Even though this is a rather trivial example, I hope it will be of help to whoever is wondering how to use a LIKE in a where using a Zend_Db_Select::where() or Zend_Db_Select::orWhere() and did not manage to find decent documentation about it.

As you can see, we bind a parameter to the where() method using the ? symbol, then when assigning the value of this parameter — second parameter — we append the wildcard character %. The new binded parameter value is then string% and which gets quoted and executed giving you the expected output.

In order to ease adoption and make it more accessible for people to evaluate FRAPI, we’ve put an Amazon AMI together. This AMI comes pre-installed with Linux Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS), NGINX as the webserver, Memcached — (And no, port 11211 isn’t opened to the public), PHP5-FPM, APC and obviously FRAPI.

If you’d like to give this public AMI a spin, just go to Amazon’s instance management section, click on “Launch Instance, go to community AMIs, and search for : “ami-0adf2f63″ . Once you found it, click on “Select” (And make sure to select Port HTTP (80) when asked about which ports to open).

It’s running, now what?

You can go directly to the AMI’s host name in a browser and you will get FRAPI’s default invalid action error, or you can follow these steps to customise it a bit more.

Now that you see your new shiny FRAPI-AMI instance running in your management console, you have a few options:

First option is: Find the “Public DNS” and the “Public IP Address” of the instance you just launched and point your domain-name’s DNS to the IP you found — Your domains could be: api.mydomain.com and admin.api.mydomain.com

Second Option is: If you do not currently hold a domain name for your API, edit your /etc/hosts file (Or the equivalent in your OS) to have an entry that points to the IP of your instance

10.0.0.1 api.mydomain.com admin.api.mydomain.com.

Once you are done with either Option 1 or Option 2, you’ll need to connect to your instance over SSH (ssh ubuntu@hostname-of-the-instance -i your-amazon-cert.pem). Upon connection, you’ll be greeted with a welcome screen giving you some information about FRAPI and the server’s software :

Once you are connected, make sure to “sudo su” and then edit the files that are in /home/ubuntu/sites/. The only thing you have to modify in those files are the “server_name” details. Put either your domain name or your made up domain name that is setup in your /etc/hosts file. The end result should be an admin file with something that contains something along the lines of

and an api configuration file that contains

Don’t give up, you are nearly there, now you have to run : “/etc/init.d/nginx restart && /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart” and you are done.

If you go to the api.mydomain.com in your browser you should now see FRAPI’s default invalid action XML error. If you go to admin.api.mydomain.com you should be able to login with the username “admin” and password “password” — Hint: You should go to the “configurations -> users” section and modify that password.

I want to code something!

SSH into your instance, and go to /home/ubuntu/development/custom/Actions, you will see all your API Controllers there and you can follow the steps here http://wiki.github.com/frapi/frapi/creating-actions (In our case, the generated files go into /home/ubuntu/development/custom/Actions)

To get accustomed you can start playing with Testing1.php and Testing2.php

Don’t hesitate to jump on IRC or on the mailing list and ask questions!

After flying from Dublin (me) and London (Helgi) finally reached Chicago and met up with the PHP Tek crowd. After discussing details with Marco Tabini, we organized a little event to announce our long awaited RESTful API Framework FRAPI.

The party was loud and fun. People chatted, asked a bunch of questions, complained, encouraged us and thanked us. We even turned around and made a live demo with no preparation whatsoever and, believe it or not, there were no bugs during the demo

The future is looking very bright for FRAPI which has attracted a LOT of attention over the past few days and we are looking forward for even more in the coming weeks. Even though there’s still some work to do in terms of documentation and a few things I would like to see changed, I have to admit that FRAPI is in a somewhat cool place right now with the upcoming *any-cache* compatibility (Which means that it will run on windows — wincache) will make it even more interesting. Currently FRAPI only supports APC but this is soon going to be fixed giving FRAPI the ability to run on the likes of Windows Azure and any other platform supported by the caching mechanism.

If you feel like trying out FRAPI, you are more than welcomed to visit http://getfrapi.com and start right away by either downloading FRAPI or forking us on the spot.

I would like to thank everyone at php|architect who have been very helpful and also a big thanks to the sales department in the Sheraton Gateway Suites O’Hare who have been the most helpful (In fact it may be the most helpful sales team I’ve come across in many years!)

The goal of this camp was to get the European PHP community leaders together and learn about the new products and new ideas Microsoft are working on. For those of you who read about the Microsoft web developer summit that took place in Redmond in December 2009 you might think it was the same thing however you would be utterly wrong.

While the camp in Redmond was very informative and we are learnt a great deal of new features coming up with Microsoft, it was vastly different than the JumpinCamp in Zurich where the focus of the camp was to get the developers to interact with the actual Microsoft developers instead of only learning about new features. The point of the JumpinCamp was to get your hands dirty in code so we all got a few hours of lectures, then sat down and worked on either implementing those solutions into our respective Open Source projects or even discussed and raised concerns we might have regarding some of their products.

I thought it might be nice to share some of the projects I’ve started working on while I was over there and what I had interests in:

OData

After meeting with Claudio Caldato, the program manager for the Interoperability team, we went over the OData project and after looking at the position of OData and it’s potential, I decided to join the team and start by developing a PEAR package that will allow producers to publish valid OData Atom Pub feeds and serve as a base driver for the PHP community (Which could be easily ported to Zend Framework, Symfony, Lithium, etc.)

Obviously one of the reason for and OData producer package is to be able to make all the Frapi users potential OData producers. Moreover, as some of you know, sometimes I get into rants about web semantics and microformat. When I saw OData I realized that we could potentially bring some microformat standards within OData Atom Pub feeds (Or JSON Feeds).

Another thing that lit me up was the JSON feed. As some of you may have read on this very blog a few months ago I wrote an article about having something called PJSF which basically is the concept or idea of defining a standard format for JSON feeds. When I saw that OData has the ability to generate JSON feeds, I obviously jumped on the occasion of making a difference in the semantics world

Azure

Azure basically is a platform that offers a flexible, familiar environment for developers to create cloud applications and services. With Windows Azure, you can shorten your time to market and adapt as demand for your service grows.

What does is really mean? Azure is an all-in-one cloud solution. Even though the concepts are a bit arduous to grasp, we can all thank Josh Holmes and Maarten Balliauw for their essential presence at this camp to help us with all the questions we had and their thorough understanding of their baby (Azure).

Azure was another thing that sprung to my mind for Frapi. What if we could get our Frapi customers to be deployed directly into the cloud? Obviously it’s possible to hack around all the possible Amazon web services and to get somewhat arranged so our customers would be on EC2 servers, however with Azure it seems almost natural to deploy and it’s clearly made for enterprises.

TableStorage

This is Microsoft’s very own NoSQL answer. The Table service offers structured storage in the form of tables. It also exposes a REST API for working with tables and the data that they contain.

This one I am still uncertain about. I think I like it, but I’ll have to work a bit more into finding more information regarding it’s internals. I really like the idea of their multiple slave replication however with the lack of documentation I could not, right now, take the executive decision of opting for TableStorage instead of say CouchDB or MongoDB. Nevertheless, the fact that it’s part of Azure gives it a big +1.

Pivot

Alex is probably one of the coolest guy to hang out with and also has a brilliant product called Pivot. I couldn’t tell you much more about Pivot apart from the fact that it’s a great tool if you want have to analyze large amounts of data with many different criteria. Seriously though, check it out, his demo and seeing it live is simple stunning. He also briefly introduced me to the art of DeepZooming and the SeaDragon technology

Altogether I suggest you give the livelabs a look. They are doing some amazing work there!

SQL Server

Even though I haven’t been into the RDBMS world for quite a while now (Being sucked into #nosql), I used to do quite a bit of SQL Server, in fact I’m still involved in the SQL Server MDB2 package and it was nice to finally be able to discuss with a developer of the SQL Server Engine Jason Stowe and the Program Manager of the SQL Server Connectivity with PHP Ashay Chaudhary (Who is now on twitter @ashay_c!) about the status of the SQL Driver in PHP (Or lack thereof) and intensively vent about a few things like the lack of up-to-date PDO SQL Server driver.

Fair play to both the SQL Server guys who have done a brilliant job at the camp helping everyone that needed help as well!

WebDeploy

This is definitely one of the tools I would have like to have 1-2 more days to play with. After a filled in event and work week, I finally managed to get some time to discuss the potential of deploy Frapi on Windows machines with the lovely Faith Allington. After playing for a few hours we had the base of the package however the day was ending and we were going to a lounge. Having our priorities set very straight in conferences, most of us headed out to the bar/lounge and so we didn’t have time to finish the Frapi WebDeploy implementation. Faith being of good nature gave me her email address and told me we could setup a conference call and keep working on the WebDeploy implementation of Frapi! How about that!

Finally

During this week, not only did I learn loads of stuff about Microsoft product, I also learnt some russian card game which encourages cheating (lovely!), I learnt how to say: “Ich lebe in einem Pilz!” and how to play cow-poo-golf. Great Switzerland!

On a more serious note however, I would just like to finish on the usual cheesy note and say thanks to Microsoft and especially Yuriy Zaytsev for organizing, Josh Holmes for his general welcoming and helpful attitude, Nicole Zahnd for organizing the flights and hotels perfectly and obviously everyone from the Microsoft team that stayed with us this week and listened to our rants and complaints about their product! Looking forward to next year (wink)

At echolibre we’ve been trying to organize our sales and customer relationship in a more efficient way as the company customer base is getting larger and larger. That’s natural process for any growing company. In order to help us organize how we do everything related to customers (Sales, Leads, Relationships, etc) we are giving Capsule CRM a good run.

Capsule CRM is basically a nice CRM tool that takes the boring part out of CRM’ing. Moreover (And the whole reason of this blog post), it has an API and as you all know, we LOVE APIs.

Therefore, we realized that we needed to integrate Capsule with some online services we have and so we built a PHP wrapper for their API to give developers the ability to place requests and use the web service as they wish using PHP

Services_Capsule is now being proposed to PEAR however you can already get the code from http://github.com/davidcoallier/Services_Capsule and start using it. The lack of end-user documentation may be the greatest lack in the package right now so I figured it might be good to post a few usage examples in a post.

Meat

So once you installed the Services_Capsule (Or for now cloned the repo and pointed your include_path to the repo-checkout) you’ll probably want to see how to use it. Even though the code has a list of examples, it might be best to show you a real world example:

Be sure to watch the examples directory as examples will make their way through there in the coming days.

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.

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.

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