For those wanting to submit their ideas to for this year's Dutch PHP Conference, you'd better hurry! Their Call for Papers has officially opened and will close at the end of the month, January 31st 2010.
Good news! The Call for Papers for DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) 2010 is now open! [...] This year we're excited about many different topics, perhaps the best way to describe it is to say that if its related to PHP and you are excited about, then we want to hear it! It doesn't matter who you are, this event is all about the technologies. DPC has an established reputation as the best place to expand a developer's skill set and improve existing practice and that remains our focus for this year.
TO submit your ideas, stop off at their Call for Papers page and submit your contact information and the abstract for your talk!
In this new post from the Ibuildings techPortal today Peter Verhage suggests a good way to learn all about the new features in PHP 5.3 - build your own ORM system.
Creating an ORM for PHP is not an everyday task but writing one is a good way to improve your PHP skills, especially if you use some of the additional features PHP 5.3 adds to the language. There are many excellent ORMs (Object Relational Mappings) already in existence and for a real-world project it would probably better to use one of these, but this tutorial uses the task of creating an ORM as a way to take a look at applications for some PHP 5.3 features.
He makes use of namespaces, interfaces, static variable/method handling, magic methods like "__set" and "__unset" as well as abstract classes - all features of some of the latest PHP releases (5.2+). By the end you'll have a basic ORM layer that can do all of the usual CRUD operations as well as more complicated searching and a few things those familiar with the Zend Framework are used to.
In this new post from Brandon Savage he looks at automated build tools and how they're more relevant now than ever in your application's lifecycle.
Build systems are just as relevant to the web (if not more so) than they are to compiled code. Build systems offer significant advantages to the development of software applications, and it is crucial that developers not take them for granted.
He suggests a few reasons to those naysayers out there as to why build processes and tools are pertinent to web development:
- Build systems make continuous integration easier.
- Build systems ensure that the same process is followed each and every time when making a release.
- With a one-step system, errors are reduced.
- Creating a build system reenforces the entire development process.
- A build system introduces formality to the release process.