Sure, the early-bird price doesn’t end until July 15th, and with it you could secure a seat for CodeWorks in your town for as little as $99. Sure, CW09 is going to be great no matter what, but… we thought we’d try to make it even more exciting by spicing things up a bit!

Here’s the deal: buy your ticket for CW09 before July 6th and you’re already a winner thanks to our unbeatable early-bird price. However, we’ll also enter you into a   random drawing for one of the following:

• A full refund of your CW09 ticket (1 winner)
• A “Master Subscription” to php|a—includes access to all the back issues* (1 winner)
• A “Master Book Access” license—includes access to all of php|architect’s books in PDF format (1 winner)
• A $20 gift certificate from the php|a online store (2 winners)

* Remember, you already get a free 1-year subscription with your ticket

Don’t hestitate! With low prices, great speakers and talks and now an incredible contest, tickets are not going to last forever!
Sign up today!

Rules and Regulations

The rules of the contest are simple: 

• No purchase necessary. Contest closes at 11:59PM ET on July 5th; entries must be received after contest closing will be null..Odds of winning depend on number of entries received.
• On July 6th, we’ll pick 5 winners at random and contact them via e-mail to inform them of their win
• The winners must get back to us within 48 hours. If we do not receive an answer by then, we’ll choose a different winner. We take no responsibility for lost e-mails.
• In order to win, you must allow us to publish your name, city and state (this is so that everyone else knows that the contest is legit)
• Prizes will be issued within one week. If you win the full refund of your ticket, we’ll issue a refund against your original purchase; you are responsible for any fees levied by your credit
  card company.
• Send no-purchase entry on a white 4×6 card addresses to php|architect Sweepstakes, 28 Bombay Ave, Toronto ON M3H 1B7, Canada
• Void in the province of Québec and where otherwise prohibited by law. Must be 19 or older to enter.
• E&OE

Edit (2009-06-29): clarified sweepstakes rules

The schedule for CodeWorks 09 —our incredible fall conference tour that will visit seven cities throughout the United States between September 22nd and October 5th—is finally available on our website!

Each stop features two days of great conference tutorials and talks—almost 30 different ones in each location!—from some of the best speakers in the PHP world, like:

• Andrei Zmievski, Digg
• Derick Rethans, ez Systems
• Chris Shiflett, OmniTI
• Cal Evans, Ibuildings
• Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Zend
• Sebastian Bergmann, thePHP.cc
• Arne Blankerts, thePHP.cc
• Ed Finkler, Purdue University
• Stefan Priebsch, thePHP.cc
• Eli White, Zend
• Jason Sweat, author
• Lukas Smith, LIIP
• Ben Ramsey, Schematic
• Sara Golemon, Yahoo!
• and many, many more!

Don’t forget that our early-bird special ends on July 15th—and with it, you can reserve a spot for yourself for as little as $99, so seats won’t last long. Reserve yours today!

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
   – William Zinsser “On Writing” 

I am often asked to take a look at friends résumé to give pointers on how that can make it more effective. Invariably, my advice is the same, so I’ll share it here. When I was a manager and in charge of hiring, your résumé had to get my attention for me to even consider it. If you got my attention, you had a much better chance at getting the job. That’s the secret: get my attention, and get the job.

So what gets my attention? Well, first you have to put yourself inside my head. As the Director of IT, hiring a new team member might be important to me, but it’s only one of the twenty things I have to do today. Thus, no matter how important it is, I’ve got limited bandwidth to dedicate to it.

When I posted that ad that you responded to, chances are you weren’t the only one who saw it. I will have 30 résumés sitting in my inbox when I get in; all of them want a shot at the job—therefore, what little bandwidth I have for this task just got split 30 ways. Your window of opportunity just shrank to about 20 seconds, and that’s if I don’t get a phone call while it’s your turn.

Now that you understand what you are up against, how do you stand out? In a word, brevity. One page is best. Two pages may be ok if you
caught my attention on the first page. I rarely made it to the third page of a résumé though.

The most important page of your résumé is the first one—and the most important section of that page is the top half. Catch my attention with something there and you may go in my green stack. If I have to go to the second half of the page to find a reason to talk to you, you go in the yellow stack. If it’s not on page 1, chances are good that you are going in the shiny metal can I call the red stack.

Ok, so the top half of the first page is important; what goes there? Well, I’ve already told you what I was looking for in the job ad I posted. Most of the time I used the industry jargon that I want you to give back to me. It’s your turn now to tell me why you’ve got what I’m looking for.

I recommend a one to two sentence paragraph telling me what you want to do, why you want to do it for me. (Don’t be afraid to be a little gonzo, I don’t mind “Code Ninja” as long as you can back it up in the interview). Next, give me five to seven bullet points that are the really important things you want me to know. This is stuff that is buried in the rest of your résumé. Keep it short and make sure they matche the skills I asked for in the ad.

Good Example for a PHP programmer:

• Wrote an article for php|architect on Zend Framework

Bad Example for a PHP programmer:

• Wrote seven articles for FoxPro Advisor

If you have any room left on the front page, give me a quick list of your work history. One line for each job you have held, the company and dates.

Now, once you have it all assembled, don’t start shot gunning it out to everyone with the letters PHP on their job ad. The rest of your résumé is static, complete, detailed and verbose; it does not need to change unless something changes in your life, like landing this new job. However, your first page should be assembled for each company you send it to.

Have several versions of your “objective” statement and tailor it to the company you are applying to. This company should get a much different version of your objective statement than say, a Law Office or Hospital.

Finally, follow up in a day or so. Chances are that you are in the green or even yellow pile and I just haven’t made it to you. If you are the only one that follows up, guess who gets the interview? Don’t be obnoxious, just a friendly, “What else can I tell you to sway your opinion?” If I don’t respond after a couple of email pings, I’m sorry, you weren’t what I was looking for but I was too chicken to tell you why. Don’t get discouraged, just keep looking.

I came across a post on the Google Code blog today titled “PHP performance tips” from their “Let’s make the web faster” series. As it often happens, this article relates primarily to what are usually termed “micro” optimizations—that is, small tweaks that you can make to your code to yield some measure of improvement in your performance or, as is the case with a number of the suggestion in the post by Eric Higgins, in the readability of your code.

This kind of discussion is not new—micro-optimizations tend to crop up in the community from time to time; it’s not difficult to see why: most performance problems are very specific in nature—they depend entirely on the particular way in which an application attempts to solve a problem. Therefore, the only kind of optimization tips that can be given in the generic context of an article can only be generic itself.

In principle, I have nothing against micro-optimizations; I just think they’re a waste of time—perhaps even more so because they take the focus away from the simple fact that it’s a rare performance problem that is cause by the language: the problem, almost inevitably, resides either with the developer, or with an external system.

Let me explain: the whole point of scripting languages is to shift the workload on external system. We rely on database systems to handle data management, and on other external libraries to perform tasks like manipulating graphics, interpret XML, and so forth. Whenever we are forced to do these things in PHP, we immediately come across performance problems because PHP wasn’t built for this purpose—much like developers come across problems when, for example, they try to use relational database as filesystems or full-text search engines.

Thus, I wish that authors of performance optimization guides would focus more on teaching people to better understand the role of each of the technologies they use instead of making them waste time replacing double quotes with single quotes. In other words, teach them to program… and they will learn to optimize.

If you have ever attended a php|architect conference, you probably know all about our great t-shirts. Until now, these were available only to conference goers, but now you can order your very own php|architect t-shirts directly from our website.

We have five
models to choose from—with themes inspired by famous PHP people, as well as all-around great PHP-related witticisms.

To top it all, enjoy free shipping to Canada and the U.S.—plus, 20% off for a limited time if you buy five or more shirts (using the coupon code APPARELFTW at checkout).

What are you waiting for? Get them before they disappear!

The first webcast in our CW09 Summer Webcast series, presented In collaboration with Microsoft’s Interoperability Bridges & Labs Center, kicks off tomorrow at 1PM ET.

Blue Parabola‘s Matthew Turland will host a presentation on the new features of the Standard PHP Library in PHP 5.3—if you’ve never heard of the SPL, or if you wrote it off as a mere curiosity, you don’t want to miss this opportunity to learn about all the powerful functionality that it brings to the table.

Registration for this webcast is absolutely free, but seating is limited, so sign up before it’s too late—in fact, if you already have a php|architect account, you can sign up for the entire series (and if you don’t, you can get one in the process and keep up-to-date with all our great news— hint, hint).

Many developers I know have some sort of side project. Most of us contribute to an open source project, work on building an idea we have, or have clients for which we write code. Some companies are against this practice, while others simply turn a blind eye. Forward thinking companies, though, actively encourage developers to have a side project.

Side projects are more than just a way to pick up beer money. In some cases, as in contributing to an open-source project, there is no money involved at all. Regardless of the incentive to work on them, side projects can potentially add value for the developer’s main employer in two very important ways.

First, they stretch the developers in new directions, adding new tools to their skill set and sharpening the ones they have. Side projects are not usually related to a developer’s day job—in most cases, contracts actually prevent them from working on things in the same space as their employer. This means that side projects expose developer to new problems and new solutions, some of which can be re-used when they get back to their regular work.

Second, side projects are usually not deadline-driven. Contributing to an Open Source project is voluntary and, as such, most projects respect the fact that, for the most part, they cannot set hard deadlines and demand people to meet them. This freedom from time constraints, not usually enjoyed on projects at work, gives developers time to explore and time to fail. The chance to fail, in particular, is important for developers: software development has been described as “The science of running down alleys till you finds one that isn’t a dead end.” Many companies don’t like it when developers spend a day or two trying a solution that eventually turns out not to work. Side projects allow developers the freedom to do this and the knowledge they learn usually comes back to play in their day job.

If you manage a team of developers, make sure they know they can work on side projects. Review your company’s procedures to make sure that it is clear what the guidelines are. Regularly visit your developers and talk to them about their side projects. Don’t pry, but show an interest. Make sure that they know it’s OK to share with you and the team things that they learn. Make sure your developers aren’t the only one profiting from their side projects.

In collaboration with Microsoft’s Interoperability Bridges & Labs Center, we’re celebrating our upcoming CodeWorks 09 Conference tour with a series of completely free webcasts on a wide range of topics related to PHP 5, PHP 6 and many related technologies:

• June 26:  New SPL Features in PHP 5.3 with Matthew Turland
   
• July 10: Connecting PHP to Microsoft Technologies with Sumit Chawla
   
• July 24: Play Doh: Towards Better Object Modeling with Matthew Weier O’Phinney
   
• July 31: Migrating to PHP 5.3 with Stefan Priebsch
   
• August 7: Zend Framework Piece by Piece with Cal Evans
   
• August 14: The Future of PDO with Scott MacVicar
   
• August 21: Running PHP on Windows with Hank Jannsen and ZachOwens
   
• August 28: PHP Date and Time Programming with Derick Rethans
   
• September 11: What’s New in PHP 6.0 with Andrei Zmievski
   
• September 18: Running PHP on Azure with Sumit Chawla

The webcasts are completely free—no strings attached. You do have
to register for them, though, so that we can reserve a spot for you!

Contents

Here’s a quick overview of the contents of this month’s
issue:

• Shining a Light on Solar by Matthew Turland
  It is difficult to have an awareness of the PHP ecosystem without knowing that one of our favorite things to create is web application frameworks. You have probably heard names like symfony, Cake, and Zend Framework come up fairly often. One that may not sound quite as familiar is Solar. This article is the result of dipping a developer’s toes into its waters.
   
• VoicePHP by Yusuf Motiwala
  Voice is one of the main methods of communication, but it has been tough to integrate with web applications, that is, it was difficult until VoicePHP came along.
   
• Xataface: A Better Way to Build a Front-end for Your MySQL Database by Steve Hannah
  This article introduces the Xataface application framework, a PHP framework for building user-friendly front-ends for your MySQL databases.
   
• The sierra-php Framework by Jason Read
  See how to create a blogging application in about 60 lines of PHP code using the sierra-php framework.
   
• The Madeam Framework by Joshua Davey
  Explore Madeam, a small MVC framework designed for simplicity and the new RESTful web. Is it just another framework or a replacement for the one you use now?
   
• Zend Framework by Matthew Weier O’Phinney
  Zend Framework blends a use-at-will component library with a full-stack framework to provide developers with a wide range of tools for developing both new projects and extending existing code bases. Additionally, it provides a set of best practices and coding standards developers may follow to ensure top quality in their solutions.
   
• CodeIgniter: Like a Moth to a Flame by Matthew Turland
  The simplicity, intuitive design, and low barrier to entry of CodeIgniter are reminiscent of PHP itself, but it also shows marks of thoughtful development.
   
• Enterprise PHP: Dealing with Deployment by Ivo Jansch
  No matter how long you spend coding an application, in the end you have to install it on a production server somewhere. Application deployment is a process that can range from simple ftp-ing of files to fully automated updates. This month we’re taking a look at how deployments are done in professional environments.
   
• Security Roundup: (Déjà-Vu, Anyone?) by Arne Blankerts
  With everything we know about XSS, why do sites keep falling victim to attack? Haven’t we learned our lesson?
   
• Collecting Garbage: Part 3 — Performance Considerations by Derick Rethans
  In the previous two parts of this column, we explored PHP’s take on circular-referenced variables and a mechanism that allows PHP to clean up this particular problem with reference counted variable tracking. Of course, the implementation of the garbage collection mechanism in PHP 5.3 has some performance impacts. In this third and last part of the column, we will explore those performance implications.
   
• exit(0): Places, People, Times by Marco Tabini
  In the PHP community, everyone can get involved and play an
  important role.

According to a recent e-mail sent by Release Manager Lukas Smith to the developer mailing list, the PHP team is in the final stages of preparing PHP 5.3 for a public release. With 5.3 just around the corner, the worst mistake that any PHP developer can do is to think of it as just another point release—something you go ahead and install on your server without giving it a second thought (after you’ve run all your tests, of course).

More Than a Pretty Face

There’s a lot more about PHP 5.3 than first meets the eye. Despite the fact that it is only a point release, it introduces a few new powerful features—some originally slated for release in PHP 6.0—that you can start taking advantage of today to improve certain aspects of your website.

One of these—perhaps the one that has been coming the longest—is

namespaces, which have been in the works for years and have been the source of much discussion (some of it quite heated) on the internals list.

Like in most other languages, Namespaces allow you better encapsulate your code, while at the same time limiting the chances of colliding against duplicate symbols defined by someone else—for example, the developers of an external library or framework that you use in your projects.

Along with namespaces, PHP 5.3 also introduces the use keyword, which allow you to import one or more namespaces in your project.

Static Member Handling

A lot of work has gone into improving the handling of static class members in 5.3—for example, you can now use the __callstatic() magic method to handle dynamic static method calls, while a new feature called late static binding improve scope resolution within the static methods of parents of a subclass.

Lambdas and Closures

For the first time, PHP 5.3 supports the concept of closures and lambda functions. This means that functions are now treated as a special datatype that can be passed as a parameter to a function call.

Much like you would in Javascript or ActionScript 3, you can create anonymous functions (lambdas) and use them as closure by giving them access to data that would normally be out of scope to them.

…and More!

The Standard PHP Library is also getting a facelift of sorts, with a number of new classes, functions and iterators added. Similarly, PHP is getting a new garbage collector, an improved HEREDOC syntax, a GOTO operator, a large number of bug fixes and an overall speed boost of around 25%.

Here are some more resources to give you a jumpstart on your PHP 5.3 reading:

• The official PHP 5.3 upgrade guide from php.net
• A 5-part article by John Mertic for IBM’s developerWorks
• Ben Balbo’s PHP5.3 article on SitePoint
• Gergely Hodicska’s blog entry on the subject (also, part 2,
  part 3 and
  part 4).