Last week our very own Helgi was at ZendCon in San José, California. He was there as a speaker to talk about Frontend Caching and “PEAR2 and Pyrus”

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!

There are many decisions involved when using new technologies and new products. Many people will often go for open source software because it’s free and you can modify the code. To me being “an open source” project involves a whole lot more than simply having an opened code base that you can modify and use for free, but it also involves a large amount of factors as such as technical documentation, user examples, tools for a software, the community based around a project and the likes of actual response time from developers.

This article is a major Kudos to the CouchDB developers. In particular I would like to thank Jan Lehnardt, Paul J. Davis and Robert Newson from the CouchDB fame. Let me explain why…

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[UPDATE] - a sincere thanks to all those who re-tweeted and responded to our call for developers. We’ve gotten a great response in the last two weeks and we’re working them. We’ll be in touch with everyone who contacted us in the coming days.

So, it’s been a while since our last post. We’ve been busy working with some very smart and talented Irish entrepreneurs on start up ideas, and the last few months have been a blast. We’ve got lots in store over the next six months and we’ve started to scale up our team.

Behind the scenes our team has grown to six, soon to be seven. Continuing on with this growth, we’re looking for two new team members: a PHP developer, and a Business developer. (more…)

A number of people have asked me over the past few days how should one go about using jQuery Autocomplete but instead of using newline delimiters, with a URL that returns JSON data.

At first, I first had a hack that involved handling the “keyup” event myself then sending a request to a JSON URL, and then involve the “autocompleteArray” method from Autocomplete. It was a mess considering that the autocomplete method is already sending the value of your defined input to the server as a GET parameter. I was repeating the behavior of the function in order to receive a simple JSON array. I was unhappy, and felt it to be a very annoying solution because I wanted to take advantage of the internal caching system of jQuery Autocomplete.

So I decided to give a look at the code and came up with a much cleaner solution. I directly added a JSON option to the Autocomplete. So for anyone interested you can find the patch here: jQuery Autocomplete JSON patch.

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Introduction

A few weeks ago, Helgi and I attended PHP|Tek 2009 in Chicago, as both representatives of echolibre and The PEAR Group.

This post will briefly discuss the formation of a Recommended PHP Standards Group, as put forward by a meeting of PHP developers at the conference. As would be expected, a bit of controversy surrounds this proposal, but my hope would be that it would be accepted and grow within the global PHP community in the coming years.

As posted by Travis Swicegood, a group of community project representatives came together to discuss naming standards for PHP 5.3 and above. (I would like to take the opportunity to publicly thank the staff of the PHP|Tek conference for providing us with a large meeting room with little more than 2 hours notice).

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A few weeks ago I was talking to Mark Baker from MySQL AB about getting a MySQL meetup happening in Dublin. Meetups currently happen in London, San Fran, etc., and are an opportunity for local MySQL users to meet socially. Mark was very helpful, up to the point that he’s offered to fly himself and Ivan Zoratti for the inaugural meetup. They’ll give us a brief talk on MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster v7 and what the future holds for MySQL.

This event is a chance for you to engage in your community by meeting other Dublin web / MySQL developers, learn from shared experiences and to make some nerdy contacts.

The good people in the South William Bar have given us the use of their top floor for this informal event, which kicks off at 18:30 on Wednesday 24th June. Places are limited to 25 people. You can reserve your spot on eventbrite for free.

To help with the “community” part of it, we’re going to put some money behind the bar for some nice beers.

UPDATE (3rd June 2009) : This happy bunch of MySQL developers have registered to come along. We’ll be releasing a few more tickets a few days before the meetup.

Barry Alistair, Richard Bowden, Declan Boylan, Rory Browne, Paul Campbell, David Coallier, Ray Cregan, Barry Cronin, Darragh Curran, Stephen Curran, Laura Czajkowski, Bill de hÓra, Andrew Duffy, Ross Duggan, J.D. Fitz.Gerald, Eoghan Gaffney, David Gillen, Daniel Hunt, Piotr Jankowski, Eamon Leonard, Conor McDermottroe, John Moylan, Tomasz Muras, Shane O’Grady, Paul Phillips, Eduard Raos, Karen Thompson, Neil Turner

According to wikipedia, the Dragon’s Den is:

a venture-capitalist television programme that originated in Japan where the format is owned by Sony. The format, which now airs internationally, consists of entrepreneurs pitching their ideas in order to secure investment finance from business experts — the “Dragons”.

As some may already know, in 2009 the television show began in Ireland on RTÉ ONE. This post covers the technical considerations encountered when a web site / application appears on national television. (more…)

Watch out! The semantic web is on the way, a thought that many (and not just the marketeers) may find daunting . Why? Because system and web app developers that want to take advantage of the semantic web will need to learn a lot of new standards and change the way they work.

I have been studying and working with web standards (XHTML, RDF, ATOM, RSS) for well over 4 years now, something I am glad of,  because recently something struck me. Conventions are arising, for example DOAP, SKOS and others, that are built on top of the Resource Description Framework otherwise known as RDF, if they aren’t, they are usually built on something very similar or related. (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.

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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.