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Community News: Last Day for php|works/PyWorks 2008 Call for Papers

As a reminder to all of those wanting to submit papers to this year's php|works/PyWorks combo conference, today is your last day!

As with all our conferences, our main goal is to provide our attendees - mostly a highly technical crowd who is looking for specific, to-the-point information on relevant developer topics - with content that is as relevant as possible to their daily lives. [...] If you have a cool idea about a product or platform that somehow relates to PHP, we definitely want to hear from you!

Check out this page for some of the guidelines (and suggestions) about submitting your proposal. The Call for Papers will close at the end of the day, July 25th, 2008 and all talks must be submitted via email to proposals@phparch.com for consideration.

Matthew Turland's Blog: EAV Modeling - Square Peg in a Round Hole?

Matthew Turland has posted about a topic that was the subject of a recent cover story in php|architect magazine - EAV modeling.

The mental image that came to me when reading about this approach to data modeling was taking the traditional relational table and turning it on its head. [...] EAV actually has to circumvent, work around, or reimplement features that most mainstream database servers today provide "for free" to the traditional relational counterparts of EAV in order to get equal functionality.

He talks about features the structure has (including row-level referential integrity and schema metadata) and points out some of the other document-focused database systems like Lucene and CouchDB.

Check out the story in the June 2008 issue of php|architect for that cover story from Carl Welch.

NETTUTS.com: Creating a Dynamic Poll with jQuery and PHP

The NETTUTS.com website has a new tutorial posted that combines PHP and AJAX (using the the jQuery library specifically) to create a simple dynamic poll.

When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of jQuery you can produce some pretty cool results. In this tutorial we'll create a poll using PHP and XHTML, then make use of some jQuery Ajax effects to eliminate the need for a page refresh, and to give it a nice little bit of animation.

The PHP handles defining the question, answers and the functionality to load, submit and return the current results (number of votes) back to the javascript. The communication between the PHP and javascript is a JSON message made simple thanks to PHP's json_encode function.

You can download the source or check out a live demo to see how it all fits together.

Christopher Jones' Blog: It's feature freeze time for PHP 5.3

In a new blog post Christopher Jones mentions the feature freeze that's happened for the PHP 5.3 series including the Oracle support through the OCI8 extension.

The volume of commits has recently increased in anticipation of today's feature freeze deadline. I expect the Alpha release time frame will also see high activity. Eventually, increased tightening of criteria for patch acceptance will bring us to Beta and then Production releases.

Features included in this most recent extension version include an allowance for external authentication, a change to let Reflection correctly show function/method arguments, an increase on the oci8.default_prefetch setting and correctly defining the SQLT_BDOUBLE and SQLT_BFLOAT constants.

Keep an eye out for a release on PECL with these new updates soon.

Community News: OSCON 2008 Slides and Blogs from the PHP Community

OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention wraps up today but some of the PHPers out there have already made some blog posts and have shared their slides from the event. Here's the list so far:

• Luke Welling - SNAP - PHP Taint Tool
• Ed Finkler - Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecInfo
• Sebastian Bergmann - Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• Laura Thomson - Write Beautiful Code
• Wez Furlong - Hot Chocolate: You got cocoa in my PHP
• Theo Schlossnagle - Full-stack Introspection Crash Course
• Ben Ramsey - Give Your Site a Boot With Memcache

Keep an eye out here for more slides and blog posts as they come out.

Jonathan Snook's Blog: Creating a Contact Form in CakePHP 1.2

In a new blog post today Jonathan Snook shows how to create a contact form for your CakePHP application (version 1.2).

Most contact forms take a name and feedback from a user and mail it off to the administrator but don't store any information in the database. This tutorial will show how to use CakePHP's models, even when no table is being used.

He shows how to define the model class, set up the mapping of columns to named elements and the code to handle the submit. It just sends a basic email with the contents of the form with a few validation rules to ensure it's not abused. Simple stuff...

Site News: Popular Posts for the Week of 07.25.2008

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

• Developer Tutorials Blog: Running background processes in PHP
• PHPImpact Blog: Static Factories vs Public Constructors
• Job Posting: Ganz Interactive Seeks PHP Developer (Toronto, ON)
• Ibuildings blog: Wow, this is so cool! (Guide to Enterprise PHP Development)
• Developer Tutorials Blog: Debugging PHP with Firebug and FirePHP
• Eran Galperin's Blog: Handling mail and mime in PHP using the Zend Framework
• CodeIgniter Blog: CodeIgniter Community Chieftain Michael Wales
• Daniel Cousineau's Blog: PHP 5.3 and Closures
• Vinu Thomas' Blog: mbstring Functions by default in PHP
• Sebastian Bergmann's Blog: PHPUnit Workshops in Australia

Job Posting: Bronto Seeks PHP Developer (Durham, NC)

Company Bronto Location Durham, NC Title PHP Developer Summary

Are you a hardcore PHP developer who loves to solve big problems in a fast-paced and agile team?

Bronto Software, a leader in the competitive world of online interactive marketing, is seeking a well-rounded PHP Developer to assist in the development of our web applications.

The PHP Developer must have experience in developing robust applications in a SAAS (Software as a Solution) model. You will be responsible for developing on a wide range of systems using a broad range of technologies, improving and extending existing code base, develop code appropriate for a high availability/reliability/scalability environment. Knowledge of the Internet marketing software industry and Bronto's business, products, and clients a big plus.

Bronto offers a vibrant, open work environment and provides perks that include; a casual dress code (shorts, t-shirts), free snacks and drinks, tickets to the Durham Bulls, and a company sponsored lunch and learn every Thursday. In addition, Bronto has a very active Community Service Committee which sponsors several local charities. All Brontos are given 8 hrs per year to volunteer at one of these charities during work hours. The Social Committee is currently busy planning our next Bronto event - past events have included Bronto Birthday Picnic and wiffleball game, speed connect-4 tournament and the annual game of Assassin.

For more insight into Bronto's unique culture please check out the following links:

• http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B33BD298127A117F
• http://flickr.com/photos/95016519@N00/
• http://bronto.com/careers

Bronto is expanding our client list which includes; Trek Bikes, iFilm, Johnson & Johnson, Lending Tree and JP Morgan Chase and we are seeking to increase the functionality of our application as well. The Software Engineer will have a direct impact on this growth.

If you have the technical expertise and the self-motivation required, we would love to hear from you.

Requirements include:

• BS degree in computer science, software engineering, or related field
• Experience developing software with PHP/MySQL (other languages a plus)
• You live and breathe acronyms like OOP, MVC, and OMGWTFBBQLOL!!1!2!
• Experience developing in a Linux/Unix environment
• Experience working with source control like SVN, Git, or Mercurial
• Ability to write code that kicks butt and takes names
• Eligibility to work in the US without sponsorship

For more information or to submit your resume, contact Stacy Lyons at stacy [at] bronto [dot] com or apply online at http://bronto.com/careers

Job Posting: RJ Byrd (Recruiter) Seeks PHP Developer (Dallas, TX)

Company RJ Byrd (Recruiter) Location (North) Dallas, TX Title PHP Developer Summary

Description

The ideal candidate is creative, very strong software and database designer with strong OOD skills, can work independently, has good communications skills and can brainstorm with the team on new ideas. He/she works well in a fast paced environment and deals professionally with both teammates and clients in order to meet business and technical demands. Some of the responsibilities will include:

• Develop new solutions using industry standard technologies (specifically HTML, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL).
• Provide input on web platform design and configuration to maximize application performance.
• Suggest code and design optimizations to improve the scalability of the applications and maximize performance.
• Demonstrate strong understanding of web application architecture and OO technology as implemented in a LAMP environment.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of hands-on PHP with strong web application development experience.
• 2+ years of experience with MySQL, HTML and Javascript.
• 1+ years of experience with XML and Linux.
• Experience with Apache, Subversion and CVS is highly desired.
• Demonstrated ability to work very well under pressure and keep abreast of current technology.
• Excellent project management and multitasking capabilities.
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem solving skills with little supervision.
• Bachelors Degree or more advanced degree in Computer Science.

Compensation
$50-70K + other incentives (full time, direct hire)

Contact
Tait Lifto, Information Technology Recruiting Manager
214.265.6580 Direct
TLifto@RJByrd.com
www.RJByrd.com

Thomas Weidner's Blog: Zend_File_Transfer examples or using validators to increase security

Thomas Weidner has posted about a method he's come up with to help protect you and your site when uploading files through the Zend_File_Transfer component from the Zend Framework.

The new Zend_File_Transfer component is growing day for day. As incredible new feature this component allows to use file validators. These are necessary to increase security and allow to define rules for file uploads (and also downloads in future).

He illustrates with a simple Zend_File_Transfer object that uses an addValidators call to limit the size of the upload to 50 KB. Other validation rules include count (the number of files to expect), extension, filessize and imagesize. Using these he makes a "more secure" upload object setting the size to 205KB, to expect five files that are all under 1MB and are of the types gif/jpg/png.

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