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! (more…)

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. (more…)

A very short post on a Friday afternoon.

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

After many days of speculations all around the web about Facebook’s rewrite of PHP, today Haiping Zhao from the Facebook team has announced “HipHop for PHP”. The basic idea of HipHop for PHP is that it turns the code you write in PHP into C++ which then can be turned into machine code.

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/

A lot has happened in the last 12 months. It being the first day back at work of the New Year, I wanted to write a post about some of the highlights of our first full (calendar) year in business.

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. (more…)

This year, David Coallier and my self were invited to attend the annual Microsoft Web Developers Summit, or WDS for short. For David this was his first time there but for me it was a 3rd year running, and as ever I was excited like a kid in a candy shop.

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. (more…)

Helgi, our lead on R&D has just been published on this years PHP Advent. In this article he looks at how web designers and developers currently interact, and offers some ways to improve the web design and development process.

The full post can be found here.

If you have ever used Python and Memcached, you probably have been looking for a library to connect to your Memcached server. And I’m sure you stumbled on the Tummy.com library which has basically no official online documentation.

(more…)

Anyone that goes to conferences knows that it’s nearly always the same people speaking. This is not bad, but this world is vast and the potential amount of decent speakers with very interesting subject and even more knowledgeable ideas is even greater.

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

(more…)