This past weekend we went along to Dublin’s OSS BarCamp. There were some really great talks, Stuart Langridge’s Javascript presentation was a highlight. Jaime Hemmett’s talk on using Git for version control was useful and informative. Paul Biggar’s talk on PHC, the Open Source PHP Compiler, was thought provoking and certainly caused a few grumbles from PHP guys like myself in the audience ;). JD and myself managed to catch up with him after and talk through some of his ideas over a drink. (more…)

Just a quick post to remind the Irish and Dublin web community that OSS Bar Camp is running this coming Saturday 28th March, in DIT Kevin Street. (more…)

Peter Bregman recently posted on Harvard Business blog about
“Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy”.

It’s a great post, full of common-sense-optimism, that makes a change from the doom-and-gloom we’ve all seen of late. He talks about why decision makers are moving away form bigger companies as their service provider to smaller, more flexible companies. He argues that ultimately this comes down to trust between people, not brands:

Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth.
Trust is the new competitive advantage.

(more…)

I wanted to write a post that shows a few different ways to customise Zend Frameworks routing when you’re using their MVC implementation. Most of this is covered in the documentation, but it can be a little difficult to dig out.

The standard routing setup of Zend matches URLs like these:

1
2

www.example.com/module/controller/action/var1/value1/var2/value2
www.example.com/controller/action/var1/value1/var2/value2

You set your controller directories in your bootstrap with something like:

1
2

$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$front->setControllerDirectory(array('default'=>'../controllers', 'bar'=>'../modules/bar', 'foo'=>'../modules/foo'));

For the first component of the path Zend will first look for a matching module, if none is found it will look for a matching controller. The module name ‘default’ is important here; it represents (surprisingly) the default controllers. So these are the ones when there’s no matching module in the URL.
(more…)

This is an important post. We believe in freedom of speech and expression online, and abhor any attempts at censoring or curtailing a user’s online experience on an ISP or Government level.

Recently, IRMA, the Irish Recorded Music Association, has taken the somewhat heavy-handed approach of sending a letter threatening legal action to Irish ISPs and even Irish hosting providers.

A copy of the letter [PDF] was made available by Michele Neylon of Blacknight (our hosting provider).

This approach by IRMA is shortsighted, thugish, and uneducated. They clearly don’t understand the Internet. If they did they’d be embracing file sharing technologies such as Bit Torrent and considering ideas put forward by the EFF and European Green Party Free Alliance.

A group of concerned Irish Internet users have come together to raise awareness of this issue. We are proud to stand beside Blackout Ireland and we encourage you to do the same. Even if you only use the Internet to check email and facebook, you should be deeply concerned about this.

Setting a precedent whereby your access to websites or online services can be curtailed without due process is what we should all be concerned about, Irish or not.

Go to Blackout Ireland now, see how you can help.

The other company we collaborate with on short.ie has released a private beta of a new application a short while ago. The web application is basically a business collaboration tool that allows someone to keep a consistent tracking over projects and clients, management of tasks, management of documents (online document manager) and much more.

I would seriously recommend people (managers, developers, etc) to look at it and register for the BETA version because having been granted access to test and give feedback, we, as private beta testers, found it really nice, insightful and simple to use.

This web app has a huge potential (internationally) and is developed following a solid architecture. Being strong PEAR contributors we are of course happy to take a look at what helped the footprintapp.com team achieve such a great product. So I went ahead and asked a few questions to Iarfhlaith Kelly from webstrong.

Q: How long have you been using PEAR?
A: I dabbled with a few of the PEAR packages back in college (2001-2005). Mostly I used the database abstraction packages like DB and MDB2. It was great to use on object oriented approach to interact with a database. After college though, from 2005 onwards, I ventured much deeper into the PEAR packages because as a freelance developer I was getting a lot more requests from clients.

Q: How does PEAR help you in your daily development life?
A: Using PEAR has greatly reduced the amount of code I’ve needed to write on the ‘heavy lifting’ areas of web development. This lets me focus on the flow of the system and spend more time building features that make my app unique, rather then re-inventing the wheel on some of the more common features often needed in most modern web apps.

Also, because of PEAR’s command line interface for installing and updating packages (both locally and remotely) it has made maintaining the code packages a lot easier then if I had to download and upgrade each one manually. This saves a lot of time during system upgrades.

Q: What do you use it for (packages you use)
A: Well, like I mentioned before I started off by using DB and MDB2 in college, but once I started using PEAR on client projects I quickly learned about the XML parsing libraries, HTTP requests, MS Excel generation, encryption, authentication, and email. I used a number of key PEAR libraries without which I would still be building it today. These were:

* Auth_HTTP for HTTP based authentication
* MDB2 for database abstraction

The system also communicates with a number of other web services, such as Amazon’s S3 service and authentication services via the OpenID format. To communicate with these, I use:

* XML_Parser for processing the returned information
* HTTP_Request for sending commands and data to the web services

Because of the standard approach to documentation across all PEAR for these packages allowed me to hit the ground running on new packages.

This is yet another great experience by PEAR users and we are glad to be helping and best of luck to webstrong and footprintapp for the future!

Nope. Just like our man Elvis, we don’t. We’re going to Soho instead*. This week our homepage got a much needed facelift, and with it comes a new address. We now have a base of operations in Soho, London to compliment our Dublin location.

Our new office can be found at 19 Greek Street (W1D 4DT), which currently houses a few other startups (Hmmm….wondering should it be renamed Geek Street?)  - all thanks to Irish entrepreneur Paul Walsh. But some space in an office does not a company branch make. So, we’re delighted to welcome to echolibre Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson.

Helgi comes with the right amount of PHP kickassness that we expect at echolibre; Helgi wirtes for PHP | architect magazine, and being a member of the PHP PEAR Group also rocks. Helgi will be heading up R&D and working with our UK clients, so we’re excited to see what happens in the next few months. We are also looking forward to connecting with the vibrant PHP and Open Source communities in London.

Today, myself and David are off to London for a bunch of meetings, and to meet the rest of the dudes at 19 Greek St.

If you’re a UK based startup and you need a fresh injection of PHP talent to your web app or development team, get in touch on freedom@echolibre.com. If you want to contact me directly, you can skype me on eamon.leonard.

*Yes, any excuse to play some Elvis Costello.