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!

Basically, the idea is to have a platform that enables those who participate in a school environment to share resources much more easily and to make it easier to find the relevant resources faster. Included in this would be a “homework journal” style system to allow the student to see exactly what they have to do and allow them to organise it more efficiently and with almost one-click access to very relevant resources chosen by the teacher to go along with that work.

This is a largish project and I don’t expect to get everything done in the week, however, my aims for the end of the week are:

The core of the application, which consists of:

• Login for school administrators, teachers and a single class based login.
• Linking and creation (uploading images, documents, PDFs etc..) of resources for teachers.
• The ability to see class assignments for students using the single class based login.

What I hope to do with the app in near future:

• Student logins so that students are presented with a fully customised dashboard that allows them to display everything that they have to do in their “homework journal”.
• Parent logins so that parents can review the student’s progress easily.
• (a slightly more distant near future I would love to see) a “marketplace” where teachers could swap resources they have created for free or for a fee.

I have yet to think of a name for this product, so I’d really love to hear any ideas people would have on that.

David and Eamon have given me advice from a technical and project / commercial perspective.

I’m using Zend Framework in the LAMP stack. I’ll update later in the week with progress.

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.

For example, in late 2009 both David and Helgi were invited by Microsoft to their head office in Redmond for a summit of 25 PHP developers from around the world. Over the course of a few days they were given an insight into Microsoft’s plans for Azure and PHP, amongst other things. You can read more about what they learned in Helgi’s blog post on the summit.

Overall, I think reaching out and engaging with different development communities is a smart move by Microsoft, as PHP and Ruby communities make up a large proportion of the international web app development workforce. I think it also lends Microsoft a bit more credibility in Open Source circles.

All that aside, Azure has a beefy infrastructure behind it. In the last two years Microsoft have built a number of half-billion dollar data centres around the world. I was lucky enough to see their Irish one up close. The place is HUGE, everything seemed to be designed with scale, sustainability and security in mind.

So, this month echolibre and Microsoft are bringing Josh Holmes to Dublin to talk directly to Irish developers about building and deploying web apps on the Azure platform. This free event takes place on Sunday 21st February at 19:30, in the Radisson Hotel on Golden Lane. You can book your place here.

This event is a good opportunity for anyone looking to get up and running with a cloud based development project. I’m sure the mix of Ruby and PHP people will probably lead to some interesting conversations afterwards

Finally, I’d just like to say that Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness.

This is an open invite to anyone who works on the web, be it as a designer or developer, a startup entrepreneur or in social media.

Our door is always open for coffee, wifi and shop-talk

We’re based here on Dame St., just drop me an email - eamon@echolibre.com

Even though there are others idea that have tried accomplishing the same goal as HipHop for PHP, I believe it is quite safe to assume that Facebook has a large enough user-base to produce code that is solid enough to run and can run well.

The announcement has been made on the Facebook blog earlier today, and tonight there is going to be the video tech talk that everybody can watch:

This evening we’re hosting a small group of developers to dive deeper into HipHop for PHP and will be streaming this tech talk live. Check back here around 7:30pm Pacific time if you’d like to watch.

A few questions come to mind even though we haven’t seen the code just yet. My main concern though is the one of buffer overflows and the security implications of turning PHP code into C++. As they say on the blog, it took nearly 18 months before having a relatively stable version and 3 developers. This is a very short lapse of time to develop a solution used by so many.

Another interest of mine related to this release is how does it compete with the likes of phc or roadsend php. If it does at all.

However I have noticed on their blog that Facebook has also developed HPHPi which seems to let you use HipHop but without having to actually compile your code before running it (The concept seems a bit like APC’s stat on and off switch from the few lines of description), which seems like a quite interesting idea for the development stages.

What is Funconf?

It’s an unusual conference, presented by myself, Eamon Leonard, and my friend Paul Campbell.

Funconf takes place on Saturday 24th April, 2010.

It was inspired by JSconf.eu, an amazing JavaScript conference we both attended in Berlin last November, and by StartupCrawl an event Paul attended in San Francisco also in November.

Funconf is for anyone who designs, develops or works on the web and loves what they do.

It’s a very small conference, with room for only 70 people.

Funconf is about encouraging conversation between conference goers and speakers on subjects they’re passionate about.

It’s a moving conference and will start and end in Dublin, with some stops along the way.

It will take place on two specially converted buses, where the seating faces into the aisle, bringing an intimate (or at least interesting) feel  to the event, and encourage conversation.

We hope it will be a conference that people enjoy and remember.

It will feature some really cool speakers, who will tell us about their experiences with working on fun stuff for the web

• Joe Hewitt - creator of Firebug and Facebook’s iPhone App
• Matthew Inman - creator of The Oatmeal
• Marshall Kirkpatrick - of ReadWriteWeb
• Michael Lopp - author of Managing Humans, aka Rands (in Repose)
• Jonathan Siegel - seed founder of RightScale, founder of ELC Technologies
• Joe Stump - co-founder of SimpleGeo, ex lead dev Digg

Funconf is a simple idea; it does what it says on the tin… we want it to be fun.

The latest information on Funconf can be found on funconf.com and by following @funconf.

A limited number of early bird tickets are on sale now - http://funconf.eventbrite.com/