For those of you just joining us, we just wrapped the CodeWorks 2010 Tour. While I’ve written a recap elsewhere, I wanted to take some time to acknowledge and thank the User Groups:

• First, from the Seattle PHP Meetup group, we had David Malouf who serves as one of the assistant organizers. The group meets the first Thursday of each month in a coworking space near Downtown Seattle.
• Next, we had the lead of PDX PHP – Sam Keen – in attendance. They meet the third Thursday of each month at the ShopIgniter offices in Downtown Portland.
• Next, we had Josh Butts & Logan Lindquist of Austin PHP attended and hosted a happy hour. They (well, we) meet the second Tuesday of each month northeast of downtown Austin.
• Also at the Austin CodeWorks stop, we had Chris Cornutt & Jake Smith of Dallas PHP. They meet the second Tuesday of each month at the Yahoo offices in Richardson, TX.
• Next in Baltimore, we had Chris Stone of Baltimore PHP and Shaun Farrell of DCPHP. The Baltimore group meets the third Wednesday of each month at the OmniTI offices in Columbia, MD while the DC group meets the second Wednesday of the month at Fathom Creative in Downtown DC.
• Finally, we had David Rogers the lead organizer of Orlando PHP. They meet the first Thursday of each month just north of Downtown Orlando.

Each of these leaders lent us a hand in promoting CodeWorks by announcing it to their members, posting on their sites, reminding them as appropriate, and hosting a happy hour afterwards for everyone to socialize. We appreciate it. In fact, Sam of PDX PHP went above and beyond for CodeWorks by convincing a local company by the name of EdgeLink to sponsor the event.

If you’re looking for a job, they often know of companies hiring. If you’re looking to hire, they know who is looking. If you want to learn about something, someone will know about it. If you don’t have the time, ability, etc to keep abreast of what’s going on in the larger PHP development world, the group will know about it. If you want to speak at conferences, these are the places to start.

In short, if you’re not connected with your local group, you’re missing out.

If you’ve been following along the last couple months, you know that a number of us were recently on the CodeWorks 2010 – or #cwx – tour. In ten days we hit five cities and met user groups all over the place. All in all, it was a blast – we all have writeups coming – but you’re not here for our analysis.. you’re hear for our slides.

First, we have my slides on “Unit Testing Strategies” – High Code Coverage through extensive Unit Testing is the Holy Grail in software development. Theoretically, it would create an environment where the code could be debugged, re-factored, and extended while keeping a stable and overall clean system. Unfortunately, this is about as elusive as the Holy Grail. This session will cover some easy ways to triage your project and figure out which tests can be the most useful right now.

Next, we have Ryan Stewart’s “Learn to love the Front End” – As a PHP developer, you’re a rockstar server-side coder – but more and more it’s becoming critical to build interesting user interfaces for your web applications. In this talk you’ll see an overview of some of the different front-end technologies. From jQuery to Adobe Flex, you’ll see how you can leverage open source framework to start building great looking user interfaces. You’ll see what’s possible with jQuery, including easy animation and easy Ajax calls, and how Adobe Flex enables advanced UI like high-end data visualization and real-time collaboration. You’ll leave with an understanding of both how and when to use HTML5/JavaScript and Adobe Flex, and see how they can help you build engaging applications faster that impress your boss and friends.

Next, Cal Evans shares his slides on “APIs from the Ground Up” – What do you call a website with no HTML? An API. As the web moves out of the browser and into desktop and mobile applications, PHP developers are sitting pretty because of the speed at which they can build robust and scalable APIs to power these apps. This session takes a look at API, how to think about them, how to design them and what to do when they get wildly popular.

After lunch, it was my next presentation titled “A hundred thousand users.. now what?” – You’ve launched your site, got the buzz, and then it crashed. It came back up, but now it’s crawling. Your boss is upset, his boss is yelling, and your customers are looking at your competitors. This session will cover how to make sure your app is ready to scale and some optimizations to get you there.

Next, Marco Tabini talked on “Object orientation the 5.3 way” – With version 5.3, PHP has finally acquired a well-rounded object-orientation model that rivals—and in many way exceeds—those of most other languages, while maintaining PHP’s trademark simplicity and ease of use. In this session, Marco will explore the new OOP features in 5.3 and show you how they can improve your coding.

Finally, Cal Evans wrapped the day with “Five Tools You Should Know & Love” – If your project is clean, completely well-structured, and lacks those last minute hacks forced by looming deadlines, this is not the session for you. For the rest of us, we need tools that will help identify problematic code and detect as those problems appear and grow. This session will demonstrate five open source php-tools that should be in every developers’ toolbox.

If you attended CodeWorks and have feedback, suggestions, or piles of small unmarked bills, feel free to get in touch with us.

A while back, our friends at Microsoft asked us to write a whitepaper on how to use Microsoft SQL Server from PHP through their brand-new SQL Server Driver 2.0, which you may have noticed tucked away in a corner of the download package for our September 2010 issue.

Now that we’ve had a chance to collect feedback and fix a few bugs here and there, we thought it’d be good to make it available to anyone—you can find it here in PDF format. Topics covered include:

• Installing SQL Server Driver 2.0
• Accessing SQL Server from PHP
• Using PDO
• Understanding joins
• SQL Azure
• Migrating from MySQL
• Troubleshooting
• …and a ton of other useful resources!