Atlanta PHP User Group

When: Thursday, Sept 2, 2010—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

Five reasons to love CodeIgniter

Presented by Nic Rosental

It seems that nowadays everyone has the best framework that you should try out RIGHT NOW. After doing a bit of testing myself, I chose CodeIgniter and haven’t looked back since. I’m going to show you five reasons why you might be interested in trying out this framework and hopefully you’ll love it too.
You can take care of installing, deploying and setting it up on your own. There’s not time for the boring bits, so I’ll take you head first into some of the coolest features this framework has to offer.

Topics will include:
-URI Management
-Form and Data Validation
-Security and XSS Filtering
-Pagination
-Image Manipulation

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

When: Saturday, August 7th, 2010, 10am – 5pm
Where: Cobb Exchange

Announcing the Atlanta PHP 2010 TestFest event!

IMPORTANT – LOCATION CHANGE: We’ve had to change locations. We will be at Cobb Exchange coworking space. Please see Cobb Exchange for directions.

NOTE: Since we are holding the TestFest event, there won’t be a regular general meeting at the Colony Square location for August.

RSVP: You MUST RSVP to Eric Lee Stewart (ericleestewart@gmail.com) with your name and email address by 12pm noon on Wednesday, August 4th. We need this information in order to give you access to the location, setup your SVN account and get a headcount for pizza lunch.

The TestFest is a global 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 are invited to join the TestFest.

Aside from having an opportunity to help in improving the language itself, TestFest will also raffle off 10 elePHPants to submitters. Every submission (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 svn.php.net and a @php.net email address.

Date: Saturday, August 7th, 2010 —10am – 5pm

Location: Cobb Exchange

Equipment: Mac (Intel), PC or Linux laptop (not required but recommended). Those without a supported laptop will pair program with someone who does.

Internet Access: We will have internet access on-site.

Preparation: Full details are available at http://wiki.php.net/qa/testfest-2010. Please read the directions for setting up the test environment for your platform under “How Can I Build a PHP Testing Environment?” at the above wiki link and if you’re comfortable, go ahead and set it up before the event. If not, assistance will be available at the event. Also, please read the details and links under “How Do I Write PHPTs?” and check out the PHPT File Layout documentation. Finally, take a look at “What Should I Write PHPTs For?” to see options for finding out what you might want to test.

When: Thursday, July 1, 2010—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

Intro to PHP with Windows Azure

Presented by Glen Gordon

Windows Azure is the name for Microsoft’s Software + Services platform, an operating system in the cloud providing services for hosting, management, scalable storage with support for simple blobs, tables, and queues, as well as a management infrastructure for provisioning and geo-distribution of cloud-based services, and a development platform for the Azure Services layer.

In this session, learn about how Microsoft’s offering is different from any other cloud service provider out there, and how you can host your PHP applications and services on Windows Azure, as well as take advantage of the other Windows Azure offerings like storage and management.

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

When: Thursday, June 3, 2010—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

PHP Quality Assurance

Presented by Eric Lee Stewart

PHP is one of the most widely used languages on the web, powering billions of page views a day. Keeping PHP bug free and stable across a heterogenous environment is the QA Team’s top priority.

With over 70% of PHP’s code base covered by tests, PHP has a great track record for finding and removing bugs before they have a chance to make it into a release. But that still leaves 30% of the code base unaccounted for through automated testing.

This month’s presentation will focus on PHP’s QA Team and how they go about fulfilling their responsibilities. Topics include:

Synopsis of QA Team.
Synopsis of TestFest.
How to build a test environment.
How to run tests.
How to write tests.
How to find untested features of PHP.

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

When: Thursday, May 6, 2010—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

Crash and Burn! Load Testing and Optimizing PHP Apps with JMeter and Xdebug

Presented by Brian DeShong

Has your application gone from being a no-name site to playing in the big leagues? Are you now seeing bottlenecks that are a complete mystery to you? Or are you itching to load test your site, but don’t know how to go about it?

Well, have no fear: JMeter and Xdebug are coming to your rescue!

In this talk, Brian will demonstrate how you can use JMeter and Xdebug to measure PHP application performance while identifying bottlenecks. You will learn how to use Xdebug’s profiling data to identify and correct these bottlenecks.

In the course of our demonstration, we’ll also look at how you can use JMeter to load test your web application.

If you love network graphs, thrashing hard disks, and tons of simulated web site traffic, you won’t want to miss Atlanta PHP in May!

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

When: Thursday, April 1, 2010—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

Lean PHP Best Practices

Presented by Alan Pinstein

Alan and his colleagues have focused on making their applications easier to manage and deploy. This talk is a brief survey of the strategies and tools by his team to easily and repeatably manage the application of lean best-practices to their projects.

Topics covered include: Version Control, Unit Testing, UI Testing, automated project setup and deployment in a multistage environment, and more.

Tools covered include:
pearfarm
git
gitflow
mp
config-magic
fixturenator
phpunit
selenium
rake
cap

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

When: Thursday, March 4, 2010—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

Getting started with Zend_Cache

Presented by Joey Rivera

This presentation will explain what caching means, why it’s important to use, and demonstrate a few different examples. Zend_Cache will be used as a stand alone module, meaning the examples are not implementing the Zend Framework, so users not familiar with the framework can still follow along. The examples will cover different usages such as how to cache a variable, a recordset from a database query, and an entire page.

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

When: Thursday, February 4, 2010—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

“It’s Magick”

Presented by Robert Swarthout, Senior Technical Yahoo!

So you’re developing your web app and the need to manipulate images or generate a CAPTCHA has arisen. PHP has support for the GD, ImageMagick, and GraphicsMagick libraries, but each has its own specialty. Which one is best for your situation? This presentation demonstrates some use cases for each, as well as when it might not be the best choice. Unless your web app never touches an image, there will be something to learn for everyone.

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

WEATHER CANCELLATION: We’ve decided to call off this meeting, due to the forecast for sleet/snow in most of north Georgia and the inevitable traffic insanity this will cause. We will definitely have Joey present his talk on an alternate date to be determined. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Getting started with Zend_Cache

Presented by Joey Rivera

This presentation will explain what caching means, why it’s important to use, and demonstrate a few different examples. Zend_Cache will be used as a stand alone module, meaning the examples are not implementing the Zend Framework, so users not familiar with the framework can still follow along. The examples will cover different usages such as how to cache a variable, a recordset from a database query, and an entire page.

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

When: Thursday, December 10, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

Please take note that we will NOT be meeting on our usual first Thursday of the month in December. Instead, we are meeting on the SECOND Thursday (December 10th).

Quick Wins: Performance Tuning + 3rd Party Patches for MySQL (Morgan Tocker)

Presented by Morgan Tocker, world-renowned MySQL Expert at Percona, Inc.

Morgan Tocker is Director of Training at Percona where he provides world famous scaling advice to Web 2.0 and Fortune 100 clients. He is a regular presenter on PHP and MySQL, having spoken at conferences such as PHP Quebec, the MySQL Conference, PHP-Tek, PHP-works and International PHP Conference.

Prior to Percona, Morgan worked at MySQL AB (acquired by Sun Microsystems) as a Support Engineer and Technical Instructor teaching courses in Database Administration, High Availability and Performance Tuning.

PLEASE NOTE: YOU MUST RSVP TO ATTEND THIS EVENT. SPACE IS LIMITED.

Get a Free Pass to Morgan’s MySQL Workshop!

In addition to our meeting, Morgan will be in Atlanta to lead an intensive workshop that covers tuning MySQL when using the InnoDB and XtraDB storage engines. Sign up for the workshop before November 26 and receive a free copy of High Performance MySQL. Sign up to attend Performance Optimization for MySQL with InnoDB and XtraDB.

Percona has graciously provided a free pass to the Performance Optimization for MySQL with InnoDB and XtraDB workshop. We’re raffling off this pass to a single winner, and the time is short (contest ends November 24 at 11:59 PM EST), so register to win the workshop pass today! Go to http://contests.atlantaphp.org/ for details and to register to win the free pass.

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.