May 5th 2005

From PHP London wiki

Contents 1 Members meeting on 05/05/2005 1.1 Where and when 1.2 Who will be there 1.3 Apologies for absence 1.4 Agenda 1.4.1 7:00-8:00 - informal drinks, snacks and chat 1.4.2 8:00-8:05 - welcome by executive committee & any group announcements 1.4.3 8:05-9:00 - talks 1.4.4 9:00 onwards - more drinks, snacks and chat 2 Minutes 2.1 Special Thanks 2.2 The venue 2.3 Talks 2.3.1 Data Objects 2.3.2 I18N : From ASCII to Unicode through ISO 2.4 More chat and beer

Members meeting on 05/05/2005

Our regular meeting - basically a monthly PHP PubCon - which is held on the first Thursday of every month.

Meet PHP users, professional developers and recruiters near you! Come to PHP London's May 2005 meeting to exchange ideas and talk about code, architecture, innovation, and open source in general. Anyone interested in PHP is welcome!

Where and when

Fitzroy Tavern from 7pm onwards.

Who will be there

Feel free to add your name if you're coming! Everyone who does so, links to their wiki profile page (copy the coding format of other names on the list - if it is displayed in red then you've not linked to a page that exists), and actually attends, will be entered in a random draw for a prize of £10 of drinks/food from the venue (started June 2009, still popular in summer 2010...).

• Marcus Baker
• Sadiq Datoo
• Jon Ramsey
• Ketan Majmudar
• David Heath
• Andrew Larssen
• Robert Janeczek
• Marcin Brzezinski
• Radek Ostojski
• Marc Carlucci
• Jesse Walker
• Demian Turner
• Perrick Penet
• Radek Maciaszek
• Jonas Neubert
• James Pearson
• Robert Barbour
• Ian Seymour
• Chris Lock

Apologies for absence

If you wanted to come but can't/couldn't, feel free to explain yourself!

• User:Doug Boit - intended to come, but last minute problem - am still happy to contribute to venue costs - damned annoyed I'm missing the persistence stuff :-(((

Agenda

7:00-8:00 - informal drinks, snacks and chat

8:00-8:05 - welcome by executive committee & any group announcements

8:05-9:00 - talks

• I'd like to do a talk (hah, some people never learn) on I18N in PHP - won't be too detailed, but may give people some ideas; discussion to follow would be good. --Jon Ramsey
• Persistence (Changes, Data objects, PEAR::DB_DataObject) --Marcus Baker --David Heath --Demian Turner

If you are interested in giving a talk, or want to request one, please look at the talks page.

Resources from previous talks are also available.

9:00 onwards - more drinks, snacks and chat

Minutes

Around 20 people were at the Fitzroy Tavern, the meeting started at 7pm, finished at 11pm and continued at the spanish bar until 12:30am. As we booked the room few people were obliged to leave the room and one came as a Whobians member :)

For the first time at the Fitzroy Tavern, the place was big enough to welcome 20 people and do 4 demos with a projector.

The cost of the venue was splitted among the phplondoner ~2GBP each. The next time the projection will be improved with a power extension and a white sheet to have a bigger and sharper image.

Special Thanks

• Sadiq Datoo for the projector
• Ian Seymour for his laptop

The venue

Everybody agreed that the Fitzroy Tavern was a great venue.

Robert Barbour mentionned the Milkbank venue and it might used for the June meeting.

Talks

Data Objects

This 3 talks shown us how to deal with data in an application without spending hours writing the same SELECT, INSERT... SQL code.

Demian Turner started with a general presentation:

• raw database function used mainly for personal script (MySQL functions, Oracle functions...)
• PEAR DB / AdoDB

This libraries try to support different database engine using the same class and methods. AdoDB goes further using portable sql tips to be able to switch sql engine smoothly.

• PEAR DB_DataObject

This allow you to use your database table as objects, the only problem is when your using a lot of join table, you end writing more code than the SQL query, to avoid this bottleneck you can write directly the sql query.

David Heath did a presentation on his own Data Object class.

Each table is an extension of the Data Object class, the first step is to specify the table name and the table's column the get, set the data you need, want.

Marcus Baker did a presentation on Changes library, an Object Relational Tools (ORTools). To use it you write the database definition on a xml file, then you can generate the sql structure and the php classes, done with XALAN during the demo. The aim of the project was to build an alternative to the JAVA Hibernate, which will not stay in memory, due to some php limit.

The goals was to use data in the php code like database transaction: 1. Creation of the database object 2. Use, modify the data 3. At the end of the script you end the transaction via a Commit.

This approach is different from the propel solution where you must save your changes everytime. Changes library was written in 4 days and weight 8Kb, it has been posted on Sitepoint forum (you need to log in to download the code).

I18N : From ASCII to Unicode through ISO

Jon Ramsey did a presentation about internationalization, explaining the origin of the problem which is how character set were defined and exchanged.

More chat and beer

• Ruby on Rails was mentionned quite a lot.
• Book : "Php 5 Objects, Patterns, Practice", seem to have good reviews over the web
• "CodeFest II : Back to the code" should arrive soon.
• James Pearson has proposed a venue for the conference, the planning and how it's going to be done needs to be defined, more info.

--Marc Carlucci