Git is a great version-control tool designed for today’s nimble, distributed teams. For those of us who come from the world of CVS and SVN, however, mastering its features takes… some getting used to.

Fear no more, for your friends at php|architect have put together a great half-day event dedicated entirely to Git called the php|architect Live! Git Summit. With talks from developers who have first-hand experience using Git in a variety of environments, this is your opportunity to learn Git without leaving your desk (in fact, you can even listen in on your iPad, so you may enjoy the Summit on your favorite couch, too).

Best of all, the price for this great event is just right: single seats start at $25 for our premium subscribers, and we even have a discounted rate if you want to get your whole team in on the fun. Seating is limited, and we’re already 50% sold, so don’t delay—get your tickets today.

As a rule, we normally shy away from political speech here at php|architect. On this particular topic, however, we feel that we should take a firm stand against SOPA, and explain our position.

Why You Should Listen to Us

We make our living by selling intellectual property. Our books, magazines, and training materials are precisely the kind of content that is all too easy to copy and distribute illegally through the internet. Plus, don’t forget that Blue Parabola is not some multinational industrial conglomerate; we are a small company, which means that selling digital content is what pays our mortgages, keeps our houses warm, and sends our kids to college. And, of course, the same applies to our authors.

I say this because, if SOPA were really about protecting the interests of copyright holders, this post would be a glowing endorsement of everything it stands for because we would have a direct interest in seeing it become a reality —but it’s not, and we don’t. We’re taking a stand against SOPA, and we urge you to do the same.

I won’t deny that seeing our products copied and distributed without our permission is unpleasant and hard to take; however, I —and everyone else here— am also firmly convinced that a punishing law like SOPA is not going to stop illegal downloads.

The simple reality is that honest people—the vast majority of us—are happy to pay a fair price for products they need, want, and enjoy. As long as the price is reasonable, the purchase process is sane, and the licensing terms do not stray into the draconian, our statistics show that most people have no problem with paying for digital content.

What of the rest? Do they deserve to get away scot-free with what amounts to theft?

No, of course they don’t, but they are —and remain— a tiny minority; one that is not easily deterred by digital locks and oppressive laws that only end up annoying and inconveniencing the very people who behave honestly.

Besides, we already have laws that are designed to deal with the criminals—laws, I should point out, that are already widely used with a reasonable amount of success to block large criminal organizations that perform piracy on an industrial scale.

SOPA Fixes the Wrong Problem

Piracy is better fought by creating better products that respond to the real needs of customers who value our work, not by trying to punish those who don’t with overly broad legislation.

We learned this lesson a few years ago, when we removed all forms of DRM from our electronic publications, and our sales went up as a result. All our products have been DRM-free since, and—well, we’re still here, alive and well. In fact, we’ve been able to invest the money that would have gone towards maintaining increasingly complex digital protection schemes into making our products available to customers in more formats, which has benefited both our bottom line and their enjoyment of everything they buy from us.

SOPA is simply an extension of the same way of thinking that has foisted DRM on our computers for the last twenty years: It’s the final, desperate blow of an industry whose business model is predicated on controlling its customers rather than adapting to their needs. Much worse than that, it’s a piece of legislation that opens the doors to all sorts of nefarious attacks on the freedom of speech which makes the internet such a delightfully messy—and immensely vibrant—melting pot for all the ideas of our generation.

The Internet We Want

This is why we do not support SOPA. At the end of the day, we do not see any significant benefits from it, even for the large media conglomerates that seem to think they will reap its rewards. All we see is a slippery slope, at whose end is an internet that we do not want to be part of.

If you haven’t submitted your proposals yet, now is a great time to do so (you know, before the new-year celebrations kick in, and you get distracted by more… urgent fun). Don’t forget, you don’t need to be a professional speaker to present at tek—all you need is a great idea and an infective passion that will rub off on your fellow attendees. Some of the best speakers we’ve ever hosted were first timers—and we love to invite new people to speak every year!

Well, what are you waiting for? Head on over to our CfP page, where you can find out more about the proposal process, and submit several of your ideas. We look forward to hearing from you.

As the week winds to an end and the festivities inch closer, our final promo gives you access to our wonderful online training classes for half price. This means that you can take a full 19-hour course, analogous to (but much better than) three days in a real classroom, for as little as $250!

Don’t wait—grab your seat before they’re all gone. The promo runs until 12AM EST on Monday, December 26th.

The Mag Is Back!

Did you miss the premium subscription + full back issue catalogue promo that we ran on Monday? No problem—we’ve brought it back for one more day. Make sure to take advantage of it—at the end of the Friday (EST), it’ll be gone for good!

One more thing…

I’ve been told that there might be one more surprise in store for next week—this one, though, will only be available to those who are on our mailing list (if you’ve bought anything this week, you should be on it automagically; if you’re not, you can always sign up).

I can’t say what the surprise is… but I’m sure it will be a good one.

Until next year, from all of us at php|architect, happy holidays to you and your families, wherever you are and wherever your travels may take you.

Download the mp3 here

Supporting links:

• phpcloud.com
• Zend Technologies
• ZendCon

Disclosure:  I – personally and via Blue Parabola – have a long relationship with Zend. I attended ZendCon this year via a press pass they granted php|architect. Further, while Cal Evans is unavailable, I have served as (fake) Editor of DevZone a number of times. Further, before phpcloud was made public, we were granted preview access and gave feedback.

This is a FREE event, so please come out and enjoy: http://www.meetup.com/South-Florida-PHP-Users-Group/events/40433602/

Topic:  PHP in 2011

A look at the state of PHP in 2011 and how it fits into the current technology stack followed by an overview of what you should and shouldn’t be doing along with a summary of new and upcoming features in PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4. This will be a 90 minute talk with an extensive Q&A session will follow.

ABOUT PRESENTER

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years.  He spent 7 years at Yahoo and has since worked for and consulted with various startups. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. You can follow Rasmus on Twitter or find him on Google+.

For further information:

The South Florida PHP Users Group meets the second Wednesday of each month and tends to focus on many of the technical concepts in and around the PHP community. In recent months they’ve covered topics ranging from an Intro to Git to Lithium to Cake. If you’re based in South Florida – or even just visiting – stop by and say hello.

php|architect has a history of great t-shirts, everything from “Support Animal Testing” to “Less Bitching, more fixing”. Each of them has been unique, and we always smile when we see people wearing them at conferences. It’s time though to take it up a notch, and that’s what we are doing with Elephpant Ware. Each design we release will be unique, beautiful, and something you are going to want to have come conference time, at your next BarCamp, or anytime you just want to fly your geek flag.

Head over to elephpantware.com and take a look at the inaugural design. We think you are going to like it.

While we pioneered the concept of publishing a magazine in PDF format on a large scale—we distributed our 500,000th copy not too long ago, our entry into more modern formats, like ePub and MOBI, has been more deliberate, in part because we didn’t just want to introduce these options for the sake of “going digital,” and in part because—well, because it took a lot of work to make our systems compatible with the new formats.

As our next step in this process, today we’re introducing ePub and MOBI versions of our books. Much like our magazine, these are generated directly from the master sources of the PDF and print versions, so they offer the same content—the only differences are in their presentation and formatting.

The first two books to receive the ePub/MOBI treatment are Vito Chin and Ivo Jansch’s PHP Development in the Cloud and Matthew Turland’s Guide to Web Scraping with PHP. In keeping with our tradition, both books are available in all three digital formats if you buy the corresponding “Digital” package, and included free of charge with a print purchase.

Naturally, we haven’t forgotten about our existing customers—if you own a copy of these books, the ePub and MOBI versions await you in your account at no extra charge. Go forth and download!

These are far from the last changes we’re going to make to our publication lineup. In addition to backporting our existing books to ePub and MOBI—and, of course, publishing new ones—we are hard at work on more new and exciting projects that we’ll be launching in the coming months.

Stay tuned!

What does this mean for your cloud dreams? Fast onboarding for one thing. According to Michael Crandell, the CEO and a founder of RightScale, a typical cloud deployment takes 4-6 weeks, but with RightScale, it is less than 30 minutes to launch an entire cluster, which is an enormous advancement.

Another major benefit is auto-scaling, both up and down. RightScale has a management system that constantly watches what happens on the system, and when load is high enough, it will automatically spin up a new server on Amazon with Zend on top. It then notifies Zend, which deploys your app, and once everything is stable, notifies the load balancer at RightScale to begin use. Done. How long does this process take? According to Zend’s Andi Gutmans, this whole process will take less than a minute. Scaling down takes a minute or two longer as open sessions need to be handled gracefully, but all in all, very quickly.

RightScale currently supports Amazon EC2, but will be adding support for Rackspace Cloud and Cloud.com as well.

So how much will this all cost? Kent Mitchell, Director of Product Marketing at Zend, says this will cost about $2400 per month for a typical configuration which will contain 3.1 PHP servers (the .1 server gives you some flexibility for scaling or for creating a temporary dev environment) along with two MySQL Servers, one Zend Server and two load balancing servers. The price goes down if you pay in advance instead of month-to-month, and customized set ups are available based on need with custom pricing. The cost of scaling, both up and down, will also affect the price, but when paying in advance, you create a pool of servers which allows you some flexibility in having more servers one month and fewer another.

To learn more about this new advancement in PHP and cloud computing, there is an upcoming webinar:
Introducing “PaaS in a Box” – Scalable, Flexible, Portable PHP in the Cloud
Thursday, April 28th, 11am PST.

[Update Apr 20, 01:52 to add a clarification about the kind of servers included in the typical configuration.]

So what’s so great about that? According to Andi Gutmans of Zend, having the two programs bundled together will provide a seamless experience end-to-end, creating apps deployable to Android devices with support for iOS and Blackberry devices shipping within 60 days. Even though this is not a pure “write-once-deploy-everywhere”, this will save considerable time and resources. Instead of three completely separate apps for the three separate platforms, you will be able to use one code base within Flash Builder to deploy natively to all three mobile platforms and the web. Dave Gruber of Adobe estimates there will be upwards of 70% code reuse across all platforms (mobile and web).

And the best news beyond that is integrated debugging. Flash Builder 4.5 will be able to handle debugging for all your platforms – desktop, IDE, server-side PHP and device – all in one session.

Everything described above will be available for Windows (XP SP3 or higher) and Mac OS (OSX v10.6 or higher). See the Adobe website for the full list of requirements. The Standard version of Flash Builder 4.5 will cost $399 USD. There will also be a Premium version for $799 USD which will also include memory and performance profilers, a network monitor, and a unit testing harness to connect to major unit testing frameworks. Both the Standard and Premium versions will be available for sale through either Adobe or Zend. There are company-specific upgrades available as well. If you already have Flash Builder, upgrades are available for both versions for $299 USD through Adobe’s website. Current Zend Studio users can contact the Zend Sales team to receive discounted pricing on upgrading to Flash Builder.