Internet Strategy Guide

It's been about a week or so since tekx ended and I figured that (since I didn't do one last year) I should put my own personal thoughts down. This was my second year at tekx and I was looking forward to the conference and it did not disappoint my expectations. Oh yeah, I'm going to write like my live blogs were and do mostly stream of thought with as little editting as possible. Want the TLDR version? It was fucking awesome, you should berate yourself for not finding a way to go and resolve to be there next year.

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I'm going to be ganking some of the announcement structure from Jeremy Kendall's Memphis PHP Announcement who apparently ganked stuff from @ramsey.

I'm proud to announce that Bloomington, Indiana now has a PHP user group. We also acknowledge the greater Central Indiana area. The goal of this organization is to take over the world help out php users, dabblers, students , and professionals in the surrounding area while encouraging an active developer community. So far we've garnered a decent amount of members in our google group.The amount of activity behind the scenes of the group has been awesome. Matt Hottell, a Lecturer at Indiana  University for the School of Informatics has promised to shamelessly plug notify his students of the PUG (in retrospect, I could've probably shortened the group name) and @_drogers has created a Bloomington Web Developers google group to include more developers in our area that work with more than just PHP. I hope to see more growth in the future and appreciate the efforts given so far. This is, after all, a community effort and I can not do this without the support of the community.

Origin Story

PHP has always been a community experience for me. From the start of learning PHP in my Informatics classes to the mentorship I received from the Resite Sproutbox team, I've seen just how awesome the PHP Community is. It wasn't until last year's php|tek that I wanted to branch that community out into the area I live in. This year's tekx gave me that final push to put things in motion to achieve that dream. I'd like to thank @caseysoftware and @dragonbe for their help and encouragement that made this a reality.

Details

• Since the current members of the google group already meet every Thursday evening at The Alley Bar, I figure why break with tradition. We'll just meet there until the time and need for selecting a quasi-formal arrangement.
• As of right now, we're just using the google group.
• You can follow @bloomingtondevs for community updates and such
  • If you're wondering about the kanji (養) that is used for the user icon, it translates to: foster; bring up; rear; develop; nurture. Edit: The romanji for it is "you", which is pronounced "yo" with a long o.
  • If you want to be in the the bloomington php user group twitter list that I've made, let me know.
  • We have no hashtag, I'd like feedback. So far I'm thinking #btownphp or #bloomingtondevs

Thank you and welcome to Bloomington PHP.

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• tek x- closing remarks (phpprotip.com)

Talk is by Elizabeth Marie Smith (@auroraeosrose).

PHP is officially supported on:

• Unix
• Windows
• Linux
• Embedded Systems
• Risc
• NetWare
• I5 (or whatever it's called this week)

PHP is starting to drop support for old systems. Like 5.3 won't run on Windows 2000. So try to keep up to date. "If you're running PHP 4, GTFO"

If you write your code right and you get a crazy manager that decides to move, you don't have to deal with the headaches. For the most part, PHP takes care of the hard stuff. You just need to know the edge cases and know the key differences.

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@lig will be talking about mysql 5.5 and scalability this session She is Senior Technical Support Engineer for MySQL.

We will be covering

• semi-synchronous replication
• performance schema
• SIGNAL/RESIGNAL
• more partitioning options
• InnoDB - LOTS of InnoDB (performance and scalability improvements)

In 5.5 InnoDB will be the default!!! WOOT.

Default replication is asynchronous. Meaning master writes to binary log and the slave connects and "pulls" contents of the binary log. Bad thing is if the master crashes, there's no guarantee that a slave has all committed transanction.

Simi-Synchronous Replication is an alternative to asynchronous replication. Midway point between asynchronous and fully syncronous. Master only waits for a slave to receive an event. Don't have to wait for slaves to actually commit.

Performance schema tracks at an extremely low level. Just like Information schema, tables are views or temporary tables. Activation doesn't cause any change in server behavior. This is designed for advanced users.

Think of SIGNAL as an exception, a way to "return" an error. You get exception-handling logic for stored procedures, stored functions, triggers,events and db apps.

RESIGNAL lets you pass error information up. Think of it as a catch. Requres an active handler to execute. Lets you program on your PHP side to catch that very specific handling.

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@auroraeosrose's talk. Going over definitions so that everyone is on the same page.

Everything uses streams

• include/require
• stream functions
• file system functions
• many other extensions

What is a stream in php? They allow you access input and output very generically. You can read and write linearly and may or may not be seekable. Comes in chunks of data. Think of a 15GB file, would you want to read that into memory? Of course not, PHP will laugh at you for being stupid.

Thank Sara Goleman and Wez Furlong for the awesomeness of streams.

Edit: Originally didn't get Wez's name in the presentation, he thankfully provided me with his identity.

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Matthew Turland is presenting. If you haven't heard of him, you're a nub (k, not really but I really wanted to put that in a post somewhere). He's an auther for php|architect and author of Web Scrapign with PHP, a contributer to Zend Framework, lead developer of Phergie. So yeah, kind of a big deal. He currently works at Synacor which provides internet solutions to ISPs, media companies and advertisers.

The biggest change to SPL in 5.3 is the containers. Why containers? Arrays aren't always great. The underlying hash table algorithm is not always ideal for the task at hand.

We'll be looking at a lot of benchmarks. The code is available on github so you can compare the performance results for yourself.

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Today's session is given by derick rethans, the author of xdebug so he might know what he's talking about.

Xdebug provides protections against things like stack overflow in PHP and infinite recursion. You can set this by setting the nesting level. It also provides a pretty formatted errors but not only is it pretty but it provides more information such as memory usage, time, function name and location on items in the call stack. It can also collect parameter information which shows the type with options to display the variable name (if possible) or values. It opts to minimal information to prevent crashing html displays with the browsers.

Another hot option is the ability to link to the files. The var_dump is overloaded to create a pretty, color-coded output. You can turn this off by setting the overload vardump option to 0.

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We're starting with a map of the world showing the 24 major timezones. Timezone changes (daylight savings times) make things tricky. The abbreviations for timezones aren't enough to determine the user's timezone. EST can mean different things.

The 64-bit signed integer used internally provides more than enough time for us to use (+/- 90 billion years if I heard correctly). strtotime() and functions with timestamps have been replaced with classes (such as new DateTime()).

The bundled timezone database has 564 zones so far that isn't dependent on timezone abbreviations. They have the format Continent/Location or Continent/Location/Sublocation like Europe/Amsterdam. Updated database is released 20 times a year. Some changes are very sudden. Basically, you're timezone database is probably outdated.

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Trying to record @akrabat's talk about zend_form but didn't get good camera placement. Won't be able to put up the video I do have until after Amsterdam. Will need to get a voice recorder instead.

Filters are destructive. This is important to know that. Validators only reject data. Decorators are used for form rendering. Apparently I'm not the only one confused by it because Rob Allen said we'll go over that extensively. Zend_Form decorators are a combination of Decorator and Strategy Pattern.

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Josh Holmes is giving the keynote and is very insistent on enthusiasm. Talking about simple projects and used twitter as an example. Twitter may have been been written in a weekend by most of us, it is successful because it filled a niche. Seems like part of the talk will be analyzing why we say "I could of wrote that in a weekend" with an air of disdain.

Looking at the definition of simplicity. First few definitions talk about foolishness and naiveté but the last definition is where we focus on "clarity of expression" and "Austerity in embellishment."

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