The March Sydney PHP Group meeting is on tonight. Once again it will be hosted by Mobile Messenger. If you’re planning to attend then meeting in the foyer downstairs (17 York St) from 6.20

The first meeting of the Sydney PHP Group for 2009 will be at 6pm on Thursday, February 5. We have a new venue above Wynyard station and you need to RSVP using Upcoming. This month I’ll be speaking about faster web applications using message queues.

Sending an email to one or two people from a contact form is pretty simple but what happens when sending an email means 5,000 of your closest friends? Richard will cover how some of the largest websites provide fast response times by off-loading intensive, non-critical jobs to back end processes.

The first week is over and I really feel I should be further along but life keeps getting in the way. Perhaps it was a bit ambitious to think I could complete the project in 14 days using only my spare time.

Today was spent creating a new template for the site. The current template was only ever meant to be temporary so that anyone visiting BabysittingGroup.com after I provided the URL could see something and register for a beta invite.

While the new template is a huge improvement on the old one I’ve decided to continue using the old template until the site is launched. Less that a week to go (hopefully).

A couple of days ago there were a few emails on the SLUG mailing list started by someone experiencing problems with a PHP script. Towards the end of the discussion I suggested:

While you’re redeveloping you should also read about Cross-site Scripting and why you should escape user input before sending it back to the browser.

Which received the response:

Isn’t PHP fun?

Once again we have seem to have someone pushing the misconception that PHP is unsafe compared to other languages. The problem isn’t PHP. Like most programming languages it does exactly what you tell it to. The problem is that most PHP programmers are self taught hobbyists who have never heard of:

• Cross Site Scripting
• Cross Site Request Forgeries
• SQL Injection
• Session fixation
• etc…

I know I can write Java, Perl and Python code that is just as unsafe by following the practices that these amatures follow. While I haven’t done much .NET or Ruby I suspect I the same applies to them too.

My point here is pretty simple. Imagine if you hired a handyman to hang a picture. If he turned up, pulled out his electric drill and a screw then proceeded to hammer the screw into the wall with the back of the drill you would blame the handyman, not the drill manufacturer. It’s the same with PHP. If you want to hire inexperienced programmers to develop your website then expect stuff to go wrong.

About 6 months ago I started using Prototype and Scriptaculous for AJAX development. I chose that combination over the Dojo Tookit because they were much better documented. While Prototype is a great AJAX library I’ve always felt that it has been let down by Scriptaculous. Effects are fine but as a web developer I’m really interested controls/components.

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of Drupal development which is how I discovered jQuery. While it’s still early days I feel safe in declaring that jQuery is my new best friend.

So why did I switch to jQuery?

1. It’s documentation is pretty good
2. It’s very similar to Prototype so migration was almost trivial
3. It seems easier to use
4. With jQuery UI I get controls rather than effects

On Thursday I’ll be doing a presentation on Subversion and Trac at the Sydney PHP Group. It will be “how to” focused so people can leave with enough knowledge to start using these tools. If you plan to attend then email rsvp@sydphp.org

At the end of OSDC last year I decided it was the right time to kick start my business and get out of cubeville. I’ve owned a company for many years now but it hasn’t done much since I stopped contracting. To get out of cubeville was going to require a new focus, new business plan, new customers and a new name.

While most people can get away with naming a company after themselves it’s a little harder when your name is Buggy. Can you imagine an IT company called Buggysoft, Buggy Consulting , Buggy Labs or Buggy Training? After tossing up names for months the company was renamed to Zoombug two weeks ago.

So what does Zoombug do? We provide LAMP consulting/development and PHP training. During the next six months the focus will be on growing the client base and releasing more code as open source.

Despite being released 3 years ago PHP 5 has struggled to gain market share. It’s been a vicious cycle of:

• Hosting companies holding off because a few applications still require PHP 4
• Applications continuing to support PHP 4 rather than risk loosing market share
• Hosting companies feeling no pressure to upgrade because applications still support PHP 4

Today I came across GoPHP5. The group is made up of projects and hosting companies pushing to make PHP 5.2 the minimum version by February 2008. Combined with the PHP Group ending support for PHP 4 at the end of this year I’m hopeful that we’ll soon be able to say goodbye to PHP 4.

Today Apple announced the release of Safari for Windows. Clearly this will not have any major impact on browser usage statistics. If Apple did not release it to gain market share then why did they? There’s a saying:

If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed.

Apple didn’t released a Windows version of Safari for the average web user, they’ve done it for the average web developer. By releasing Safari for Windows they have significantly reduced the barrier that has, until now, prevented many web developers from checking that their websites work correctly with Safari.

But why now? Why not two years ago? Two years ago Apple wasn’t about to release the iPhone. To make the iPhone work commercially they need to sell it as more than just a phone that can play music. They need to sell it as a device that can keep you connected via email and the web. Most web developers are willing to check their web site with multiple browsers but didn’t have a way to check it with Safari. Apple has now provided this just weeks before the iPhone goes on sale giving developers enough time to download Safari and fix their websites so they work on the iPhone the day it is release.

Sadly, as a Linux based web developer I’m still left out in the cold.

The slides for my presentation at this months Syd::PHP meeting about the PHP Data Objects Extension are now available online.