It is with great pleasure that I announce a new symfony event: symfony Day Cologne. symfony Day will be the first symfony conference in Germany. On september 4th 2009, symfony fans from Europe and beyond are invited to come visit the beautiful city of Cologne for excellent speakers, great discussions and an awesome party.

Registration is open and you can reserve your spot in the event’s website. The day will cost 80 Euro and includes food and drinks during the event.

Regular expressions are a very useful tool for developers. They allow to find, identify or replace text, words or any kind of characters. In this article, I have compiled 15+ extremely useful regular expressions that any web developer should have in his toolkit.

Here’s just some of the expressions on the list:

• Enlight a word from a text
• Remove repeated words (case insensitive)
• Matching a XML/HTML tag
• Matching hexadecimal color values
• Parsing Apache logs

If you’re looking at performance and you want to get some quick wins, the obvious place to start is caching. Caching as a concept is focused exclusively around improving performance. [...] Fundamentally caching has one limitation – managing updates – and several decisions. In this article, we’ll explore the basic options for caching and their impact on performance.

They talk about three different update methods – a synchronized update, lazy update and a read-through strategy (where the caching functionality itself can force a re-read of the original source). There’s also a brief look at options to consider when caching data and how you’re going to manage that cache once you’ve filled it with data.

Company:

Our client, headquartered in the Southeast, is an online marketing services company that acquires new customers on behalf of brands in a variety of vertical markets, ranging from home and business services to education and automotive. Capabilities include lead generation, sales conversion, performance tracking and marketing channel optimization. Founded in 2000, the company has six offices and more than 500 employees.

Responsibilities:

Provide PHP programming and functionality for a wide variety of consumer related websites, intranets, extranets, and web-based applications.

Collaborate with business leaders to understand technology needs and requirements and lead a small team of developers.

Be challenged on a daily basis to solve problems in new and creative ways.

Design, evaluate, update, and maintain object oriented applications in PHP.

Share your opinions and insights with business leaders on a daily basis in order to affect rapid decision cycles and effective solutions to business requirements.

Translate vague business requirements into tangible and accurate technical requirements as well as anticipate future requirements within the design of new systems.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Sciences or similar field.
• 5+ years of solid PHP and MySQL development.
• Strong working knowledge of HTML, DHTML/CSS and Javascript.
• The ability to translate business requirements into system design.
• Successful track record of working in a fast-paced, collaborative team environment.
• Exceptional debugging skills and the ability to easily and quickly read and modify existing code.
• Ability to effectively communicate with business leaders and marketing managers.
• Desire to take an active role in the success of the business unit.
• Genuine interest in our business and in creating technologies to enable its success.
• Sense of humor

Further information can be obtained by contacting:

Jeanne Boyce – Banis & Associates

at 815-468-0150 or jmboyce@sbcglobal.net

All inquiries are kept on a strictly confidential basis.

Continuing on from day 1, today, I’ll teach you five different ways to write select statements for your database. If you haven’t watched the first entry in this video series, don’t worry; each video can function on its own as a single tutorial. Having said that, I highly recommend that you watch each screencast.

You can watch the vidcast through their in-page player or just grab the source code for their examples and get to work.

While Agavi can certainly be used to serve up static content, it really shines when you use it for something more complex. And in this second part, you’ll do just that – over the next few pages, you’ll learn how to receive, validate, and process input from Web forms, as well as connect your Agavi application to a MySQL database.

He returns to his simple templated example site and shows how to use the command line agavi tool to create the routing and controller to handle the “contact us” requests. He includes form validation examples, how to use the population filter, and how to generate the Doctrine models to connect with the form directly.

• pecl_http 1.6.4

• mongo 0.9.3
• gearman 0.5.0

In the previous part of this series, we discussed the main pieces needed for a proper development environment. However, there are other, smaller pieces, scripts, subsystems and other very important components of a properly-configured development environment that don’t fit in the acronym.

This second part of the series looks at the “T” in DTAP – testing. It mentions unit testing, integration testing and regression testing. He also touches briefly on “refresh scripts” to handle data updates or pushes out to another stage of the process.

The methods of the class that I [just] mentioned were declared implicitly dynamic, even though it’s perfectly possible to call them statically, and the PHP engine won’t raise any errors about this process. However, it would be much better to declare these methods explicitly static, thus taking advantage of the functionality offered by the text helper class without having to spawn an instance of it.

They show how to define the methods with the “static” keyword so they can be called outside of the class’ scope. Code for the helper class and the code to put it to use.

Now that pear2 is in svn.php.net, it is possible to do commits with
multiple packages using a feature of subversion called “sparse checkouts.” [...] Here is the version I used to set up pear and pear2 in a way that will allow committing to both pear and pear2 packages in a single commit.

Rasmus Lerdorf has written about the same thing for the main PHP side of things. All the commands you’ll need are there to get things set up and working more efficiently.