PHPTek 2010, FRAPI release party!

Posted by David in PHP, frapi
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 12:13

Last week Helgi and I had the humongous chance and honour to fly to the “windy city” to PHP Tek 2010. For a change however, the purpose of this trip was not to give a talk at #tekx but to announce the open source release of a little something we’ve been cooking up for a while.

After flying from Dublin (me) and London (Helgi) finally reached Chicago and met up with the PHP Tek crowd. After discussing details with Marco Tabini, we organized a little event to announce our long awaited RESTful API Framework FRAPI.

Read on…

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Frapi API Tester

Posted by David in frapi
Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 17:04

Lately I’ve noticed that more and more service seem to include API testing in their list of services. For instance this week at Chirp, Twitter announced their development console available on dev.twitter.com which gives you the ability to test the API without really having to write any code just yet.

This feature is also well known for people using Hurl which is a website that you can use to make HTTP requests and test your API responses. Also on OSX there’s the HTTP Client Tool which does more or less the same as the ones above.

Another company that announced this feature this week was Apigee:

Use the API Console to review an API’s structure, experiment with the endpoint, and review the request and response messages. We’re launching with support for Twitter APIs and are adding more soon

Apigee is basically an analytics tool for your API. It allows you to track requests, users, errors, etc. So for them, implementing the API tester is something that makes sense as they provide statistics for you API, if you notice an error, you should be able to just test the API call and see if you can reproduce from within Apigee.

Read on…

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Go the right way with WonderProxy

Posted by David in PEAR
Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 17:11

As the web grows, we developers have to write applications that are not location centric but rather develop applications that can be viewed by anyone around the world. Any developer that had to write such software probably has used GeoIP and has encountered issues when the time came to test their application. The only real way to test your application, without setting up servers around the world, is to assume that your code works and that the GeoIP database is working correctly.

Read on…

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Switzerland, Microsoft and the JumpInCamp!

Posted by David in Azure, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, Open Source, PEAR, PHP
Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 16:13

As some of you may know from the tweets I’ve been posting for nearly 3 weeks now, I was invited to attend the very first edition of the JumpInCamp organized by Microsoft in April 2010.

The goal of this camp was to get the European PHP community leaders together and learn about the new products and new ideas Microsoft are working on. For those of you who read about the Microsoft web developer summit that took place in Redmond in December 2009 you might think it was the same thing however you would be utterly wrong.

While the camp in Redmond was very informative and we are learnt a great deal of new features coming up with Microsoft, it was vastly different than the JumpinCamp in Zurich where the focus of the camp was to get the developers to interact with the actual Microsoft developers instead of only learning about new features. The point of the JumpinCamp was to get your hands dirty in code so we all got a few hours of lectures, then sat down and worked on either implementing those solutions into our respective Open Source projects or even discussed and raised concerns we might have regarding some of their products.

I thought it might be nice to share some of the projects I’ve started working on while I was over there and what I had interests in:
Read on…

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The Capsule CRM API and PHP

Posted by David in API, PEAR, PHP
Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 15:02

Introduction

At echolibre we’ve been trying to organize our sales and customer relationship in a more efficient way as the company customer base is getting larger and larger. That’s natural process for any growing company. In order to help us organize how we do everything related to customers (Sales, Leads, Relationships, etc) we are giving Capsule CRM a good run.

Capsule CRM is basically a nice CRM tool that takes the boring part out of CRM’ing. Moreover (And the whole reason of this blog post), it has an API and as you all know, we LOVE APIs.

Therefore, we realized that we needed to integrate Capsule with some online services we have and so we built a PHP wrapper for their API to give developers the ability to place requests and use the web service as they wish using PHP

Services_Capsule is now being proposed to PEAR however you can already get the code from http://github.com/davidcoallier/Services_Capsule and start using it. The lack of end-user documentation may be the greatest lack in the package right now so I figured it might be good to post a few usage examples in a post.

Read on…

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Heard about the JumpInCamp?

Posted by David in Cloud Computing, Microsoft, echolibre
Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 02:09

As many of you know, Helgi Thormar and I have been exchanging with Microsoft for a while now trying to give what we can in order to help them improve their open source approaches and ideas.

Last summer we were invited to Seattle for the Microsoft Web Developer Summit (Which was a blast thanks to Microsoft) and as soon as we came back to Europe, I got a call from Yuri from Microsoft who wanted to organize some kind of workshop/camp/developer summit for European developers and Microsoft altogether. Read on…

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Guest Post: Ben Chapman’s week of code (Part II)

Posted by Eamon in PHP, echolibre
Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 18:25

This is an UPDATE post by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who has been with us for the past week on work experience. (Original post here)

Well, I’ve been working on my project for the week and here’s the update that you were promised! (And stick with the post, there’s a live demo!) I haven’t gotten as far as I had hoped but I have learnt a lot whilst here. See the previous post for more on that and what I had planned.

Read on…

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Guest Post: Ben Chapman’s week of code

Posted by Eamon in PHP, Zend Framework, community, echolibre, industry, leadership
Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 17:42

This post is by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who is with us for a week on work experience.

Hello! The guys here at echolibre thought that making a web app would be the best way for me to experience working in this industry, so I am. The idea that I’ve come up with and started this week is, as Eamon put it, a document management system for schools, teachers & students.  Here’s just a quick overview of what I want to do with the project and I’d love to hear what you think about it or any ideas you have — so if you want to, just throw me a comment below! Read on…

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CouchDB, Custom Erlang Map Functions

Posted by David in couchdb
Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 15:49

Some of you know we are working with CouchDB quite intensively here at echolibre, and so I figured we might as well share a few of our notes, hickups, ideas, implementations, etc. So I  decided to make a series of short post on CouchDB (>= 0.10.0) and I would like to start with writing your first CouchDB view in Erlang.

Obviously, you have to make sure that you enabled native Erlang views. Make sure to read on how to enabled your Erlang views on the CouchDB wiki

Read on…

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Event: Josh Holmes talks PHP, Ruby & Azure

Posted by Eamon in Azure, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, PHP, community, industry
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 20:01

Note: This post is for PHP and Ruby Developers based in or near Dublin, Ireland.

There’s no denying that Cloud Computing has been a particularly hot space for the last year. I’m sure many of you have given Amazon Web Services (Infrastructure as a Service) and Google App Engine (Platform as a Service) a go by now, if not actually using them to run software of your own making.

In the last year the buzz from Microsoft on their Azure offering has been gradually getting louder, to the point where they are now rolling it out. Microsoft’s proposition is interesting as, in simple terms, it’s a like a mix between the IaaS and PaaS models that are pursued by Amazon and Google.  As part of their drive to let developers know about Azure, Microsoft have been reaching out to development communities that would traditionally be non-Microsoft centric — in particular PHP and Ruby. Read on…

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