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.

After having a phone chat and a few weeks planning, Yuri came back to me with an invite to the JumpIn! camp which is, in Microsoft’s words:

The JumpInCamp is designed primarily for open-source application developers who are interested in increasing their skills in a range of specific areas. Here they will be able to experiment with ways of combining open-source technologies with Microsoft products to optimize applications

Obviously there’s a tad too much marketing in there, however the point is that Microsoft is inviting 25 developers from across Europe to exchange and learn about, sorry to say, but AWESUMSAUCE things like Azure and a bunch of other cool features Microsoft has been working on.

So listen to me now European web developers, go to http://jumpincamp.com/, signup, set your application and join Helgi, me and a bunch of other open source enthusiasts in Zurich in April for a great craíc and to meet with some interesting people

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.

Monday
I sat down with Eamon and planned out exactly what the app would do, the users and roles, and what out of that I could get done in the week. I spent the remainder of the day planning each of the “actions”, “roles” and “resources” my app would have so that I could write the app much better and understand what would be going on in it. On that day I really got a sense of object-oriented programming that I hadn’t before, mostly thanks to David and Helgi for helping me with it and finding my feet with Zend Framework and understanding the concepts behind OOP.

Tuesday
I got started with the code. Much of this day was taken up with looking up various things in the Zend documentation and trying to understand how it worked. Despite the ton of reading I had to do to find out how to make Zend do what I wanted I got a lot of the core features for the model done like adding, viewing and listing resources. The main thing I learnt was how to use Zend_Db which is a critical component to most apps using Zend since the database contains all that info!

Wednesday
I coded the remainder of the models and started on creating the interfaces and forms. The theme I was lucky to get off  ThemeForest so I just dropped in the default code from Zend_Layout and that was that. Then I learnt that you really should add users before models because I had one fun time trying to add it in retrospectively using Zend_Auth and Zend_Acl.

Thursday
I just finished the journal and resource components and rounded them off. I learnt that you really should make sure your revision control is working before you screw up your code by deleting an entire library that you have no backup of. (Doh!)

Friday
Today, I finished the prototype of the app, all the components started behaving and working together. I cleaned up the user system so the Zend_Acl worked to the best of it’s potential and rewrote the library that had I deleted by accident on Thursday. I learnt that when under pressure I code faster and that you should really, really plan out and code the user system first before any other components. Also libraries are better the second time you code them!

Here’s some screenshots and a live demo for you to try out! I still have not decided on a name, so I’m just going with Project X for now

You can play around with what I’ve been working on here: http://projectx.teachmetothink.com/

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.

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.

Startups

The year started off well enough. We’d just finished a two month project for Mobivox, a Canadian VoIP startup. We’d been building their billing system and integrating it with their VoIP system since our first day of trading in October. The project went well, and Mobivox was later sold to Sabse Technologies, a company founded by Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmail’s Co-Founders.

In early January we decided to shake up our business model a bit. We’d previously taken the route of web developers / PHP guns for hire. Ireland is a pretty small market, and we found that sufficiently differentiating ourselves from all the other web developers in the country to be no easy task. Given the broadness of the term itself, we decided to focus on our strengths on those that need them the most: startups. We also decided that in order to do this, we’d need some extra brains.

David had been working in the Open Source community for number of years, spending a lot of time working on PHP and PEAR. Through PEAR he met Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, and was convinced he’d make a great addition to our team. In January, I met with Helgi on Skype and we talked through the possibilities.

By St. Patrick’s Day, Helgi was working with echolibre. This would mark the end of a difficult quarter for most small Irish businesses. It seemed that many businesses were experiencing difficulty in collecting payment. This was due to a wider knock-on effect whereby everyone seemed to be waiting for invoices to be paid, and could not themselves settle creditors invoices. We too experienced difficulties in this area, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, eh?

In April, one of our clients appeared on Dragon’s Den with an app we had built for them called RentCollectors. It’s a service that allows landlords to outsource and monitor the collection of rent. RentCollectors has collected almost €2M in thirteen months, not bad for a difficult economic period.

In April, we started working on VidCollege, an app we built in a week. VidCollege was co-founded by Sean Fee, himself featured on Dragon’s Den UK for his other venture, iFoods / Look And Taste. VidCollege is an web based service that gives third level institutions the ability to provide video access to courses and materials, and offer full accreditation.

The launch of VidCollege was put on hold by Sean and his co-founders, while they decided to focus on the development of a sister web app, called VidSchool. This would be a service that creates a new market place for teachers to connect with students seeking extra tuition. This was a two month build, and we worked hard on it over the summer. We were delighted to see it being launched and showcased at TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco in September.

In May, Helgi was made a partner in our company, bringing to four the number of co-owners in the company.

In June we met with Dave McAvinue of Pixel Lab, to talk about their new venture, Tender 3D. He and his team have been supplying high-end 3D models to film, tv, design and engineering sectors over the last number of years and they spotted an opportunity for a web app that effectively created a new market place for 3D work. Tender 3D connects potential buyers with suppliers of 3D animations, models and graphics. It’s also a project management tool that ties in with the buying process. Tender 3D is supported by Enterprise Ireland, and have a great team behind it. Tender3D will be going into beta shortly, and has already received international attention from the 3D community.

In June we also met with Joe Drumgoole, to explore an idea he had for controlling the cost of cloud computing. Initially we considered developing this as a side project in our spare time. Given the activity in the cloud computing space in the previous 12 months (and knowing that despite the best of intentions, “spare time projects” tend to be slow to develop), we decided to try to secure angel investment. Ray Nolan, co-founder of Hostelworld and serial technology investor stepped in, and CloudSplit was born.

CloudSplit is a huge deal for us, and something we’re very proud to be working on. On a technical level the work has been challenging but fun, and we’ve made great strides with the software since we started development in August. In September myself and Joe travelled to TechCrunch 50 to showcase the service and to meet what would become our fledgling user base. CloudSplit is aimed at users of cloud computing, platform-as-a-service offerings such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It allows them to track the cost of their cloud infrastructure in real-time. CloudSplit has been covered by tech blogs like TechCrunch, Technorati and Digital Beat, as well as the Irish Times. In December Joe presented CloudSplit to a live audience of 1,500 and an live streaming audience of 100k at LeWeb, Europe’s largest web conference.

On a personal note, developing the software behind the only two Irish companies to appear at TechCrunch50 was a massive achievement for our team, something that we’re very proud of. Working with two entrepreneurs like Sean Fee and Joe Drumgoole has been a real highlight of the last 12 months.

In August we had two new additions to our team. Noah Slater, a Debian packager, well known contributor to Open Source projects such as Apache Couch DB and all-round Python and PHP rockstar, brought his considerable skill and experience in software development to help with the build of Tender 3D and CloudSplit. David Doran, an excellent frontend and PHP developer also came on board and has been working hard on Tender 3D and FRAPI.

echolibre is a distributed company — our team is spread across Dublin, Cork, London and York. While Helgi and David visit Dublin regularly, and I visit London now and then, it’s not often that we all find ourselves in the same location. For our company Christmas party, however, all six of us met in Dublin, and for me this was the real highlight of 2009.

Conferences

Helgi, David and myself put in a good number of appearances throughout 2009 at national and international conferences. David talked about APIs at the first Open Source Software Barcamp in Dublin, in March. OSS Barcamp is made possible by the hard work of Laura Czajkowski and a team of volunteers, and we’re proud to be a sponsor of each event.

Between May and October Helgi was on the conference trail *a lot*.  He gave talks and held workshops at PHP Tek’09 Chicago in May, Dutch PHP Conference Amsterdam in June, O’Reilly OSCON San Jose in July, Epicentre Dublin in August and ZendCon San Jose in October. He also spoke at some smaller events such as PHP London in October.

In October, I spoke about best practices and current trends in Web Development and Startups at Refresh Dublin, part of the Refreshing Cities movement.

Both Microsoft Ireland and Microsoft UK asked us to attend their Web Developer Summit in December, which was held in their headquarters in Redmond, WA. This was an invite only event, limited to 25 attendees, with David and Helgi representing echolibre. Helgi wrote a post a few weeks ago that covered the topics that were discussed. Microsoft have been working hard to make inroads into traditionally non-MS oriented communities such as PHP, in an effort to enhance the performance of their web server (IIS) and cloud (Azure) offerings. From a PHP perspective, any steps taken by Microsoft to engage with the community, to improve performance, reliability and security, and to enhance user experience, is to be applauded.

Open Source Projects

Throughout 2009 we worked hard on our first self-sponsored Open Source prject, FRAPI. We wanted to build a framework that would be useful for creating APIs, easy to use, and free to the community. We started work on FRAPI early in the year, and by August it was being used in the builds of both CloudSplit and Tender3D. We’re finalising documentation at the moment, as we want to make sure the widest possible audience can use it from an early stage. For now, you can see a screen cast of how to build an API in five minutes using FRAPI on www.getfrapi.com.

We continued to support PHP and PEAR by making various contributions through code and documentation throughout 2009. We also lent a hand and some code to the Apache Sponsored CouchDB and the Adobe award winning Twitter client, Spaz.

Final Thoughts

One of the things that stood out to me in 2009 was the strength of the web and Open Source communities in Ireland and around the world. Through the conferences we attended, the various meetups and tech events, and through the likes of Twitter and blogs, it was made clear to us that there is real community support out there for anyone willing to engage and give something back. If there was one thing we would encourage anyone reading this to do, it’s to follow your passion and get involved. So far, this has worked well for us; we’ve had a year of ups and downs, but the one thing that has always been constant is the community.

Here’s to 2010

What is WDS? In short, it’s a summit where Microsoft invites a selective few (roughly 25 people) from the PHP community, during which they basically ask the attendees questions, show case a few new features to get feedback on and utilize the time to help figure out how Microsoft can better serve the PHP community at large. These people tend to be various leaders of either community sites or big open source projects and will thus have a lot of insight into how people use their software on Microsoft platforms and the problems they have.

David Strauss from Drupal was kind enough to compile a Twitter list of the people attending, anyway most of them: http://twitter.com/DavidStrauss/mswds09 this includes various Microsoft people attending.

Before anyone starts going crazy over the fact they think Microsoft are “evil” and all that non-sense, well just don’t go there, I have covered this before in my other WDS wrap ups and so have other people!  Microsoft is trying to work with us to make it a better platform to work with, for everyone.  This includes making PHP faster, more stable and secure on Windows, among other things.
I think that’s a great thing that a big company like that is prepared to listen to the community and work with them - And as such we should respect them and their intention, they have yet to show any “bad” behavior.  I hope that silences the trolls

The event spanned 1st of Dec till 3rd Dec with a pre event meal on the 30th of Nov.  My flight to the event took grand total of 13 hours flying! and so I barely managed to get to the event meal on the 30th to catch up with friends and have some very good food - During which I got the news that David got stuck in New York for the night and would be effectively be missing the first day of talks, so first casualty of the conference and it hadn’t even started!

Before I continue on listing up some of the sessions and my impression of them etc.  A bit of a warning beforehand.
Some sessions caught my attention more than others, others I couldn’t attend since I was out in the hallway having very useful discussions with various Microsoft employees and so on, just a small disclaimer.
Ben Ramsey made excellent notes, as always, which can be found here: http://tools.benramsey.com/dokuwiki/conferences:mswd09
So I will have varying degree of depth, if any, on session. Also, I will point out bits I did not like about a particular subject as there is no point in praising things I don’t agree with

OSTC - What are they doing with PHP

The first session of the day was given by Garrett Serrack, a Microsoft employee and one of the contributor to recent PHP Windows improvements. This talk was on application installation workflow on Windows vs. Linux and how that affects PHP and indeed other open source projects.
The talk was very unbias side by side comparison, in fact if anything Linux was touted at better at this.

He went over things like how Linux has a good concept of shared libraries, dependency control, easy installation / upgrade process and many other things while Windows application usually have to bundle their dependencies, often are horribly out of date but at the same time pointed out that many applications on Windows will in reality trick itself into thinking it’s running on Linux (multi platform applications) and thus miss out on very good compiling tools, WinQual (error reporting tool) and many other things (see Ben notes).

With the previous things in mind Garrett introduced us to some very interesting work that he’s been heading up internally at OSTC / Microsoft that focuses on making it easier for applications, and specifically open source, to compile and build on windows.  This work is in the pipeline to be released to the general public, depending on some agreements from higher ups but basically what this tool is suppose to do is do scanning on the source code and figure out dependencies and so on.  Garrett drew up some flow of this new project / tool which can be seen on Ben Ramsey’s Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benandliz/4150127011/ (whiteboard version) and a proper UML can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/benandliz/4151335578/

This is a tool I’m very much looking forward to see come to fruition as it will remove the bus factor for building PHP Windows releases (about 3 people in the world know how to do it properly) in addition to the benefits it will have for other projects!
A very good kickoff session and very much reflects great work MS has been doing in various areas.

IIS & Web Platform Installer & WinCache & PHP + Windows

Next up was a talk titled “The Next Generation of the IIS Web Server & Windows Optimization for PHP” and was presented by Mai-lan the IIS product manager but since she went all over the place and touched on various things that came up in other talks, I will simply join this all into one.

Mai-lan took us on a ride to explain why IIS is the awesomest! While admittedly it was a bit of a marketing spiel at one point I do think it was a good talk, for the people that didn’t get the same talk last year from another PM

However IIS7 has gained a lot of nice little features since last years WDS and others simply had to be brought up again to reminds us.

Web Extensions

Things such as what is the future for IIS and Windows Server, the various Web Extensions for IIS (WebDAV, SEO, smooth streaming and so on) - yeah I know, IIS is extensible, took me by a surprise - That’s new to me and quite exciting to hear!

• Extension repository: http://iis.net/extensions/
• Extension API documentation: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/347/developing-on-iis-70/

IIS is looking really promising to me and is the main pillar in the Web Stack that Microsoft is trying to build up and thus very important to keep an eye on if you aren’t using it already.

Rewrite Rules

The Rewrite Rule extension for IIS is always something I am very excited about - You know mod_rewrite for apache - IIS has a similar functionality, there is even a mod_rewrite to IIS Rewrite Rule conversion app floating around, yay!
RuslanY later came on an schooled on this and showed us the path - This was very exiting for me since I still remember the time when I worked on an open source CMS and we were trying to support IIS 6 and 5, no rewrite rules and a lot of voodoo magic, but no more with IIS7!

Smooth Streaming

Smooth streaming is very interesting, most people might be more familiar with it when they are being shown Silverlight but behind the scenes it’s IIS Media Services that’s handling a good deal of it.  Mark Brown showed us a demo of what it really is, this demo I had seen a few times before but is always damn impressive.  The whole thing here is that Silverlight + IIS figure out what your bandwidth can deal with and adjust the streaming of the video according to that, this is achieved by reducing the quality of the video file you are getting.
I can’t wait to see it be more widespread!  I’m told Netflix users Silverlight and exactly that feature

SEO toolkit

Mark went ahead to show off the SEO toolkit, this thing I was not so impressed with. Seemed like any other crawler which I could write custom queries for, find dead links, missing title tags, alt tags etc but all for their own I guess I would probably have to use it a bit by hand to see any real value in it.  So for now I’m declaring SEO Toolkit to be a bit useless.

WinCache

RuslanY came on talked about WinCache, what it does for us (opcode cache, FS cache, relative path cache) and showed a few demos.  Always good to see speed improvements like that reach PHP users on Windows and it works nicely with IIS5 to 7+

• WinCache is in PECL: http://pecl.php.net/package/wincache
• WinCache documentation in PHP manual: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/book.wincache.php

PHP on Windows - The last 12 months

Mai-lan touched on what has happened to PHP on Windows in the last couple of months as it was under her group now.
On the PHP core it self they had helped fix up a lot of the small nit gritty things where the Windows behavior differed from other platforms or simply didn’t work.  A lot of work had gone into making PHP stable and fast on Windows, on par with Linux, if not faster and a great deal of more documentation for PHP on Windows.
A big thing now is that WinCache (as you can see above) is published on PECL and various Microsoft employees are now allowed to contributed directly to APC, PHP Core and more - No more backdoor patch handing of going on.

They also have helped various open source projects work better on IIS, using proper rewrite rules among other things.
Also a part of their group was to get a lot of the big PHP OSS apps to start publishing to the Web App Gallery, which the Web Platform Installer pulls from.

Web Platform Installer (WebPI)

This one was probably one of the more discussed product during the whole summit, and for a valid reason as well.  Microsoft first introduced us to WebPI at least years WDS and at the time it caught my attention since I maintain the PEAR installer.  Back then I realized that this was going to be a big thing but never really had the time nor urge to try it out.

To get a little bit of context going on here, WebPI is the installer / stack bootstrapper while Web App Gallery is the where you submit your application, packaged up with specific meta files, so that WebPI can install the application.
When installing WordPress for example, WebPI will take care of downloading the package, installing IIS, PHP & MySQL, configuring and getting things up and running, as required.  The whole point of it is to making working with the Web Stack is to make it very simple to get up and running and install applications.

Mai-lan gave us a high level overview of WebPI and Mark Brown demoed how to use WebPI, and how to install WordPress in 5 minutes.

WebPI looks all good and dandy but is still in it’s early days but has a lot of great potential and is very well integrated into IIS and the Windows platform, it makes it a breeze in many cases to deploy applications and to keep your self up to date on things but the group at large had a few gripes with it and suggestions what should be fixed.

• Add beta link to WebPI app gallery pages
• Needs access to previous versions of apps
• Needs access to multiple versions of PHP
• Needs to support frameworks

Things I would suggest on top of that, use PEAR internally to utilize already existing framework / component channels and allow me to deploy directly on an Azure cloud.  And since Azure supports multiple PHP versions then that can hold hand in hand with the request in the above list.

So to recap, WebPI, something to look out for, ties into various bits of techs from the Microsoft Web Stack.

Licenses

A lot of people raised the issue of how hard it can be to develop on the Microsoft platform because of license fees - Since we have to pay not only for production but also for development. testing and staging servers.
To fix that Microsoft has been running a few programs as of late and through WDS these were brought up a few times.  All I can say is, if you haven’t signed up for your free licenses yet, do it!

The full post can be found here.

In an attempt to identify the reasons why the speakers presence is so repetitive, I nailed it down to the diffidence factor. Today we were discussing about the community on IRC and the issue of low amount of new speakers came up again. So I’m bringing the idea back up to the surface

Many new speakers are scared of coming forward either because they think their ideas are plain bad, they don’t have enough content, they are scared to speak in front of a large audience or simply don’t have time to organize a full length session. Lightning-talks were made to try and overcome those issues however the “speaking in front of an audience” problem remains and some people need to validate their ideas before throwing themselves on stage in front of a 100 people.

In a breeze of imagination I hereby present to you the idea of “speed-speaking” which is basically “speed-dating” for speakers.

The rules are simple:

• 10 tables of different size and shapes (between 6 and 12 seats)
• 1 new speaker per table (That’s 10 new speakers)
• 10 minutes super-lightning talk
• 2 minutes Q&A per table
• 1 minute to change table between the 10 minutes

This result is more or less a hundred and thirty minutes  (say 2 hours), 10 speakers which get the chance to express their ideas, very simple Q&A, contacts are made, speakers loose their speaking virginity and they get out there, more press coverage for the event (imagine if anyone would put up a simple post about each 10 talks), new speakers and out of those at least 1 has to be a good one that will either come back the next year or become a quality speaker due to the confidence boost and experience he just gained.

What I am looking for with this blog post is to gather your feedback on the idea. Is is something conference organizers would be willing to try? Maybe an uncon version? Give me your ideas, changes, thoughts. I’m sure we can find new quality speakers with this

The first talk I gave was about frontend caching and how you can get the most speed out of your website by optimizing the various bits of the frontend.

Make sure to catch “The aftermath” on Helgi’s blog as you may get a better idea of what we do in conferences and what happens in general!