Once again, we bring you the php|tek Webcast Series. For the past few conferences, we’ve put together a sampling of interesting sessions, hot projects, and sharp people from around the community to talk on topics that have piqued their interest. Since we only have 30 minutes, these usually aren’t in-depth technical discussions.

Instead, consider these appetizers to introduce you to something new, get a flavor for the topic, and entice you to explore more..

February 4th – Josh Butts on Phactory for Unit Testing

Unit Testing with databases is painful at minimum and difficult at best. In this session we’ll talk about Phactory and how to use it to creating objects, generate data, and even testing against MongoDB. Register here »

February 18th – Clark Sell on What is Microsoft WebMatrix?

Did you know WebMatrix could download WordPress, MySQL, PHP, allow you to make some changes and then deploy it right to your ISP? In this webcast, Clark will provide an overview of the newly released WebMatrix. Clark will explain where it fits into the overall Web Deployment story on Windows.
Register here »

March 4th – Nate Abele on the Lithium Framework

Have you heard about this “next generation” of PHP frameworks and wondering what all the hype is about? Are you using PHP 5.3, but still having trouble getting your head around features like closures and where they’re useful?

In addition to giving you an overview of how to build an application with the Lithium framework, and an in-depth look at the flexible filter system and advanced class design, this session will delve into how different patterns and paradigms (including object-oriented, aspect-oriented, functional, and even procedural) come together to make Lithium one of the most flexible, but also one of the most pragmatic PHP frameworks available. Register here »

March 18th – Bill Karwin on SQL Antipatterns: The Next Generation

Following his popular 2010 book “SQL Antipatterns,” Bill Karwin describes all-new blunders developers frequently make when using SQL, and shows how to solve these problems with PHP examples.  Topics include: Crosstab Crossroads, Shell Game, Transaction Encapsulation, and Reading Off the Script. Register here »

April 1st – Aaron Brazell on Pluggable Authorization in WordPress

This session will look at ways to override and “hijack” the authentication process allowing WordPress to leverage existing third party authentication systems such as LDAP or oAuth. It will also examine ways to allow third party applications to leverage WordPress’ authentication system for single sign-on capability across a non-homogenous suite of applications. Register here »

April 15th – Travis Swicegood on Node.js

Node.js allows developers to rapidly build network applications that can handle tens of thousands of users. At least, that’s the promise. This talk introduces developers to Node.js and its ecosystem. It separates the hype from the reality and helps them answer the question “is Node right for me?” Register here »

April 29th – Peter Laudati on Deploying PHP Apps to Windows Azure

In this webcast, we’ll provide an overview of Azure’s services tuned specifically to the needs of a PHP developer. We’ll look at how PHP applications can be deployed to Azure, as well as how Azure’s services can be consumed from PHP apps via the PHP SDK. Want to offload your images & other large media files from your existing shared host? We’ll show how you can you can do this using Azure’s storage service. We’ll also look at SQL Azure, the relational database service provided by Azure, and show how you can migrate your MySQL data to it. Register here »

May 13th – Matthew Weier O’Phinney on Git Over it

With the explosion of distributed version control systems (DVCS) in the past decade, a few have risen to the top in terms of adoption, including Mercurial, Bazaar, and Git. In this webinar, we’ll look at the basics of Git, and some common workflows you’ll encounter when using Git in the real world: collaborating with others. Register here »

Starting on February 4th, 2011 and all the way until php|tek, we’ll get together every other Friday at 2pm Eastern (GMT-5). Grab your lunch, bring a cup of coffee, or just turn off your phone and come learn with us.

And if your boss needs convincing, describe it as community-driven Research & Development that didn’t come out of your budget.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to attend AdobeMAX. While I was there at Adobe’s invitation, I took it upon myself to chat with smart people from all over the community. One of the more interesting people I tracked down was Christian Cantrell. As a Developer Advocate and Product Manager for Adobe part of his job is to build applications, experiment, and use that experience to help guide product development. But the interesting part is that he come up with demos like “One App, Five Screens”:

Me: What motivated you to create the video?

CC: When we first started talking about getting AIR on mobile devices, I was a little skeptical about the idea of writing one application that would run everywhere. Not only is it a technical challenge (primarily in adapting to different screen sizes and resolutions), but I was also afraid that a single application might not give users the kind of experience they are accustomed to having on their specific devices.

The more I thought about it and experimented, the more I realized that there probably wasn’t going to be one single way that developers would build applications for all the different devices we support; rather, the approach to cross-screen development would be dictated by the project itself. Games were one area where I thought applications could really work well almost entirely unchanged across devices, so I decided to create iReverse as a proof of concept. To be honest, I was even surprised by how well the project has worked out.

Me: What changes did you make to support each of the devices?

CC: Almost none. For Adobe AIR for TV, I added support for the remote control (which is really just keyboard events), and I had to write a little additional layout logic in the TV project “wrapper” to compensate for overscan in order to make sure the game board was rendered entirely on-screen. The rest of the code just follows multi-screen best practices like doing dynamic layout in stage resize events, checking for capabilities like the accelerometer before using it, and trying to stick with APIs that are available to as many profiles as possible. The rest of the platform differences are pretty well contained in the individual projects’ application descriptor files.

Me: What was the easiest part in development?

CC: Adding new platforms was surprisingly easy. I used the desktop version primarily during development, and I can honestly say that I experienced almost no problems at all when running iReverse for the first time on other devices. Thanks to the best practices and the architecture I used, it just worked. The only issue I ran into was when the Adobe AIR for TV team ran it on a set-top box for the first time. Since the game only supported touch and mouse events, everything ran fine, but there was no way to interact with it. I spent a couple of hours adding keyboard support (while testing on the desktop), and when I sent it back to them, it worked perfectly.

Me: Where did you have the most problems in development?

CC: It took me some time to work out some best practices and to figure out a good architecture to use. I built some simple prototypes before I started on iReverse to make sure the concepts were solid, but once I had it all figured out, it was just a matter of writing the code. iReverse was the first game I ever wrote, so there was a little learning curve in terms of figuring out things like game logic and the computer player’s AI, but that had nothing to do with multi-screen development.

Me: What resources or tips would you suggest to someone attempting to develop their first cross platform app?

CC: I would probably start with the Adobe Developer Connection. There are a lot of good articles posted about multi-screen development (including more information about iReverse) and links to all the best blogs to follow. The technology is so new that the first round of books isn’t out yet, so getting information online is probably your best bet.

If you want to learn more about cross platform development with AIR or about Christian’s work in that area, don’t hesitate to visit his blog, Adobe Developer Connection or sign up for our upcoming class Essential Flex for PHP Programmers.

Recently Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Supreme Allied Commander of Zend Framework, posted on his blog “Aspects, Filters, and Signals, Oh, My!” In it he references an article published in php|architect magazine.

I was first introduced to AOP in 2005 or 2006 via a php|architect article (I can’t find my stash of back issues, nor can I find it on the php|arch site currently).

The article, “Aspect Oriented Software Development and PHP” was actually in the April 2006 issue and was written by Dmitry Sheiko.

This article provides an introduction into the popular paradigm of aspect-oriented software development (AOSD). It includes a multitude of practical examples, provides a view of how to objectify an abstract approach like AOSD, and helps the reader easily grasp its essence and advantages. The article is primarily intended for programmers working with PHP. Its aim is to demonstrate a way of applying AOSD in PHP-based projects that already exist.

We dug into the php|architect archives and dug up the article Matthew was referring to. If you want to read it for yourself, Aspect Oriented Software Development and PHP

If you like this article, consider subscribing to the magazine. For only $35/year you get 12 issues packed with articles like this to help you grow as a developer.