Tablet talk and Maemo Wiki now count towards karma, with more karma refinements on the way
• Issues with weird email formatting in Maemo forums has been fixed and will be part of 8.09.3
• Per-module karma listings are now showing correctly, making it possible to see the top contributors to different aspects of the community

Midgard is a big and complex piece of software. If you notice any issues related to this upgrade, please let us know. And if you have any ideas on improving the website, be sure to file those too!

Technorati Tags: lighttpd, maemo, midcom, midgard, ragnaroek

NetBeans 6.5 is soon to be released. After 10 years of NetBeans that's the first version of Sun's OpenSource IDE featuring PHP support. While 6.5 is waiting to be packaged the development didn't stop and the first features for the successor, NetBeans.next, are already being developed. David Van Couvering just showed a preview of a cool new feature: SQL completion in PHP strings, if it does what the screenshot promises that's a damn great addition in my opinion....

This blog posting is in German as the events it relates to is German-only. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are working towards an English edition of the PHP Code Camp, though.

Die Zeiten, in denen man es sich leisten konnte, den Benutzer testen zu lassen, sind vorbei. Heute gilt in vielen Projekten gar die Regel, dass ein nicht getestetes Feature als nicht vorhanden gilt. Lernen Sie, wie man automatische Unit Tests schreibt, wie testgetriebene Entwicklung funktioniert und welche Vorteile Sie davon in Ihrem Projekt haben.

Auch genügt es nicht, nur Teile der Anwendung isoliert zu testen. Eine Anwendung muss auch im Zusammenspiel aller beteiligten Komponenten getestet werden. Dazu gehört gerade für AJAX-lastige Anwendungen auch der Browser. Erfahren Sie, wie Sie eine Webanwendung als Ganzes automatisch im Browser testen können, welche Vorteile kontinuierliche Integration für Sie haben kann und wie Sie die Qualität Ihres Codes durch Codemetriken beurteilen können.

Sebastian Bergmann ist nicht nur während der Workshops für Sie da: Nach den intensiven Trainingseinheiten des Tages haben wir für Sie Abendevents vorbereitet, bei denen Sie den Trainer und die anderen Teilnehmer in entspannter Runde kennen lernen und sich fachlich austauschen können. Machen Sie sich fit für Ihre PHP-Projekte und lassen Sie sich die Chance für Ihre Teilnahme an diesem besonderen Event nicht entgehen!

Die erste Ausgabe der PHP Code Camp Series: Quality findet das erste Mal vom 28. bis 30. Januar 2009 in München statt.



PHP-Entwickler aufgepasst: Fernab von Arbeits- und Projektstress unter der Woche lädt die Entwickler Akademie vom 16. bis 18. Januar 2009 zur ersten Weekend Edition des PHP Code Camps. Ein Wochenende lang in die Tiefen von PHP eintauchen und von Experten lernen. Buchen Sie Ihren PHP-Urlaub noch heute, das Laptop einpacken und nach Bad Ems starten, um den Rest kümmert sich die Entwickler Akademie -- vom Transfer vom Flughafen, über ein Get Together am Freitag bis zur virtuellen Linux-Maschine mit allen benötigten Tools für die Wochenendschulung. Wenn das Jahr so beginnt, ist eines klar: 2009 wird das Jahr für PHP-Entwickler!

Das innovative und neuartige Trainingskonzept des Camps enthält die Essenz aus den Praxiserfahrungen und den Spezialgebieten von drei der bekanntesten deutschsprachigen PHP-Profis. Das bietet Ihnen den Vorteil, dass Sie tiefgehendes Know-how von den führenden Experten jedes Themengebiets vermittelt bekommen. Sie werden stets von allen dreien Trainern gleichzeitig betreut -- ideal für praktische Übungen und für die intensive Wissensvermittlung.

Equinox: (Latin: Equal night) This example came about after a previous example to get the season for a given date. In the southern hemisphere, seasons are calculated simply by date. Summer down here begins on December first, Autumn on March first, Winter on June first, and Spring on September first. This works well, and the seasons can be adjusted simply to transpose them into values that correspond to the nothern hemisphere. But these dates do not truely reflect the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere, or autumn in the southern hemisphere. Historically, in the northern hemisphere, the beginning of spring is marked by the spring, or Vernal, Equinox. The Vernal Equinox marks the point in time when the Sun crosses the celestial equator from south to north. Calculation of the true Vernal Equinox is regarded by some as the true beginning of spring, while some churches relate to it in a totally different way.

Property Lists (plist) is a format used on OS X as a way to store settings and other configuration data, as part of my SQLite talk I show how to extract SQLite databases from the backups generated for the iPhone when it syncs to your computer.

Simply, its an XML format that stores a data structure consisting of boolean, integer, real, string and blob values. I've provided the parser I use to extract data from the PList file, it doesn't work with binary plists at the moment. But may do so in the future, you can convert a binary PList to an XML PList using the plutil binary on OS X.

Instantiate the PlistParser class and then call the parse method with the filename as a parameter. This will then return an array of the PList elements.

If you have any problems add a comment and I'll look into it.

I wonder if the concept of amazon whishlists work. Or have you ever got something from your whishlist, because you did something in/for PHP?

Zend Framework 1.7.0 has been released and is now available from the Zend Framework download site