Rasmus Lerdorf in Houston! 1

Posted by jpm on May 29, 2009

Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP language, will be in Houston in June and graciously volunteered to do a presentation to our group! Sorry about the last minute modification, but we will need to move our meeting from our usual date/time to Wednesday June 10th at 6:00pm. The presentation details below from Rasmus himself:

Architecture, Performance, Optimization and Security.

I take a look at the performance of some popular PHP applications and go
through and show the common mistakes people make and show how much of a
difference just a little bit of optimization makes.

Then, if there is still time and interest I’ll explain the current state
of XSS on the Web with some live examples of XSS issues on some local
sites.  I usually like to have 2-3 hours, but I can squeeze it into less.

I hope to see you all here for this great opportunity! You can RSVP here.

–Joao

New location for our monthly meetings 1

Posted by jpm on February 19, 2008

I’m happy to announce that we are finally changing the location for our monthly meetings, from the dreaded University of Houston main campus to a Galleria location. Alert Logic has agreed to host the monthly meetings at their headquarters (we are next to the Marathon Oil building), so hopefully this will make it easier for people to attend. I’m looking forward to having a real meeting room with projector and wireless internet for a change!I’ll be updating the meeting details today, but our new location will be the following:

Alert Logic, Inc.
1776 Yorktown
7th Floor
Houston, TX 77056

Driving directions from Downtown:

1. Head north on Travis St
2. Turn left on Walker St – go 0.4 mil
3. Take the I-45 North ramp – go 1.0 mi
4. Take exit 48B onto I-10 West – go 5.1 mi
5. Take exit 763 onto I-610 South – go 1.5 mi
6. Take exit 9B to Post Oak Blvd – go 0.8 mi
7. Turn right on Post Oak Blvd – go 0.5 mi
8. Turn right on San Felipe – go 0.6 mi
9. Turn left on Yorktown – go 0.1 mi

January meeting: PHP 6 presentation

Posted by jpm on January 10, 2008

Bryan Alsdorf did a good presentation on the new features being planned for PHP 6, the next major release of PHP. He also discussed some of the important changes that are coming up on PHP 5.3, such as the new mysqlnd and (possibly) namespaces.

If you missed the meeting, you can download the example source code and the PDF presentation here: PHP 6 presentation (PDF format)

November meeting: PDT presentation

Posted by jpm on November 02, 2007

Ryan Hill from Deviant Research did a great job presenting on PDT, the new generation of IDE tools from Zend (the company founded by some core PHP developers). We discussed a wide variety of topics related to PDT, including the community aspect of this software project, as well as some of the cool features available in PDT.

If you missed the meeting, you can download the example source code and the PDF presentation below:

November meeting photos

Posted by jpm on November 02, 2007

We had a great turnout in the November meeting, with around 20 members showing up to hear about GD and PDT. I took a few pictures, which are available below through Flickr:

November meeting photo #1

August meeting: Form Validation in Smarty

Posted by jpm on August 03, 2007

Joao Prado Maia presented on a novel approach to perform form validation with Smarty and AJAX. Through the use of the PHP DOM extension, form validation is added to XHTML templates dynamically, easing the pain of modifying dozens of forms to add proper validation.

If you missed the meeting, you can download the presentation below:

SPL (Standard PHP Library) Presentation Details

Posted by jpm on July 11, 2007

Jordan Raub did a good presentation about SPL, the Standard PHP Library, at our July meeting. Thanks for Jordan for showing up even while being slightly sick with a fever! 🙂

For more information about SPL, look at the official PHP manual section and this page direct from the core developer with detailed class by class definitions.

Symfony Framework Presentation Details 1

Posted by jpm on July 11, 2007

Don Hobson gave a presentation about the Symfony framework at our June meeting, and the following is the material provided that night.

Upcoming March Meeting Details

Posted by jpm on February 21, 2007

We will have a presentation from Mike Culver of Amazon.com about the Amazon Web Services, and what’s possible by using the available developer program. Full details below:

Amazon Web Services
What’s possible in a post Web 2.0 world? Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new directions that Web Services are headed in. The presentation will provide an overview of Amazon Web Services, including a demonstration showing how to easily set up a virtual server environment using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Also included will be a Web Service named Mechanical Turk that allows computers to make requests of people, an online storage service, and more.

Amazon spent ten years and over $2 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon.com for millions of customers. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), over 200,000 developers have registered to build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology.

About the Speaker
Mike Culver joined the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services in May, 2006. Mike brings with him fifteen years of technology leadership experience, including at companies such as Microsoft. In addition, Mr. Culver has a strong background running an IT organization. As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, he helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way that businesses compete.

Join us March 1st at the University of Houston. See our Driving directions page for information on how to get there.

Speakers Wanted 1

Posted by jpm on November 12, 2006

As it is usual for our group, every month we have presentations about topics related to Web development and PHP and MySQL in particular. We usually have two presentations, one about libraries, practices or tricks on how to improve your productivity and another presentation on actual tools, such as IDEs and database administration tools.

If you have an idea for a session for an upcoming meeting, send it over! Presentations don’t need to be complicated affairs, and two-way sharing of ideas and experiences is the goal.

Get in touch through a comment if you wish to participate.