Last week's Front Range PHP meeting was a huge success. Ryan Stewart presented on how to use Adobe's Flex technology with a PHP back-end. The presentation was excellent, and Ryan gave away some incredible prizes. Afterwards much fun was had at the Big Game Restaurant.

In any case, Ryan has posted the slides for his presentation on his blog.

Next week I'll be presenting twice. The first presentation will be at our Front Range PHP User Group meeting (more info here) on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 and the second at the Denver RIA Developer's group. Both presentations will be about integrating Zend Framework and Flex together but will each have a slightly different emphasis geared toward the audience of each group.

In both cases I'll be presenting with Jay Whipple, principal at 111ELM Design. Jay has been building RIA's in Flash since 1999.

I would love to see you at one or both of these events. Please be sure to check it out and RSVP if you are planning on coming so each group can plan appropriately for food any drink. You can RSVP for the Front Range PHP User Group meeting by sending me an email.

I look forward to seeing you,

David Stockton
President, Front Range PHP User Group

David Stockton presented on Firebug and FirePHP and their integration with Zend_Log:

At the November 17th FRPUG meeting, I presented on Getting Started with OOP in PHP. The video below is a screencast of that presentation. We have some video of this presentation and others but the screencast was the quickest to get published on the web so here it is. If you have any questions, please let me know at dave@frontrangephp.org.

On December 17, Dan Lindorf gave a presentation on the basics of the Model, View, Controller (MVC) construct. The MVC pattern is used to create functional separation of application objects through easily defined boundaries. MVC abstraction has proven to be highly effective in creating scalable, high performance web applications and has been adopted as a best practice within the FRPUG. 

I've posted my presentation slides from last night's FRPUG meeting. I will try to post the screencast later on if you'd like to hear the presentation as well.

Update: I've posted the screencast online now too. It's 1 hour 2 minutes long but you will be able to heard the discussion and questions that took place during the presentation.

Thanks,
David

On December 17, Dan Lindorf presented a basic introduction to the Zend Framework. This presentation included an overview of the Zend Framework directory structure, the Zend MVC implementation, class autoloading, the Zend Bootstrap, and many of the cool features built into the Zend Framework library. Due to limited time, Dan was only able to complete half of the presentation. The rest of the presentation will be provded during the January 28 FRPUG meeting.

Last Wednesday, September 8, 2010, Kevin Schroeder, Technology Evangelist for Zend Technologies presented at the Front Range PHP User Group meeting. He talked about Zend's new offerings including Zend Server and Zend Studio. He also talked about PHP Application deployment strategies, unit testing, including PHPUnit and Zend_Test, as well as queueing and scalable computing.

I video-recorded as much of the presentation as I could, but unfortunately 32GB and one battery are only enough for about 90 minutes which means I don't have anything for the last hour (starting around unit testing). Kevin has provided his slides, though, which you can find below.

Overall, it was a very successful meeting and I am looking forward to our next meeting on October 13, 2010.

Thanks,
David Stockton
President, Front Range PHP User Group

Last month at our June 23rd meeting, Chad Robertson presented on how to set up Zend Framework with modules. His slides are finally available and you can now view them here.

Thanks,
David Stockton

Please try the attached code sample for yourself. If you have questions or comments, please leave them at forums section at this site under presentations.

simple-zend-part-2.zip - file containing source code for the sample

Please try the attached code sample for yourself.  If you have questions or comments, please leave them at forums section at this site under presentations.

simplezend.zip - file containing source code for the sample

Improve performance with APC.  This presentation shows how APC improves the performance of a stock Joomla website... known to be very resource heavy.

At last night's meeting, Chad Robertson presented on Navicat database management software for MySQL. He had posted his slides and you can now view them here.

Assuming the weather cooperates and we don't have to cancel tomorrow's meeting, presentations will be on Zend Debugger, Unit testing and test driven development, and, if we have time, a little more on Zend_Form, specifically how to use Zend_Form for just validation and filtering with standard HTML forms.

We've got a lot of great prizes to give away and some awesome announcements, so I hope we'll see you there tomorrow night.

David

At this evening's FRPUG meeting, Drew Strickland presented on Advanced JavaScript. His presentation slides are now available.

Sam Hennessy presented on Adding Dependency Injection to Legacy Applications. His talk will also be given at ZendCon.

It was a lot of fun and I hope to see you all at the next meeting in October. Please see the meeting page for more information.

Thanks,
David Stockton
President, Front Range PHP User Group

During our December meeting, Drew Strickland gave a presentation introducing HTML 5. His presentation slides were built using HTML 5. In the presentation was an interactive multi-player space shooter game. Drew has posted the slides and the game code to his bitbucket account. You can check out the code below. Please note, no support is provided and he will not be accepting contributions or patches to the project, but you are welcome to use the game engine for anything you'd like.

Thanks to Drew for providing these great resources to the Front Range PHP User group and the PHP and development community as a whole.

• The Game
• The Slides

Thank you,
David Stockton
President, Front Range PHP User Group

Last night, FRPUG held its first monthly meeting in Denver, and it was a huge success. We had 15 attendees who enjoyed pizza and sodas provided by TEK Systems. Our Vice President, Chad Robertson, presented on debugging PHP using Zend Studio and Zend Debugger. Unfortunately we forgot to screen capture it but Chad may be posting the slides later. If that happens, the link will be here later.

After that, I presented on Unit testing with PHPUnit using a Test Driven Development methodology. That presentation was screen captured and should be posted once I am able to find a place to upload an hour long screencast.

At the end of the presentations, we gave away door prizes which included several Zend T-shirts, a copy of TechSmith's Camtasia Studio, a copy of TechSmith's SnagIt!, and a variety of other cool prizes.

Our next meeting will be in Colorado Springs on January 27. Matt will be presenting on APC (Alternative PHP Cache). Other presentations will be announced as they are determined.

Looking forward to seeing you at the next meeting!

Thanks,
David

I've finally finished the editing and rendering for Matt Skinner's presentation on JMeter from February 24th at our last Colorado Springs meeting. It can be viewed here: Introduction to JMeter.

You can also view the presentation here, although I think it's slightly smaller and may be more difficult to read the text.

Introduction to JMeter from Matt Skinner on Vimeo.

Thank you to Matt for presenting on this highly useful tool.

Thanks,
David

As promised, here's my slides from our meeting on April 14, 2010 on Mercurial. I feel like I've only brushed the surface here and I could probably have gone on for another two or three hours easy. In any case, I hope you enjoy.

Thanks,
David Stockton

Front Range PHPs latest Denver meeting was a huge success. With over 23 people attending with great food and excellent presentations, it was our largest attended meeting so far.

Jon Meredith presenting an excellent and highly entertaining bit on NoSQL databases. The slides for the presentation are below but unfortunately do not capture the humor that came with seeing the presentation live.

John Murray presented on Domain Driven Design and his presentation should be posted in the coming days.

With no further adieu, here's Jon's presentation on NoSQL databases.

Thanks,
David

I've finally been able to post the video I got from Kevin Schroeder presented at FRPUG on September 8, 2010. You can view about 1.5 hours of the presentation (split into 8-12 minute chunks) over here. Unfortunately, the quality isn't great, the audio isn't great, and there are gaps from one clip to the next since the DSLR decided to shut off every 4GB of recorded video or so.

We've got plans for video coverage at our next FRPUG meeting that should improve all of these things (longer recording capacity, better audio, etc). Anyway, check out Kevin's presentation. It covers a bit about what Zend does, why people use PHP, what Zend Server brings and several different strategies for deploying your PHP applications.

Thanks,
David Stockton
President, Front Range PHP User Group

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I'll be working on that.

In November we had two presentations: Chad presented on Zend_Form and went into how to use filters, validators and decorators. Unfortunately, we forgot to record the presentation so there's not a lot to post on that.

Also, Mike presented on how to set up multi-site Drupal on the Mac. His presentation material is available on his blog.

He also mentioned that if you want to use launchd (Mac native scheduled jobs) instead of cron, he's got that as well.

Thanks to both of these guys for their presentations. I'm looking forward to the December 23rd meeting and I hope we'll see a lot of you there at the Rockrimmon Library. I've got a lot of exciting news to share and we'll have some excellent door prizes to give away.

Update: Mike has posted an updated tutorial on his site: Updating Drupal Multisite on OSX

Thanks, David

As promised, I've finished the editing of the screen cast and uploaded it to the intarwebs. You can view it here: PHPUnit and Test Driven Development. I step you through creating a functional Zend_Form without having to set up the whole Zend MVC framework.

The form is presented as a standard HTML form that submits to a PHP page for processing. That page simply determines if the form is "valid" or not by calling Zend_Form's isValid() method. The form has three fields: name, email and phone. Using Test Driven Development, I show you how to write unit tests first and then write a little bit of code to make them pass until at the end we've got a fully functional Zend_Form object with validators (Zend_Validate) and filters (Zend_Filter), including development of a custom filter class for formatting the phone number and another filter for allowing alphabetic phone number entry.

Please take a look and send any comments or questions to dave@frontrangephp.org.

I hope you enjoy the screencast, and I hope to see you at our next meeting.

Thanks,
David

I've finally gotten around to posting this (sorry), but here it is: Neal Gamache's presentation from our October 13, 2010 - Escape from the Black Box.

In case you weren't there, Neal spoke about his experience in testing games as well as his current experiences with more "enterprise-y" software. He discussed different strategies that companies try in order to increase quality and how they usually turn out. He talks about defects, how they get into software and how it's inevitable that the software you release will have defects.

Please check out his slide deck. It's on Google Docs this time, so if you click the full-screen button, you'll actually get to see some of the progressions and transitions.

Enjoy!
David Stockton
President, Front Range PHP User Group

Here's my slides from Wednesday's presentation on regular expressions in PHP. For those of you who were there, you know I was unable to successfully screen capture either presentation. In any case, here's the presentation slides for the Regular Expression presentation. The Mercurial presentation slides will be posted shortly after this. I hope you enjoy.

Thanks,
David

At our last meeting on January 20, 2011, Wil Moore III presented on "Tame your build with Hudson, PHPUnit and SSH". The presentation was very informative and we've now got the slides from Wil's presentation.

Thank you for your presentation, Wil!

Mike Reeves has posted an update to his November presentation on setting up a multisite Drupal installation on the Mac.

You can view the new article here: Updating Drupal Multisite On OS X

Thanks, Mike.

In case you missed it, here are the slides from Jon Meredith's presentation last night on Using Riak with PHP. Riak is a distributed, highly available, open source NoSQL database.

Enjoy,
David Stockton