blog.phpdeveloper.org

If you do anything on a website besides sitting in you chair only coding all day long, you owe it to yourself to check out a copy of this book from Prentice Hall - The Design of Sites. Now, I can almost feel the eyes rolling from here even at the mention of this kind of book, but trust me - pick up a copy and thumb through it and you’ll see the difference.

It’s not one of those “here’s what’s cool in web design right now” kinds of things. It goes a bit deeper than that and it looks more at the components and structure of a site rather than the things that you could slap onto the exterior to make your site a bit more trendy (Ajax revolution anyone?) Instead, it breaks things down into patterns that describe the bits that make a web site what it is.

Each of the patterns presented are components, like “order tracking and history” or “personalized content”, that can be swapped around and plugged together to make a site. Of course, a book full of these kinds of things could get messy, so they divided them up into chapters:

• Site Genres
• Creating a Navigation Framework
• Creating a Powerful Homepage
• Writing and Managing Content
• Building Trust and Credibility
• Basic E-Commerce
• Advanced E-Commerce
• Helping Customers Complete Tasks
• Designing Effective Page Layouts
• Making the Site Search Fast and Relevant
• Making Navigation Easy
• Speeding Up Your Site
• The Mobile Web

It’s a long list of a lot of great stuff that could get hard to keep track of. Thankfully, they thought of this too and color-coded each of the sections. Then, inside of each, the design patterns all have their own shade of the color for where they fit. Using these colors (and a letter/number combination) , they reference the patterns beside some of the other related patterns. It’s a bit hard to describe without seeing it, so I’d recommend picking it up and flipping through it to check out the layout style alone (definitely well thought out).

All of the patterns are briefly covered in an overview chapter (to make finding what you’re looking for fast) and expanded out in the later chapters with descriptions, examples and screenshots. They don’t just describe the end result (like a “grid layout” or a “progress bar”) either. They explain the concept behind it and, if needed, get into a little design concept theory showing why the pattern would be used.

There’s tons of great stuff crammed into this book (weighing in at over 800 pages, not counting the Appendixes) - so much that I’ve really only scratched the surface of the content. Plus, for a book of its size, the cost is pretty good - $40 USD from a site like Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

So, “The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites” - definitely pick it up and take a look. It’s nice to see a web development book that focuses more on making sites better rather than just making them better looking.

Oh, and a quick last note to the coders out there - don’t get this one thinking it’s going to be all about programming these patterns. It’s mostly a theory book with a dash of code thrown in here and there to show what they’re talking about.

Well, no more being anxious about the Zend Certification Exam (taken two weeks ago - does that make me impatient?) - an email came today that sealed my fate for the PHP 5 version of the test…

I passed! I am officially a PHP 5 Certified Engineer

Woo! It’s funny how, no matter how old you get, you always (well, I always) seem to feel the the same way after I’ve taken a test and am waiting on the results. Either way, it’s always a relief to find out the result - good or bad. Thankfully, it turned out good this time Congrats to all of the others out there that took the test and are new ZCEs!

Okay, so in playing around with some of the somewhat bleeding edge stuff (well, okay, so PDO isn’t that bleeding edge) on my development server, I’m trying to get Oracle support working for a simple script. It doesn’t want to seem to cooperate, and I just wanted to make sure I’m not doing something I shouldn’t be (or are forgetting something) - because it still dosen’t work.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• compiled PHP 5.2.0 with:
  • –enable-pdo=shared
  • –with-pdo-oci=shared
  • –with-sqlite=shared
  • –with-pdo-sqlite=shared
• Installed both PDO 1.0.3 and PDO_OCI 1.0 from scratch
• Verified that the modules are in the “ext_dir” specified in the pnp.ini
• added the lines to load them dynamically:
  • extension=pdo.so
  • extension=pdo_oci.so
• When I make a phpinfo() page, it shows both that PDO is loaded and that “PDO Driver for OCI 8 and later” is “enabled”

And, of course, the code:

This yields the lovely error message below:
“Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘PDOException’ with message ‘could not find driver’ in /www/web/test/getbal2.php:36 Stack trace: #0 /www/web/test/getbal2.php(36): PDO->__construct(’oci:dbname=PHIS…’, ‘user’, ‘pass’) #1 {main} thrown in /www/web/test/getbal2.php on line 36

Suggestions? Ideas? Is there something I’m missing?

Well, I’m back from this year’s Zend/PHP Conference & Expo out in San Jose, California and can honestly say I had a blast. I’ve talked to people in the past that have gone to other conferences and have had fun, but this experience was more than that for me. Not only did I get to listen to some great talks, but I also got to meet up with some of the people I write about every day on PHPDeveloper.org and have never gotten a chance to shake hands with - including Aaron Wormus, Chris Shiflett, Ben Ramsey, the attending #phpc gang, and various others (as I forced my t-shirts upon them).

As mentioned, the talks were great, and the conference planners did a pretty good job keeping dupes out of the schedule. There were some that overlapped a bit, but I think that just happened because of the wide range of some of the talks. Here’s some of the ones I attended:

• Robert Richards - Advanced XML and Web Services
• Chris Shiflett - Essential PHP Security
• Eli White - High Volume PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques (standing room only)
• Chris Jones - The Experience: Faster PHP with Oracle
• Aaron Wormus - Moving to PHP5 with Style
• Jaisen Mathai - Efficient development Using PHP, JSON and AJAX
• Ilia Alshanetsky - Caching Systems
• Andrei Zmievski - Unicoding with PHP6
• Sebastian Bergmann - Testing PHP Applications with PHPUnit
• John Coggeshall - Create a Sophisticated Web Application in 45 minutes - Using the Zend Framework

Definitely a busy week, but all of the talks I went to were great. I even learned a few helpful hints from them. Overall, though, it almost made me feel back for still being stuck in PHP4 Land where I work. There’s so much more that PHP5 has to offer, and making a move to it wouldn’t be that bad *crosses fingers*. I already had a PHP5 install on the test side to work with - now it’s just a matter of really getting in and making the changes.

My wife came along with me for the week and we managed to get out and do a few things during the day and evenings. We managed to get out to a local attraction, the Winchester Mystery House to get the tour (we’d wanted to do the flashlight tour on the 31st, but it was all sold out) and, post-conference, went up to San Francisco for what was, quite possibly, the rainiest day of the whole week. It turned out good, though, and we ate at a wonderful little place off the main strip - Scoma’s - with some of the best lobster bisque I’d ever had.

Needless, to say, it was a great week, and here’s to hoping I get to make the trip back out there next year. I’d be good to see the familiar faces again, and to get to catch up on all of the latest developments in the PHP world. Thanks to Zend for a fun week, and thanks to the DoubleTree for the nice facilities, and, most important of all, thanks to Axis Open Source for the free WiFi. There’s nothing more frustrating than a internet-related conference without an internet connection…

Update: if anyone happens to know if a cheap way to get things overseas from the US, please let me know. I want to send these shirts out, but I can’t seem to find a cost-effective solution.

So, I’m back from this year’s Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and am looking over the damage done to the PHPDeveloper.org shirt population (my wrapup of the conference will come in another post). From the looks of things, I apparently underestimated the correct size of the average PHP conference goer. I started off with 50 shirts of varying sizes (M/L/XL) divided up into mostly XL shirts. It seems, though, that most of the people that were given a shirt by the end of the week ended up with a Large size (not the XL like I had figured - no offense meant to the other coders out there).

So, as a result, here’s the tally of what I have left - out of the 50 t-shirts, there’s 23-ish (I owe one or two to different people) of them left to be up for grabs for anyone out there. It’s first come, first serve, so if you want one, get while the gettin’s good:

(I’ll try to keep this post updated as the shirts are dropped from the list)

All you need to do to get your hands on one of these shirts is to drop me a line and let me know your shipping information. There’ll only be a $7 charge on top of the shipping to help pay for the shirts. Donations of more are always welcome and will go to help the site directly.

If you’d like to see some “action shots” of the shirts and where they were showing up at the conference, check out these great photos:

• Ben Ramsey donning it at the con
• Myself and two developers from Indeed.com hanging out at the ‘Pirate Party’
• C’est moi as taken by Cal
• Ben Ramsey and Aaron Wormus finding out info from one of the vendors
• Aaron and I showing our PHPDev pride during the happy hour the first night

And, of course, my personal favorite shot - when Cal got up and plugged the shirts as part of his announcements one morning (no, I didn’t ask him to - as much of a surprise to me as anyone).

So, if you’re interested in grabbing one of these shirts (see this other entry for some more detailed photos), email me and let me know.

It’s not complete notes from the session, but here’s a few interesting things I caught during Christopher Jones’ talk:

• Oracle is introducing connection pooling for Oracle->PHP scripts (to be included with version 11g) - database resident connection pooling
• you don’t need to redo the entire prepare/reparse of the oracle statement just because you change a value of a bind variable. You can just oci_execute and move on…
• You get better performance if the table statistics are up to date
• Check the oci8.statement_cache_size php.ini setting to tweak your fetching performance
• Use oci_set_prefetch function (PHP5) to get a bit permance increase
• ’set autotrace on explain’ can give you more stats on your query and how it’s performing
• Look into using TKPROF and STATSPACK (admin)

Looks like a bright future ahead for Oracle and PHP - especially with the new connection pooling. I can’t wait to give it a shot…

Wandering around through the parking lot at the lunch break today, the plate in the photo was spotted. So, who wants to place money who this plate belongs to?

Not that it’s hidden out there (it’s on the main city site), but I still thought this might help some others out there headed to the Zend/PHP Conference next week.

Downtown San Jose Dining Guide [pdf]

Oh, and if there’s anyone out there that hasn’t mentioned to me already that you want one of the t-shirts, either leave a note here or email me at enygma at phpdeveloper dot org and let me know. I’m going to have them with me at least one or two days so I can get them to everyone.

See ya there…

Well, the time has officially come and they’ve sent me images of the press check of the t-shirts! It’s always odd to see something you designed on an actual shirt So, without further ado, here they are:

It looks like there might be a little bleed on the lettering on the back, but it still looks good. Oh, and no, that’s not me wearing the shirt

So, I wanted to wait until we found out for sure on Friday, but here it is:

We’re going to have a baby woo!

We now return you a regularly scheduled coding…