Pragmatism in the real world

I'm speaking at ZenCon 2009!

I'm speaking at ZendCon 2009 this year! I'm doing a tutorial session called Zend Framework Certification Bootcamp where I'll be highlighting key sections of Zend Framework that you'll need to know in order to pass the the ZFCE exam. I'm also presenting a standard session, Getting a website out of the door (aka Managing a website project) which will be a non-code talk about the realities of project management in a small web development company… continue reading.

Some notes on Zend Server CE for Mac OS X

I've installed Zend Server CE on my Mac to see where it's got to and it's looking quite usable. The installation puts everything into the usr/local/zend directory which is fairly well laid out so that you can find what you are looking for. There's also a a nice admin system at http://localhost:10081 which allows you to restart PHP, view phpinfo(), configure extensions and php.ini. There's also a phpMyAdmin to help administer the bundled MySQL server.… continue reading.

DPC '09

The Dutch PHP Conference is over and so it's time to write a short wrap-up. Day 1 The conference was opened by a cool animated video and then Cal Evans welcomed us, with a nice short speech. The keynote was given by Andrei Zmievski of Digg. Andrei is a core devloper and gave an interesting overview of what we can expect to see next in PHP. I then listened to Paul Reinheimer talk about some… continue reading.

WinPHP wrap-up thoughts

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. The WinPHP challenge come come to an end and I'm fairly happy with how SuccesSQL has come. I wish I had realised exactly how little time I had in May though. Somehow I managed to forget that we had three… continue reading.

SuccesSQL demo online

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. The WinPHP challenge comes to an end around now, so I've put up a demo installation of SuccesSQL (v0.01!) at http://test.successql.org. The test site takes a lot longer to display the first page than version running in my VM and… continue reading.

Metadata from Zend_Db_Table_Abstract

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I finally found some more time to work on SuccesSQL and can now display table structure information: Zend_Db_Table provides all this information directly which is quite useful, however the intended use-case for Zend_Db_Table is that you extend Zend_Db_Table_Abstract for each… continue reading.

Retrieving a list of databases from SQL Server

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I need to get a list of databases from SQL Server for the currently logged in user. Initially, I found a built in function sp_databases. This looked promising, until I discovered that it didn't work for my user. I'm pretty… continue reading.

SQL Server troubles

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I'm now at the stage where I'm writing code and came across an error: Message: 2 [Microsoft][SQL Native Client] Named Pipes Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server [2]. That seemed a little odd, so I fired up… continue reading.

Zend Framework URL Rewriting in IIS7

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. To get my Zend Framework Tutorial working with my IIS7 & MS SQL server set up, I needed two things: A Sqlsrv adapter for Zend Framework. A replacement Apache's mod_rewrite module. I've already covered the Sqlsrv adapter, so let's look… continue reading.

Zend Framework connection to SQL Server using SqlSrv

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb. I haven't managed to get much time on the challenge this week as I had hoped. Both my sons' birthday parties have taken place along with one son's birthday (the other's is tomorrow). It turns out that fellow challenger Juozas… continue reading.