I had a chance to attend a NYC MYSQL meetup event this week. Thanks Brian for giving me the heads up on
#phpc. It was my first time joining a local group and seeing what it was all about. MYSQL guys didn't show up and asked Hans (of NYPHP fame) to host the meeting which was more of a Q & A session. Another interesting point was that most of the people present were PHP developers. After the main Q & A session people spread out into small groups and had their groups discussions of exchanging background information and just general discussions on various topics. This was a lot of fun and conversations wonders into various topics and discussions.
Here are a couple of things that I mentioned during our face to face discussions:
- PEAR has two kinds of documentation: manual and api. The PEAR website layout and navigation (which I find weak and very basic) has main manual that covers many packages under main "Documentation (http://pear.php.net/manual/)" link. This coontains the tutorials, examples and api (which are tied to some package version??) Yet when I go to the package page and click on Documentation link I am taken to API documentation which lets me pick the current/latest or version specific api documentation that looks different and is independent of the main PEAR manual?
- There are a number of new functions in PHP5.x releases. Some of them are life savers. Embrace the new functions, stop implementing your own versions:
- New PHP5 Functions (http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.functions.php)
- New PHP5.2 Functions (http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration52.functions.php)
- Eaccelerator (http://eaccelerator.net/) - this PHP extension is a must have. I have tried some of the others and this is so far the most stable and has the best performance. It's also able to be used as a session handler and has PHP api to do local value caching inside the web server (until apache restart).
- Xdebug (http://xdebug.org/) - this PHP extension is a MUST for your development and QA environment. This is a powerhouse of an extension that provides profiling, tracing and debugging of your PHP code. I'll try and see if I can provide some more posts and information on this one.
It was nice to meet all you guys and I'll try to attend more events in the near future.
Gena01