MIH SWAT

Recently I went to Luke Welling’s presentation entitled “PHP in the 21½th Century” at OSCON. He mentioned something interesting that got me thinking, something he calls “The Smarty Trap”. This trap occurs when someone decides to write a template engine with “a simple syntax that designers can understand” – it starts with some includes and printing a variable here and there. All goes well until he realizes he needs looping, so he builds loops into the language. And so it continues until the template engine is as complicated as any other programming language. (more…)

Once again php|architect hosted the php|tek conference, a yearly event held in Chicago. Tek has a reputation of being one of the most community-centered conferences, and true to its reputation this year’s conference promoted a variety of social networking activities alongside the usual conference sessions. The presence of various key players in the PHP ecosystem (Core Developers, Community Leaders, Products leaders and various representatives and evangelists from leading companies) was definitively a highlight for me. (more…)

This year I was honored by being invited to participate as a member of the PHP Community in Microsoft’s Web Developer Summit. I used the opportunity to represent the huge PHP community in Brazil and highlight the community’s work. (more…)

October 2009 saw my return to San Jose for one of the top conferences on the PHP calendar – ZendCon. Other than taking place a month later and the conference venue shifting locations slightly, much of the format of this year’s ZendCon was the same as last year’s. (more…)

In the past I blogged about SPL (the Standard PHP Library) and how it makes PHP Developers’ life’s easier. Since then i have noticed a lack of SPL recipes on the web. If you are getting to know SPL, the use of the available classes can be a real mystery. So I decided to add more posts on SPL for Google to add to its index. This is the first in a series of posts. (more…)

Security is a recurring topic when discussing Technology. Taking security for granted when you are developing an application, even if it is a very simple application is a huge mistake which can have grave consequences. (more…)

This year the PHP Community promoted the PHPTestFest in various places around the globe and it was a success. I participated in the event promoted by the PHPSP UG (PHP Sao Paulo User Group) which ended up as being the team with the most tests committed. After participating in the event I kept going and have since obtained an SVN account and karma to be an official test committer to PHP. (more…)

This review has been pending for a while, but recently I finished reading Derick Rethans’ book: Date and Time Programming. At first glance the topic of the book might lead you to think “why do I need a book to teach me about such a simple topic” ? But further investigation and hard experience will show you that handling date and time in software development is not always as straightforward as “Its twelve o’clock”. (more…)

By a show of hands, how many people here have ever heard of SPL? How many have used it? Chances are most of you did not raise your hands, and some might even have a confused look on their faces. Not many know what SPL is, so let’s explore. (more…)

Rafael Dohms, one of SWAT’s PHP experts and a leading proponent of PHP in Latin America attended the 2009 php|tek conference in Chicago. This conference is hosted by MTACon, the company behind php|architect magazine, one of the most influent PHP publications in the world. Rafael tells the story of the conference in this post. (more…)