For our April presentation, Lonnie Olson presented on SQLite. He covered basic features, version differences, command-line access, SQL features, datatypes, and of course PHP support in it’s different incarnations. View the slides or download the entire presentation with code and database examples.
For our March meeting, Ray presented on new AJAX tools for Eclipse. We also covered installing, configuring, and optimizing Eclipse for PHP development and versioning.
Mac Newbold presented on PHP 404 handler scripts. “Running PHP with Apache has some definite advantages. One that I use frequently is using a PHP script as the 404 document that apache uses when a page can’t be found. You can use it for many things. PHP.net uses it to run a site search, to try and find the page you were looking for. You can use it to create ‘virtual’ URLs, where one script handles requests for many different URLs and hands back dynamic content based on the page name. You can even combine it with things like GD to make dynamic images that are created on the fly for each URL.”
For January’s presentation, Richard K. Miller presented on model-view-controller (MVC) frameworks. MVC framework Ruby on Rails has received a lot of attention in the past year for making web app development easier and more enjoyable. Several similar frameworks are available for PHP. Special guest John Peterson of MyTechSupport.com, the creators of a PHP framework called PHP on Trax also presented. PHP on Trax was used to rapidly develop KatrinaHousing.org, a highly trafficked website that helped hurricane victims find housing.
For our December meeting, Victor Villa presented on Open Laszlo, a client-side framework for Rich Web Applications (AJAX-like stuff) that is compatible with PHP.
For our November meeting, Mac Newbold presented on arrays. A fun-filled evening of exciting adventures was had with everyone’s favorite PHP data type. We covered both lists and associative arrays, the differences between them, and their respective operators and functions. We demonstrated how to use them in various loop constructs, and a million and one ways to sort your arrays. We showed everyone how to use arrays in some of the other standard PHP functions, like the string functions. And finally, we covered how to use arrays to make advanced data structures, like multi-dimentional arrays, lists of lists, and “structs” or mock objects.
For our September meeting, PHP programmer and web services evangelist for Amazon.com Jeff Barr presented. As Web Services Evangelist for Amazon.com, Jeff Barr focuses on creating developer awareness for the Amazon software platform. He has a longstanding interest in Web services and programmatic information interchange. Jeff has held development and management positions at KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, and Microsoft, and was a co-founder of Visix Software. Jeff’s interests include collecting and organizing news feeds using his site, www.syndic8.com . He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the American University and has donegraduate work in Computer Science at the George Washington University.
Our 4th official Phlyte meeting will be held on Thursday, July 14, 2005, at the usual location (Code Greene, 1440 S Foothill Dr, SLC, in Foothill Village, above Blockbuster). Perhaps the most interesting agenda item is the logo contest. We’ve had a lot of great submissions, and we’ll be showing them in the meeting, and taking a vote. It may finalize things, or just get us a short list of finalists, depending how it goes. We’re planning on discussing the wiki and other infrastructure items, so we can start writing down all of our plans and decisions where everyone can see them. We’ll also be discussing the planned directory structure and file layout. And then we’ll write some code. Depending who is there, we may discuss database abstraction or the python port.
This entry will be updated with links to notes or other relevant documentation, along with any audio recording that may be produced.
Our third official Phlyte meting will be held on Thursday, June 30th, at the usual Salt Lake City location at Code Greene in Foothill Village. Everyone interested in the project is encouraged to attend.
The goal is to continue to make the important decisions and to get started actually writing some code this week. We’d like to cover directory structure for the site, coding style standards, and some basic guidelines for what code belongs in which files.
After the meeting is over, this article will be updated with links to an audio recording, if we can get one, and a meeting report with a summary of the decisions we made. Don’t forget to use the #phlyte IRC channel and the Phlyte mailing list, too.
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