Atlanta PHP

When: Thursday, August 7, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Join-Fu: The Art of SQL

Jay Pipes, the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL and co-author of Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), joins us this month to present “Join-Fu: The Art of SQL.”

Join-fu is the art of performance-tuning your application’s SQL. Join Jay in a fun, irreverent look at the common ways application developers misuse and abuse their database.

Topics covered include:

• Schema optimization and vertical partitioning
• SQL Coding style guidelines
• Set-wise problem solving in SQL (and why it kicks for-loop-fu’s ass.)
  • Rewriting correlated subqueries into joins
  • Using derived tables or subqueries in the FROM clause
• Working with N:M or “mapping” tables
  • Dealing with OR conditions
  • Dealing with AND conditions
  • Combatting filesorts using Cross-join-fu
• Understanding Left-join-fu
• Handling Heirarchical Data
  • Adjacency Lists
  • Nested Sets
• Doing GIS calculations in SQL
  • Without using user variables, the spatial extensions or stored functions
  • Calculating distance between two points
  • Doing radius searches in spherical geometries
• Reporting techniques in SQL
  • Calculating running sums and aggregates
  • Calculating rank of results

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

Due to the 4th of July holiday, we will not have our regularly scheduled meeting in July. Instead, we’ll be taking a break this month.

Join us again on August 7th at our regularly scheduled time when special guest Jay Pipes, North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL, presents on “Join-fu: The Art of SQL.”

More details coming soon.

When: Thursday, June 5, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Topic: PHP Templates the XSL Way

When developing a web application a common question is, “what templating engine should I use?” There are several to choose from if you’re using PHP, including PHP itself. In this presentation we’ll explore XSL and how it can be used to build a templating engine in PHP. James Logsdon presents.

Mini-Talk: TBD

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Tuesday, May 27, 2008—6pm-10pm
Where: Schematic Atlanta

TestFest 2008 Workshop

We are hosting an additional workshop in May for the PHP TestFest! This is a BYOL (bring your own laptop) workshop. WiFi, food, and drinks will be provided. Please RSVP at meetup.com, so we can get an accurate head count.

Ever wanted to get involved in the PHP development team but were unsure of where to start? Perhaps you’re not exactly a great C developer, so you weren’t even aware that your help could be valuable? Well, you don’t need to be a C developer to aid the PHP development team, nor do you need to do any fancy compiling or building. You can write phpt tests!

The month of May has been designated as TestFest 2008 for PHP user groups around the world. This month, PHP user groups will work to improve the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. Aside from having the opportunity to help in improving the language itself, PHP.net will also raffle off 10 elePHPants to submitters. Every submission (phpt test) that is considered helpful receives one entry into the raffle. Furthermore, people that show they are capable of writing tests entirely on their own may be given official PHP.net accounts with direct commit access to cvs.php.net and an @php.net email address.

Location

TAKE NOTE: We are meeting in a different location for this workshop! Our meeting takes place at the Schematic Atlanta offices at the Millennium in Midtown building (at the corner of 10th and West Peachtree streets). Click here for directions. You will need to sign in with security in the lobby.

When: Thursday, May 1, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Topic: TestFest 2008

Ever wanted to get involved in the PHP development team but were unsure of where to start? Perhaps you’re not exactly a great C developer, so you weren’t even aware that your help could be valuable? Well, you don’t need to be a C developer to aid the PHP development team, nor do you need to do any fancy compiling or building. You can write phpt tests!

The month of May has been designated as TestFest 2008 for PHP user groups around the world. This month, PHP user groups will work to improve the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. Aside from having the opportunity to help in improving the language itself, PHP.net will also raffle off 10 elePHPants to submitters. Every submission (phpt test) that is considered helpful receives one entry into the raffle. Furthermore, people that show they are capable of writing tests entirely on their own may be given official PHP.net accounts with direct commit access to cvs.php.net and an @php.net email address.

The Atlanta PHP May meeting will be dedicated to TestFest 2008, introducing the concept of phpt tests and how to write them.

Mini-Talk: Easy Loader Generation

We’ve all seen those nifty animated loading images on Ajaxified Web 2.0 sites, but how do we create them? Eric Stewart shows us how with “a neat little tool for making a quick little AJAX loading gif.”

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

Yesterday, php.net announced the TestFest!

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors.

All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite. Please visit the TestFest homepage to get additional details on the TestFest on how to get involved, either as a UG or by setting up the necessary infrastructure.

As a preview for our May 1st meeting, we will have a workshop format catering to two different groups of developers. For beginning PHP developers, we will help you get started developing PHP applications by helping to set up your environment and teaching a few of the basics. For intermediate-to-advanced developers, we will discuss how you can assist the PHP development community by writing phpt tests. More details to come in the future.

Discuss phpt tests and the TestFest in the Atlanta PHP forum.

When: Thursday, April 3, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: I’m a PHP dev! Why should I care about Microsoft?

There are a host of technologies and tools from Microsoft that can add value to your PHP solutions, save you time, and are just plain cool. This presentation will cover server technologies like FastCGI, IIS and the PHP SQL Server Driver, client technologies like the ASP.NET AJAX Library and Silverlight, as well as developer tools. This is not a sales pitch – it’s a technical walkthrough with demos, and will give you pointers to lots of resources for digging deeper.

Glen Gordon is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft who presents free .NET developer training around the Southeast. You can reach Glen through his blog http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon

Mini-Talk: Bug Tracking

Kevin Roberts will do a short presentation about bug tracking.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, March 6, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Robust Batch Processing with PHP

Brian DeShong will present on robust batch processing with PHP, a talk he will also give in May at php|tek in Chicago.

Offline processing is a common practice used in building scalable web applications. Dedicating machines to perform expensive processes, such as video transcoding, image transformation, and sending of emails, helps keep front end webserver resources available to serve requests.

How do you make developers aware of problems with these processes? How do you ensure that your batch processing system can scale to multiple machines? How do you handle failure in a responsible manner? Brian will use real-world examples while illustrating how to build a robust batch processing system.

Mini-Series: PHP IDEs

Alex Peterson will present the Eclipse IDE and the PHP plugin for Eclipse.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, February 7, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: The Tao of MVC

George Jempty demonstrates how to leverage his own BareBonesMVC (Model View Controller) engine, to balance simplicity against over-reliance on CMS and/or MVC frameworks. Mr. Jempty has successfully delivered professional software to prominent multi-national clients using BareBonesMVC, which he made publicly available at http://code.google.com/p/barebonesmvc-php/ in July 2007, and which has been downloaded over 1000 times since.

Mini-Series: Eclipse

Bill Hertz is slated to give a mini-presentation on using the Eclipse IDE as an editor for PHP.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, January 3, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Sphinx Full-text Open Source Search Engine

Zack Huston and Robert Swarthout will present an overview of the capabilities of Sphinx search.

Hear how PaperBackSwap.com used Sphinx to replace MySQL full text searches and run approximately 100 times faster. Also, hear how Sphinx is used on SwapaDVD.com to create suggested searches—similar to Google Suggest.

Key features include:

• The ability to interface with a MySQL database, PostgreSQL database or any XML feed.
• Search any combination of text fields and weight each field differently on the fly.
• Sphinx is published with APIs for PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby.

More information can be found at www.sphinxsearch.com

Mini-Series: TBA

We will announce the new mini-series topic soon. It will either continue with our IDE series or start a new series on frameworks.

PHP Year In Review

Ben Ramsey will lead a discussion about the many decisions made—and those left to be made—over the course of 2007 that will impact the future direction of PHP. Topics will include PHP 5.3 and 6, namespaces, late static binding, garbage collection, Unicode support, etc. What are these features? How will they affect you? Are they important to you? As 2008 begins, we will look ahead to see what lies on the horizon for PHP. This promises to be an interesting discussion that will likely bleed over into our after-meeting dinner/drinks.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.