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3 years and 10 months ago - back in May of 2003 - I met with one of my PHP development clients Stephen Thoms at Byzantium cafe in Ponsonby, and we decided to start a user group for PHP developers in Auckland and around New Zealand. I left that meeting and set up a list server, and emailed invitations to my other clients and developer friends. Within 6 months we had 50 members, had found another couple of dozen friendly developers through Jochen Daum’s group at Meetup.com, and were getting together in Auckland every month that we could scrape together at least 3 or 4 starters.

Fast forward to today and we’ve just this morning reached 300 members on our shiny new Google Groups list server. There are well-attended (sometimes 30+) meetings in Auckland on the first Thursday of every month (thanks NatColl!) and regular meetings now being held in Wellington too. We’ve got good relationships with other related groups (NZ Web Developers in particular) and the future looks bright with new developers joining daily and initiatives such as Ben Ramsey’s PHP Groups coming on the scene.

The list has seen a few bad times (spamming, flamewars, etc) along with the good, but mostly it’s been a great new channel with opportunities for asking questions, providing knowledge and feedback, seeking work, finding PHP candidates, making contacts, and when things were slow just shooting the breeze with fellow coders. Everyone on the list should be proud of the community they’ve created - I know I am

I finally went out this morning and sat the Zend PHP5 exam (and passed!). It seemed a great deal easier than the original ZCE exam was… but then again that was 2004 and I’ve done a bit more programming since then

I thought that the new exam was less obscure than the PHP4 one seemed to me at the time, and covered more ground as well. My hat goes off to Dhwani Vahia at Zend and the community team who put the questions together, they’ve done a great job.

Thanks too to Davey Shafik and Ben Ramsey for their excellent work on the study guide, although I couldn’t find the mentioned PDO section! I’d recommend the book to anyone either considering sitting the ZCE exam or just wanting to learn PHP - it covers almost all of the fundamentals in short time.

The php|architect Vulcan mock exams are good too. I did one this morning before heading out and if anything it was harder than the real exam, so they’re a good indicator of whether you’re ready or not!

In other news I’m off to Sydney on Wednesday for a week for the salsa congress. I was hoping to catch up with the local PHP community over there but just checked their website and I have to fly back to Auckland the day before they meet which is a shame. If any Sydney PHP people are reading this and want to catch up for a beer after the weekend, drop me an email.

I’ll be speaking on E-Commerce at the WDANZ Conference in Christchurch next month. They’ve given me a slot on the first day at 12:30 between a security talk by John Martin from IBM, and Location Based Mapping with John Clegg from ProjectX (Zoom-In). I’m looking forward to hearing both of those too so hopefully there’ll be time to get organised and find my way around.

My talk will be based around a comparison of the various options for payments processing in New Zealand, and I’ll include implementation examples and demonstrations in PHP.

In a move that’s come as a surprise to many people, Zend and Microsoft today announced they’ve formed a long-term partnership to improve the performance, reliability and stability of PHP on Windows Server platforms.

The official media release is here and Reuters have more reporting here.

Hopefully this will just mean better deployment options for PHP in production, and not any less of a focus on non-Windows platforms for their other software (Studio and Guard are already slow enough on Mac).

The Zend Framework Project this morning released their new GData Client Library for interfacing with the Google Data APIs.

The Google data APIs (GData) provide a protocol for reading and writing data on the web. GData can use either Atom or RSS and has a feed-publishing system built on Atom with some custom extensions for handling queries.

From the GData page at Google:

All sorts of services can provide GData feeds, from public services like blog feeds or news syndication feeds to personalized data like email or calendar events or task-list items. The RSS and Atom models are extensible, so each feed provider can define its own extensions and semantics as desired while still conforming to the standards. A feed provider can provide read-only feeds (such as a search-results feed) or read/write feeds (such as a calendar application).

The GData Client Library comes packaged with example code for reading Google Base entries, and reading and writing for Google Calendar.

I’ll play with this more over the next few days and wrap these libraries in a Symfony plugin.

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