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!

On Friday evening we quietly announced on twitter a product that we’ve been working on for the last 10 months. FRAPI is an Open Source API framework that allows you to open up your existing web based application or legacy system to your own or third party developers.

FRAPI handles standard API things like authentication and data formatting, and speeds up the API development process — like the way ZF or Symfony for PHP, Django for Python, JQuery for JavaScript (or, I suppose even Ruby on Rails ;-p ), does for other technologies.

David Coallier put together a quick 5 minute screencast to show you how you can use FRAPI to start building your API. (more…)

The last couple of months have been extremely busy for me, to a point where I have not been blogging or participating in open source project nor the local user group to the level I’d like, but it has been the good kind of busy, where you feel exhausted but very satisfied with one self.

What has been keeping me busy? I have presented at 3 conferences (PHP Tek, DPC and OSCON), took a week vacation in Iceland with Chris Shiflett and Andrei Z, moved to a new house, work on a very fun but stressful project among other interesting things that have happened.
A rough calculation told me that since mid May, around the time of PHP Tek, I have been away from my home a total of 38 days, almost 50%, not bad at all!

To touch base quickly on each of the conferences I spoke at: (more…)

[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…)

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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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…)

I wanted to write a post that shows a few different ways to customise Zend Frameworks routing when you’re using their MVC implementation. Most of this is covered in the documentation, but it can be a little difficult to dig out.

The standard routing setup of Zend matches URLs like these:

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www.example.com/module/controller/action/var1/value1/var2/value2
www.example.com/controller/action/var1/value1/var2/value2

You set your controller directories in your bootstrap with something like:

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$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$front->setControllerDirectory(array('default'=>'../controllers', 'bar'=>'../modules/bar', 'foo'=>'../modules/foo'));

For the first component of the path Zend will first look for a matching module, if none is found it will look for a matching controller. The module name ‘default’ is important here; it represents (surprisingly) the default controllers. So these are the ones when there’s no matching module in the URL.
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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!

Hello, I’m Eamon Leonard, I’m one of the founders of echolibre.

We’re a web app development company based in Dublin, Ireland. We’re really into building web apps and making things easier for businesses through web technology.  We love what we do. (more…)