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…)

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!

A few days ago we were granted commit access to the kick ass,  award winning Adobe AIR Twitter client Spaz.

We are delighted to be part of another open source project, and one that takes a new and innovative approach to web and desktop development.

The Spaz client is a cross-platform (available on AIR platforms) client that allows people to interact with Twitter in a whole new way. It’s great for both regular computer users in it’s ease of use, and heavy twitter users. For example you have different themes with Spaz but you can also override the CSS design to customise the app’s appearance.

The application supports markdown, it minimizes to system tray on windows, it has a URL shortening helper, retweet functionality, the ability to add favourites, the ability to delete messages, twitpic support, and much more.

You can of course go directly on Spaz’s website and read more about it and try it out

Laura Czajkowski recently announced that planning for a new Bar Camp in Dublin is underway.  This time a focus will be on Open Source Software and it’s benefits to businesses, education and government.

We’re proud to say that echolibre will be involved with OSS Bar Camp in March; we’re looking forward to talking about Open Source products and development tools we love, as well as giving an insight into how web companies can bring value to their existing products by embracing Open Source concepts and methodologies.

You can follow the latest updates from OSS Bar Camp on twitter, and we’ll be posting more about the event as the weeks progress.