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Open source and the times of crisis

March 17, 2009

crisis, enterprise, open source, php, symfony
I want to make one thing clear: I am far from an economist. I will be mostly speculating, giving my opinion which is based mainly on assumptions and observations. Having said that, I’m writing this to the best of my knowledge and with a clear conscience.

Recession, credit crunch, crisis. It doesn’t really matter what term you use, it seems that the news is dominated by this. And indeed, these are trying times. A lot of people are losing their jobs, lots of companies stopping investment in anything but bare necessities. And even though the IT and software world seem to not be a directly affected part (the crisis seems to hit banking and real estate mostly), we see the indirect results. I’m reading a lot about projects being cancelled or cut short. And I can understand these decisions. However, I also see opportunities in this crisis.

PHP and Open Source in general have a huge opportunity here. Out in the open source world, there is much software that has proven itself stable and enterprise-ready. There are many companies out there that are able to supply this software and support it to the enterprise world. And though the enterprise may be cancelling out “vanity” projects, they still need to innovate, they still need to show off, to convince (potential) customers that they are the best choice, that they are ahead of the rest. To survive, they need the customer now more than ever.

A big part of the Enterprise world is used to implementing big, corporate software systems based on closed technologies. This software costs a huge sum of money to be implemented, and then lots of money for licenses. Aside from the licenses, even more money needs to be spent on maintenance contracts and support. Looking at open source, the initial investment may be just as big (or perhaps slightly lower). The support contract will still cost money (though again, perhaps slightly less) because that is work that still needs to be done. However, there are two big advantages when working with open source software:
- You save a lot of money on licenses
  Since most open source licenses don’t cost you a thing but are only there to protect the rights on the code and the author, companies can save lots of money on license costs.
- You prevent vendor lockdown
  There is no need to stick with the original developer of the application when you’re not satisfied with the work. You can more easily take your business elsewhere if either the price or the quality isn’t good enough. Sure, the money needs to to be spent on maintenance and support, but at least it is possible to pick the highest quality available.
These two advantages are not new. They’re been around for as long as open source has been around. But in these times of crisis, they may become the deciding factor for companies when they need to choose between investing in open source software, investing in closed source software, or not investing at all.

The only possible problem is that big companies may not realize that open source can be enterprise-ready. And this is where the service companies come in. I think that companies such as ibuildings, Sensio, OmniTI and Zend are able to get to the enterprises and convince them to choose open source. I know they’ve been at that for quite some time, but especially in these times there are opportunities for them and many other open source-based companies to step in and contribute to solving the crisis in their own way 🙂
PHPCon Italia coming up!

March 16, 2009

conferences, php, refactoring, symfony

As I will be flying in on wednesday, I’ll be missing the workshops. Quite a shame, as Sebastian’s workshop on Quality Assurance in PHP looks quite interesting. I guess I’ll have to catch that one elsewhere. Looking at the DPC schedule there’s still one slot open… oh Cal, look what is very interesting! 😉

On thursday I’ll be speaking in the first timeslot after the opening. At that point, I will be doing my myphpbusters talk about the symfony framework. I’m competing with two italian sessions, so I’m hoping enough visitors will be comfortable enough with the english language to come by. After the coffee break I would like to attend Agile development and domain driven design by Jacopo Romei. After lunch and keynote it’s my turn again with my refactoring talk. Now, the rewritten talk that I’ve first given at the 4developers conference is one I’m quite happy with, so I’m really looking forward to giving it again. I’ve got some improvements lined up before doing it on thursday, which will improve it even more. It will be awesome! I am, however, competing against the likes of Sebastian Bergmann and Lars Jankowfsky, so I hope enough people will find refactoring an interesting topic 🙂

After my session the day is closed by three sessions in Italian, so I’ll just hang out and talk to people. If you’re visiting the conference, please do come by and say hi, I’m very interested in meeting people from the Italian PHP community!

On friday I’ll be flying back but hopefully I’ll be able to attend Lukas’ keynote and maybe his session on freetext search (but I may need to leave before that one ends). I may opt out of visiting the freetext search session to not disturb the session when I have to leave, and instead maybe talk to some people at the conference.

If you’re in Italy and do PHP: Come by in Rome this week. It’s gonna be lots of fun!
Improving your presentation by writing

March 10, 2009

articles, conferences, php, presentation, refactoring, writing

Over the past year I’ve done several presentations at user groups and conferences on the topic of refactoring. In this talk I shared some of my knowledge and experience with refactoring. Even though I am not the biggest refactoring expert, I believe that I know enough to share it with people interested in the topic. Every time I did the presentation, I was happy with the message I got across, yet not completely satisfied with the way I got it across.

When Ibuildings internally launched the TechPortal initiative and did a call for writers, I immediately took the opportunity to propose an article on refactoring. I thought it was a logical follow up to the talks I’d been giving on the subject. And indeed it was. Yet, as I was writing the article, more and more the feeling creeped up to me that I should’ve done this way earlier. I should’ve done this even before doing my first talk on the topic.

At first I was a bit confused. How could it be possible that I’d been working on this presentation (and the various incarnations of it) for quite some time, and not be satisfied with my presentation and slide deck, yet now that I was writing on the topic, I got a very clear idea of how to approach the presentation. But actually it makes a lot of sense!

When, like I did with my initial refactoring talk, you start preparing a presentation based on your own experience, you work on a short outline, and then on the slides. At least, that’s the approach I took. You order your thoughts very globally, because the only things you need to actually save are the outline and the slides. Even though you consider all the information you will be presenting, most of it stays in your head. And at least in my head, information isn’t as structured as, for instance, an article.

And this is where writing the article helped. I really had to structure the information much more in the article than I had done in my head and on the slides for my presentation. Because you don’t just put the outline into that article, you have to actually write all the information down. An article needs to have a good structure, present all information at the right time and in the right context. And even though writing the article is something completely different from preparing a talk, having the information in such a structure helps a lot in getting the information straight for your talk.

Now, the article at TechPortal is scheduled to be published in a few weeks, but already it is a success to me. I’ve used this new, more structured approach to the refactoring information when I prepared my refactoring talk for the 4developers presentation in Krakow. And having done the presentation, I am much more happy with it myself, I’ve gotten much better feedback from the attendees, and also Ivo, who has attended both my refactoring talk at PHPNW ’08 and the one in Krakow, said the latter one was much better. This feedback decided to make me share this experience.

So, if you are going to do a talk, and you can’t really get your head around the right structure for the talk, write an article. You could write the article for your weblog, for php|architect or another magazine, or not even publish it but just use it for yourself. The writing itself is more important than where you publish it, as long as it helps you in getting the right structure for your presentation.
The Power of Refactoring slides from 4developers

March 7, 2009

4developers, conferences, php, refactoring, slides

I’ve rewritten most of my presentation as a result of writing an article on refactoring (more on this later). I am quite happy with the results, but I’ll probably change it a bit more before PHPCon Italia and php|tek, at both of which I’ll also be delivering this talk. Response to my presentation was quite positive, with some very nice questions afterwards as well.

The conference itself is pretty nice as well, though there a lot of presentations in Polish. It is nice to meet some people from “other worlds”, such as Neal Ford and Ted Neward. The conference is well-organized and the people are friendly here. Even though my conference schedule for february/march was made quite busy by this conference dropping in, I must say I’m happy that I accepted the invitation to come here.

The Power Of Refactoring (4developers Krakow)

View more presentations from Stefan Koopmanschap. (tags: refactoring software)
4developers, or: a quick trip to Poland

March 5, 2009

4developers, conferences, php, refactoring, talk

The trip will be a very quick trip. I will fly out tomorrow evening, land in Katowice (1.5 hours from Krakow, as I have understood) at 21:30. I will attempt to sleep in the hotel, and then get up early as I’m on second in the Dedicated Languages track (after Ibuildings CTO and overall cool guy Ivo Jansch) to do my refactoring talk.

My refactoring talk will be a slightly adapted version of the earlier refactoring talks I did. It will still contain PHP code examples, but will also ensure people know that this practice is not limited to PHP only, but will work in any language when done properly.

After my talk, I’ll have a few hours to talk to people before having to leave again for my late afternoon flight back home. I am a bit sad about not having time to explore Krakow and surrounding areas, however having done PHP UK Conference last weekend and being in Rome for PHPCon Italia in two weeks time, I didn’t feel like being away from my wife and kids for too long.

If you’re from Poland (or just living there) feel free to come over to 4developers on saturday. It will be fun, I promise 🙂
PHP UK Conference 2009 (and my slides)

March 1, 2009

conferences, london, php, phpuk2009, symfony

I arrived on thursday morning in London for a day of working in the Ibuildings office there. So I had a very early flight in, which may not have been the smartest of things to do. But it worked alright: I missed high traffic to Rotterdam and was able to get into London before 9AM 🙂

After checking in to the speaker hotel and running by Tesco to get a toothbrush and toothpaste (I *knew* I forgot something) I was able to chill a bit. Following twitter I noticed some speakers were planning on meeting in the hotel bar, so I also went down.We had some nice conversations until it was time to check out the conference location and then move on to the speaker dinner.

After dinner it was time for the pre-conference social. During our dinner, the delegates were already treated to a talk by Derick Rethans, and then moved on to have a nice social gathering (obviously with drinks). We joined them and I talked to quite a few people, some of which I had met before, others I hadn’t. It was fun, but I went up to my room after a while. It had been a long day.

The next day was the conference day. It started with us getting ourselves to the conference location. As check-in opened, the location started to fill with people. Sponsors had their stands, with some pretty cool stuff there such as the Microsoft Surface. Then it was time for talks. I didn’t attend as many talks as I had planned or hoped, but where I didn’t attend talks, I got to meet people, which is always nice as well.

First, Marcus Baker opened with a short but nice introduction to the conference. He was quickly followed by Aral Balkan, who opened the conference with a keynote about today’s technologies and what a great time it is for working with them. Aral turned out to be an excellent speaker and he easily got his points across. Most important point that I took away was that the difference between regular and premium products is “fun”. People buy premium products because they’re fun to work with, and developers should realise this.

After a short break I went on to watch the Sharding Architectures talk by David Soria Parra. David had a very good technical talk on sharding, strategies, technologies and mindset. I enjoyed his talk, though it could’ve done with some more practical examples.

My talk went pretty well. It was well received by the audience, and I got some nice and useful feedback. And I got to convince some people to at least give symfony a better/second look. Mission Accomplished 🙂 Slides of my talk are embedded below.

After that, I ran off for Chris Shiflett’s talk, who had a nearly non-technical talk on security, which was refreshing and refreshingly useful. Chris is an excellent speaker and he was able to grab the attention of the audience (or at least me) and show some excellent examples of where and how security works and doesn’t work.

Then it was time for a drink at the conference, after which we moved on to the post-conference social for drinks and food. Somehow the post-conference social seemed less crowded than the pre-conference social, something that did surprise me a bit. However, it was fun, food was good, and again nice talks.

The morning after the conference I had breakfast with some of the speakers again, after which I met with Lorna to prepare our talk for php|tek (preparing a joint talk when living in two different countries requires some useful planning). After some tourist-y present-buying for the home front, it was time to travel back to the airport (Luton). The same train that I took was also taken by one of the members of the Infadels (easily identifiable by his small flightcase with “Infadels” spraypainted on it).

Anyway, the conference was great, I had a lot of fun and learned a few things from the sessions I attended. Plans were made for TestFest as well (expect to hear more on that later). All in all, a good conference.

Myphp-busters: symfony framework

View more presentations from Stefan Koopmanschap. (tags: phpuk2009 framework)
My schedule for PHP UK Conference 2009

February 23, 2009

conferences, php, phpuk2009

Obviously I’ll try to visit the keynote, and I should, really, because the keynote by Aral Balkan sounds interesting enough. After the keynote, I’ll be wanting to visit David Soria Parra’s talk on Sharding Architectures. Having been seriously introduced to a sharding architecture last year in a project, but not seriously exposed to the details of that architecture, I really want to see what it is all about.

After that I want to check out David Axmark’s Drizzle talk. I’ve not given Drizzle a serious look yet, and I want to know more. A perfect opportunity to get it from the source.

The first timeslot after lunch will be the hardest to choose from, and I haven’t made this decision yet. On the one hand, I’ve not seen Stuart Herbert’s talk Living with Frameworks yet and I really would like to see it, having a pretty serious framework background 😉 but on the other hand, having talked to Hank Janssen before about PHP and Windows, I already am quite curious on what Hank has to say. I’ll probably decide then and there during lunch which one it will be.

After that is my timeslot. I am luckily programmed against Mihai Corlan’s Flex talk, which I’ve seen already at the Frontend Special of the Dutch PHP usergroup. That means I won’t miss something… I already have the information 😉

In the last slot, I am aiming for attending Chris Shiflett’s Security Centered Design talk. It sounds like a nice talk and is definately a topic I’m interested in.

Overall, PHP London have been able to select a top schedule with awesome speakers and a nice list of topics covered. I’m very much looking forward to it!
A first look at Zend Server

February 20, 2009

php, zend, zend server

I decided to start fresh so I launched my Parallels and installed a fresh Debian VM to check Zend Server out on. After running through the Debian installation I was ready to start the work.

I was happily surprised to read on the download page that Zend was now offering a Debian repository so I could use apt-get to install Zend Server. Unfortunately, the only way to get to the installation instructions was to download a 0.7Mb PDF file. Not a big problem, but it could’ve simply been a small text on the download page with instructions.

Adding the repository was as simple as editting the sources.list and updating, so the installation could begin. NOT. Even downloading and adding the key did not help me, I kept running into an error about public keys missing. Since I didn’t feel like digging into this, I decided to simply download the .tar.gz with the installer and go from there.

So, back to a fresh start. I downloaded the .tar.gz, unzipped, and ran the installer. Now this installation was a very nice experience. Very simple, just asking me for the path to install Zend Server into, with the default being /usr/local (which would be my choice). Surprisingly, the installer did not ask for the GUI password. After the installation was finished, I was informed to have to manually run a shell script to set a password. Not troublesome, but could’ve been slightly more userfriendly by putting that into the installer. I also noted that Zend Server was being installed into /usr/local/zend instead of /usr/local/Zend, where previous Zend applications were installed into. Again, not troublesome, just surprising.

Now, I was able to get to the GUI, running on port 10082. I was greeted with a login screen that looks more fresh than Zend Platform’s, but of course that’s just the looks. After logging in, I get to a dashboard that immediately informs me that Zend Server is running PHP 5.2.8, has a recent Zend Framework. Oh wait, Zend Framework 1.7.4? Doesn’t that have a security flaw in it? Even though the issue with Zend Framework was minor, this doesn’t look good for an “enterprise-ready Web Application Server” that is meant for “PHP applications that require a high level of reliability, performance and security.” Minor as it is, it would’ve been nice to actually see the latest version of Zend Framework included.

Back to the dashboard. The dashboard is nice and clear. It has a list of the most common tasks, with links directly to where you can go work on those tasks. It also has an overview of the status (on or off) of the most important Zend Server components (Data Cache, Debugger, Guard Loader, Java Bridge and Optimizer+). And of course it has it’s regular navigation. One last thing to note is the interesting button in the right bottom: “Restart PHP”. Especially interesting since usually you don’t restart PHP, but you restart the web server.

Navigation through the Zend Server GUI I find it must nicer to work with than Zend Platform. A seemingly AJAX based system loads the selected pages for me. The whole user experience is pleasant.

However, looking at the actual functionality, I get less thrilled. The Zend Server GUI looks a lot like Zend Platform. It’s got all the basic functionality such as turning on and off extensions, changing the PHP configuration and managing the IP’s that are allowed to connect using the Zend Debugger. In the community edition of Zend Server I sorely miss, however, things like being able to easily see repeating PHP errors and slow script or query execution, tools that are quite useful in Zend Platform. According to the website, the Enterprise Edition does include these tools, but I suspect that once Zend Server leaves beta, that one will start costing some money whereas the Community Edition will probably remain free. The community however, would benefit a lot from those development-supporting tools. The community may be less interested in software updates, hot fixes and technical support for Zend Server, but development-supporting features would’ve been nice to have in the Community Edition.

So, the interface looks quite nice. The whole user experience of navigating through the GUI and changing settings is quite nice. However, from a functional point of view, I think Zend could’ve done a better job for the community. A big part of the community may just as easily install apache, php5 and mysql from the dotdeb repository or even compile it themselves, and most of the community will probably not really need a GUI to enable an extension. This is just a beta though, so things may change in the future. We’ll see. Right now, I’m a bit indifferent about this new suite. It’s good to see something new coming from Zend, but I think they could’ve done better.

Full disclosure: I work for ibuildings, who is a partner of Zend. Everything in the above are my personal observations of my first look at Zend Server.
symfonyUnderControl: lime integration with phpUnderControl

February 8, 2009

continuous integration, ibuildings, lime, php, phpUnderControl, phpunit, symfony, symfonyUnderControlPlugin

There is a plugin for symfony that enables phpUnit testing for symfony projects. However, this plugin used to be in limbo for quite a while. Besides, even though I see the power of phpUnit and have worked with it on several occassions, I personally prefer the more minimalistic approach of lime for unit testing.

From the first moment I was introduced to the concept of continuous integration I have been really interested in this. I’ve been playing with several packages for CI and set them up for fun. One thing that kept bothering me was that I could not test my own symfony projects with it.

I started working on the symfonyUnderControlPlugin a few months ago, and quickly had a working proof of concept. It wasn’t perfect, but it did the job: It outputted xUnit XML to the logs directory of phpUnderControl based on the test results of my unit and functional tests. However, this setup was far from perfect. Time constraints kept me from spending more time on it at that point though.

Recently, inside Ibuildings, a new program was launched. This program enables Ibuildings employees to get allocated a certain amount of time to work on Open Source software. I’ve sent in a proposal to enable me to further work on the symfonyUnderControlPlugin and this was approved! So, last week, I started working on rewriting the plugin to have a better setup and after not even having spent half of my allocated time, I’ve already come to a point where I was able to generate more than the XML my Proof of Concept was generating. I’ve now released this as a first alpha preview release with release number 0.0.1 .

So, thanks to Ibuildings, symfony/lime users can now start trying to integrate their projects with phpUnderControl continuous integration. Keep in mind that this is not production-ready yet, it’s a first alpha release. But I appreciate any feedback I can get on this version: bugs, feature requests, comments, questions. Everything is welcome.
TestFest 2009 is coming!

February 4, 2009

php, testfest

The Dutch PHP Usergroup has also registered itself as one of the organizers. We’re currently in early planning stages but we’ve already committed ourselves to organize a TestFest this year together with the Belgian usergroup. Our main aim is to make this year’s event bigger and better and ensure even more tests to be delivered to the PHP team. Of course, we have last year’s success to defend, so we should aim high 😉

Aside from that, other user groups have already committed to organizing a TestFest and at php|tek, TestFest will also be present as part of the Hack-a-thon being organized! Matthew Turland and I are the main people responsible for that. If you’re interested in this, please do contact one of us.

We’re working on getting TestFest into more places as well, so it seems the TestFest virus is spreading already. If you’re representing a usergroup or otherwise want to contribute to TestFest, come hang out in #phptestfest on irc.freenode.net!