ATK rules...

Trying to grow the PHP market

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-11-28T21:13:34Z

Sometimes recruiting efforts yield very nice results.

As of this week, Mikko Koppanen works in our Ibuildings UK team. Mikko is known from his Imagick extension, a wrapper to use ImageMagick in PHP.

The nice thing about this is that now we finally have someone on board who knows how to write PHP extensions.

A few weeks ago, Stefan Koopmanschap joined our Dutch team. Stefan is, among other things, in the board of the Dutch PHP User Group, and maintains the Dutch Symfony site.

With these 2 additions to our team, our PHP army is growing steadily, allowing us to continuously improve our support to companies in the UK and The Netherlands that are taking PHP seriously. PHP is rapidly moving into the realm of big corporations, and this means that there's a lot of demand for PHP professionals.

In the past weeks, we've been in contact with several major Dutch websites that are planning to move from java or .net to PHP, which is a very good sign.

Also, we've started working with several Computer Science institutes to add PHP to their curriculum. Most of them are already doing things with PHP, but often this is limited to very basic applications, a CMS, a blog etc. We're now helping them to breed better PHP programmers by teaching proper OO, Design Patterns, MVC, frameworks etc.

Traditionally, these institutes have been Java and .NET oriented, and we hope this will help show more people how PHP is a viable language for serious web applications.

[marketing mode] If you want to join us in our efforts to bring PHP to the business world, we still have openings [/marketing mode]

P.S. this is a crosspost, since Planet-PHP is still fetching the old instead of my new one.

Jedi Mind Trick

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-11-15T22:26:48Z

[waves hand]

This is the job you are looking for.

http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9056

Validating OCL constraints in PHP objects

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-11-15T08:00:45Z

While Planet PHP hasn't updated my feed url yet, just a little pointer to a post on OCL and PHP that I've written on my new blog:

http://www.jansch.nl/2007/11/15/validating-ocl-constraints-in-php-objects/

New blog location and layout

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-11-11T21:29:50Z

I have moved my blog to http://www.jansch.nl. It also has a nifty new layout, created by Almer Kaasschieter.

If you subscribed to my RSS feed, please tell your feedreader to fetch the feed from http://www.jansch.nl/feed. (Or http://www.jansch.nl/category/php/feed if you're only interested in my posts related to PHP).

A post explaining the details of the move is posted here:

http://www.jansch.nl/2007/11/11/welcome-to-my-new-blog/

PHP4 to 5 migration webinar

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-10-23T19:03:09Z

Tomorrow I'm doing a webinar for Zend: I will be talking about migrating from PHP4 to PHP5. I won't go into the technical details so much, but I will talk about why to migrate and how to migrate. I will talk about both the benefits and the risks.

It's at 9.00 am PDT (18:00 CET), and you can enroll through the Zend site. (It's free )

Oh and it's live, so you have the opportunity to ask questions.

In SF for ZendCon

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-10-07T06:01:06Z

I'm going to ZendCon this year.

First time I visit the conference. First time I visit San Francisco and first time I visit the United States.

Landed yesterday in the afternoon. I'm here with fellow Ibuildings-guy Tom and our girlfriends.

Today we went into San Francisco to do some sightseeing. Went to fisherman's warf, saw an airshow, did some shopping (both Tom and I did take european->us outlet converters, but we hadn't taken into account that some of our adapters do not support 110 volt

San Francisco is a very nice city with remarkably friendly people. Tomorrow we'll visit the Golden Gate Bridge & Park, and for next friday after the conference we've got tickets for Alcatraz.

I'm really looking forward to the Zend Conference. Meeting lots of old friends and hopefully a lot of new PHP enthousiasts. Sessions that I'm interested in are the ones from Matthew, Ilia, Eli and
Joel. There are many more I'd like to see; unfortunately I can only visit one at a time.

Some tips for those that haven't arrived yet:

Tom is in the Hyatt (where the conference is); I'm in the Bay Landing Hotel about a 3 minutes walk from there, because the Hyatt was already booked for some of the days I'm here. However, it turns out that the Bay Landing Hotel not only is 80$ per night cheaper, it also has complementary breakfast (18$ in the Hyatt) and free internet (9$ in the Hyatt), so that turned out just fine.
When we arrived, we took a taxi to the hotel. Today we discovered that one floor up from the taxi stand at SFO airport, there is a 'hotel courtesy shuttle' stand, with free shuttles going to most hotels in the region, including the Hyatt.
When you do take a taxi, tell them 'Hyatt Burlingame'. Tom discovered that just 'Hyatt' takes you to the Hyatt in san francisco city center.

So, if you're going too, see you at ZendCon! And if you're not going, you're missing out on a great event!

Introducing the i7 Framework

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-09-28T14:48:26Z

"Oh no, yet another framework for PHP..."

Admit it: that was what you thought when you read the title, didn't you?

But rest assured, we haven't created a new framework.

But we did launch something.

For 7 years now, we've been working on ATK, and it has found its niche as a framework for developing business applications. Where some frameworks focus on providing components, and other frameworks focus on websites, ATK has more and more focussed on business apps: these internal applications that companies use to run their business. (And also often as an easy-to-build administrative backend to some webapplications).

ATK typically lives on an internal Linux or Windows server in an office or corporate environment.

This year, a specific set of circumstances led to a whole new market for the framework.

The most important in this respect was the release of Zend Core for IBM's System-i. "System i" may be relatively unknown in the PHP community, but it's the new name (they change it every few years) of what was once called the AS400, and if that doesn't ring a bell, it's the big machines that run all these enterprise 'green screen' environments of large retailers, factories etc.

Zend Core basically brings native PHP to the System i world. This means that PHP is now a valid alternative to Java, when modernizing all these enterprise applications, and creating a web frontend for them.

The fun thing is: about 90% of the apps running on System i are business applications. Data management, data flows, workflows, business processes. Things that ATK is good at.

So this provides a great opportunity for the framework.

The operating system running on System-i is called 'i5/OS', so the calculation we did was:

i5 + PHP + ATK = i7

Corny, granted; but giving it a new name (which seems to be relevant in the IBM world) gives us the possibility to make this a separate product range. i7 basically is ATK for i5, with native i5 drivers, and an extensive support package. For some reasons, in the big blue IBM world, 'free software' is considered evil, so we had to add a support package in order to be taken seriously.

The past 2 days, we have presented "the i7 Framework for System-i" at the System-i Expo in the Netherlands. We did 2 sessions of 50 minutes demonstrating the framework to IT managers, most of which hadn't even heard of PHP yet. And the results are promising. Not only for our little framework, but also for PHP in general.

Info on the i7 framework can be found at i7.nl. Currently in Dutch (because of time pressure before the Expo), but an international version will follow soon.

UK and NL PHP job openings

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-09-24T22:04:30Z

I'm not a fan of bragging, but something is going on here that makes me extremely proud.

It's been 7 years since I started to work for Ibuildings. Back then, they were an average development startup, focussed on delivering web applications, and they were using this fairly new, experimental, open source scripting language called PHP3.

It's fun to see how a company can grow with a language. I've seen PHP go from PHP3 to PHP4 and later from PHP4 to PHP5, and in the meanwhile, Ibuildings' focus has shifted more and more from a development shop to a PHP service company. Companies that used to be our competitors, gradually became our customers. And we've grown from a 3 people group to a crowd of 48.

And I'm proud (and not too shy) to say that at the moment, we are the only 100% PHP service company in The Netherlands, with projects ranging from plain old development and outplacement, to training and consultancy (audits, development methodology implementation, architecture etc.). And promoting PHP in general, with events such as the DPC earlier this year.

Last year I was very proud when Zend made us their official representative in The Netherlands. Besides the fact that we can now sell Zend products and services, which is nice for our sales people, I was particularly fond of this, as it confirmed that we must have been doing something right.

And now we're happy to announce we're going to do something left.

Recently we've seen increasing demand for PHP services in the UK. The adoption of open source in the UK has been a bit slower than on the European mainland, but PHP is finally gaining momentum there.
And if there's a market for PHP, there's a market for PHP services.

So now we are not only 'Ibuildings.nl BV', but also 'Ibuildings UK Ltd', and we have a home in London. Whoot! PHP on the right and on the left side of the road.

We already have a small group there doing cool things with PHP. And we're happy to have bright people such as Gavin Lee Foster, the author of Xinc on board.

I'm not bragging entirely without a reason. We are hiring. We have job openings in both the Netherlands and the UK. And we have plans in several other European countries as well (servicing those primarily from the UK and NL for now).

So if you're above average in terms of PHP skills, have good communication skills, and you want to use those skills not only to develop, but also to help others learn to see the power of PHP, send us proof of your skills, and an up to date resume, and we'll be in touch.

ATK 6.1 released

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-08-30T10:36:12Z

I just released ATK 6.1; It contains several new features such as Ajax based dialogs, a new language file (Indonesian), and several bug fixes.

The most important however is that it fixes an XSS vulnerability based on the usage of $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"] that we had overlooked.

It is recommended to upgrade ATK applications to ATK 6.1.

The release can be found on http://www.achievo.org/atk/download

The changelog is included in the release, and at http://www.achievo.org/atkdemo/atk/doc/CHANGES

My First Mashup

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-07-27T09:33:44Z

I have been inspired by Cal Evans' mashup experiment, which he did a presentation on at the Dutch PHP Conference last month.

Also, I was annoyed with having to consult many different resources when I plan a business trip.

So I began building frekfly, my own little mashup.

Version 1

The first version, which took me only a few hours to built, offered only a google map, basic weather information, flickr images and currency conversion. To built this, I used the following tools:

PHP5's Webservices API, which made it possible to consume webservices with only very few lines of code.
The Flickr API to retrieve images
Google Maps for the map display
Some webservicex services, for weather, geographical and currency information.
Zend Framework, mainly for its Zend_Service_Flickr class, which makes consuming the flickr rest service easy.
ATK, for its debugging console and file-caching.

It's really easy to construct an application like this in PHP, given that a few lines of code give you access to any available webservice. The first version of the app did not even use a database, everything was retrieved from webservices and cached in files.

Version 2

Then, I wanted more. When I travel for work, I usually need hotels that are located close to the airport, so I looked for a webservice that could provide me with hotel information. I requested access to the API at expedia, but they have a manual approval process and I'm still waiting for a response. Luckily the people at booking.com were a lot more helpful and they provided me with an iframe based interface to their hotel reservation engine, and they even styled their pages according to the design (well ok, that's not really a design yet, is it ) of frekfly.

The only thing missing from their API was the ability to search by latitude and longitude, which was my close-to-the-airport criterium. However, they kindly send me a dump of their hotel database including the coordinates.

So in version 2 I had to add a database, and I used the database abstraction layer of ATK to easily access it.

Version 2 is what is currently online. I may post some code examples of the webservice interfaces later on, because I found this to be a very instructive experience.

Future plans

In the next version, I want to add other nifty web-two-point-oh features to the site, including the ability to have visitors enter comments and details, so they can help complete the airport information. (such as 'are there better restaurants before or after security?'). Here I plan to use the JSON functionality of Zend Framework, to make this very 2.0-ish.

Issues to deal with

One of the major disadvantages of mashups is the fact that you're dependent on external systems. At night, the site is hardly usable because webservicex is very busy at that time and gives a lot of timeouts. Of course, this is countered by caching, but I can't cache every output for every airport on the planet, so caching is based on a 'retrieve the first time its needed' approach. So that's a disadvantage at this point.

Another interesting issue you have to deal with when writing mashups is standardization in naming, or rather, the lack thereof. For example, I consult 2 different webservices and a few file based airport resources to get airport information, but each of them use different names for the same airport. Where possible, I use the official 3-letter IATA code, but some of them do not support that.

So instead of actually matching data from different sources, you have to use a more probabilistic approach, where you say "hmm, 'Schiphol Airport Amsterdam' and 'Amsterdam, Schiphol' are probably the same airport.

I had a similar issue with the weather service; it doesn't support latitude and longitude, so what it does is 'guess' what the nearest weatherstation is, based on the airportname, the nearest town name, the biggest city close to the airport and finally the country capital if all else fails.

These are all issues to deal with in a mashup-based application, and I would encourage everyone to built a mashup at some point, because it teaches you things that you don't usually encounter with standard mysql+php based websites.

DPC2007 and Zend UK Business Conference recap

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-07-04T21:14:40Z

On june 16th we organized the first Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. The event was attended by more than 250 people and with speakers such as Cal Evans, Kevlin Henney, Lukas Smith, Derick Rethans and many others, I think it was a great event.

We've decided to make it a yearly event, so mark June 14, 2008 in your agenda for the next instalment.

I did a presentation on business frameworks (and ATK in particular) at the conference, the slides of which can be found on slideshare.

The DPC was not the only new conference, last monday I visited the first Zend UK PHP for Business Seminar organized by the London office of Zend. This conference was targeted at 'business people', and featured speakers such as Zeev Suraski, Harold Goldberg (Zend's new CEO), David Boloker (IBM) and Clint Oram (SugarCRM).

I had the honor of presenting a talk on 'enterprise PHP development' on the seminar. Since it was targeted at business people, I explained the development process of PHP applications using metaphors. What may be obvious for most of us, isn't so obvious for a lot of people and companies, so I found it important to talk about the process surrounding PHP development, and not just plain PHP coding itself.

Below are the slides of this talk:

This is the 7th presentation I did in 3 months time; I'm beginning to get the hang of this.

ATK6 released

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-06-12T06:45:49Z

Today it's exactly one year since ATK 5.6 was released. So the new release was long overdue.

It's finally here, along with a new website which has a lot less fuzz, and is more to the point.

The changelog is a whopping 1056 lines. This translates to rougly 300 changes for this release. We might say this is a new generation, which is marked with a new major version number, and a new default layout. And it finally has ajax support (the way you are used to in ATK: add a flag to add autocompletion to a field, add one line of code to make things refresh on the fly). Most of you have been using the nightlies for months now, so this may not be new for you, but many companies are still using 5.6 for their apps.

The new release can be downloaded here.

Given the amount of changes, upgrading might not be trivial. Consult the forum if you need help.

DPC line-up complete

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-06-09T11:50:50Z

About a month ago we announced the Dutch PHP Conference that is going to take place in Amsterdam one week from now.

Apparently there is much demand for such a conference because we already sold out all tickets one day before the early bird discount ended, and our line-up wasn't even complete at that point.

We just confirmed the last addition to the program: Derick Rethans, from Xdebug and ezComponents fame, will give a talk about Test-driven Development.

The complete program is available on the conference website.

PHP on IBM's System-i

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-06-08T17:10:34Z

Some of the developers at Ibuildings are working with PHP on IBM's System-i platform. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it has been called 'iSeries' for a while and it's basically a new name for the old AS/400. If you're old enough to remember Happy Days you probably remember those nifty 'green screens' that they used to use in stores, banks etc. There's a 90% chance that these green screen applications were running on AS/400.

The green screens have mostly made way for more modern interfaces, but the servers that run them still exist today. Many of the applications on them have been modernized by adding a web-interface to the existing applications.

There are several ways to make a web interface for green screen applications, or 'RPG programs', as System-i developers call them; RPG is the programming language that they traditionally use on those machines, and it is complete abacadabra to most PHP developers.

For a while now it is possible to use Java to make webinterfaces on System-i, and there are several cgi based tools. And recently IBM and Zend have teamed up to port PHP to the i5/OS operating system. So far this port seems succesful; one of the reasons is perhaps that PHP is easier to adopt by traditional System-i developers than Java, which forces you to learn Object Oriented Programming. In PHP you can do OOP, but you don't have to. You don't even have to use functions, and this is a lot closer to classic System-i languages (although I would of course recommend any System-i developer moving to PHP to learn at least about procedural programming).

When running PHP apps on System-i, you can use the standard db2 database extension to access the db2 database, but alternatively you can also use the 'i5 toolkit' that is available in PHP on i5/OS. There are some subtle differences, and if you find yourself having to write PHP applications for System-i, it's good to know about how to use the i5 toolkit to use the db2 database. Harrie Verveer has written an article on this topic on our company blog. It explains one of the differences between the db2_* and i5_* functions, but it contains some sample code and as such is a nice example of how to use the i5 functions.

Is a macbook the PHP developer's choice?

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — 2007-05-25T18:25:43Z

This week I was at the International PHP Conference. It was a nice conference with interesting topics. It was however a bit of a pity that the PHP conference got 'cornered' by the Webinale conference, which was a lot bigger and caused the PHP sessions to be in way too small rooms. But most of the sessions I visited were interesting, so all in all it was a nice conference.

There was one particular thing I noticed though: the amount of people using macbooks. I know that it's a popular notebook, but almost half of the laptops there was a mac!

See picture:

4 of the visible laptops are macbooks, and there were even more not directly visible on this picture.

Maybe my own laptop got scared of this, because it decided to die during the second day of the conference. It's probably a motherboard failure and repair will be expensive, so I'm thinking of buying a replacement.

Now I'm stuck with a dilemma. Should I buy a macbook?

Regardless of it's Cool Factor, what makes a macbook useful for PHP developers? What are features that are good, what are features that are hard to get used to for a developer switching to mac? Any ideas?

One thing I will miss if I buy a mac is the ability to write on it; I had a tablet pc and since I got it, all my notes were digital. So the alternative is a new tablet.

Tough choice!

(If you're curious, the picture was taken during Stephan Schmidt and Frank Kleine's talk on Annotations. Interesting presentations, although I have my doubts abusing the docblocks for declarations)