walkah: php

I know it's late notice, but I'll be hosting a free workshop tomorrow night, April 2nd at 7pm as part of the PHUG + RMI free workshops.

For those of you here in Toronto that are unaware, PHUG is the new local PHP User Group. They have a lot of momentum and are an exciting group - I look forward to more collaboration in the future betweeh PHUG and DUG-TO.

The workshop will be Drupal Basics - a crash course in everyone's favourite CMS. We'll look at the core Drupal concepts, how building sites in Drupal works, and some basic theming tricks.

It's a free event, but space is limited so please register. Looking forward to meeting some new faces!

UPDATE: P.S. this isn't an April Fool's joke ;)

I blogged a while back about trying out komodo 4.0, the development IDE from ActiveState. In the end, to be honest, I just couldn't really get into it. One of my biggest reasons for not sticking with it was performance: it's tough to learn a new app if it's routinely slow and unresponsive. However, JeffG pointed out in a comment that Komodo worked much better on Intel Macs than PPC. So, I thought I'd give it a whirl on the new macbook pro.

The difference in performance is amazing. I can actually use this tool now as it was meant to be used! With apologies to Sacha and all the emacs people, I've been using Komodo IDE for all of my Drupal development for the past 2 weeks and I like it. I know it's some sort of lost geek cred, but function name completion (not just for PHP functions, but Drupal internal functions as well!), integrated debugging and all that stuff really can make your life easier when it's working well.

But, naturally, wouldn't be a blog post if I didn't have a gripe or two - although these ones are minimal. So dear lazyweb:

I love the 'open/find toolbar' - but I can't for the life of me find a keyboard shortcut to focus the open file box there. (i.e. ctrl-i works for the find part, but what's the equivalent for the "open" box?). The one adjustment in moving from emacs is actually having to use a mouse. :(

The other one I actually asked in the support forum (which runs drupal, of course), but the issue is for all of my client work I have drupal checkouts from CVS managed in subversion repositories. I actually, in these cases, would like Komodo to ignore the CVS meta-files and treat the project as using SVN. Any hints?

Anyway, Shane, Jeff and the whole Komodo crew: I just might be a convert. Congrats on your great work :)

One of the nice side effects of speaking last month at the Vancouver PHP conference, was that one of the sponsors, ActiveState, gave out licenses for the latest version of Komodo - their IDE. Now, traditionally, I've had a really hard time using anything other than emacs for software development. I started using emacs in university 10 or so years ago, and it's just comfortable now. But, some drupal developers I know love it, so I'm giving it the ol' college try with Komodo. Here's how it's going:

The Good

• Komodo is built on Mozilla technology. Why is that important? Well, it's a platform I believe in - that has to count for something, right? It also means that both projects can benefit each other, and Komodo is inherently cross-platform (something I still believe is important).
• "Just works" debugging for PHP. Komodo works natively with xdebug for PHP debugging, and it works - and works well. As someone who writes a lot of "web services" type software, I see the value in being able to debug things when tools like var_dump() aren't readily accessible.
• Some nice drupal-specific features as well as using drupal for their support site - that's got to win them something ;)
• Emacs key-bindings

The less good

• Performance. I don't know how Firefox does it, but it's the one XUL application on my G4 Powerbook that isn't dog slow (even Thunderbird struggles a bit). I probably just need a faster computer, really.
• Emacs keybindings: there's just lots I can't seem to do from the keyboard. Mice and I have never gotten along, and my powerbook's trackpad is even worse. I try to avoid them as much as possible. For example, I like to periodically CVS/SVN update my working copy. Yes, there is a keybinding for this action, but as far as I can tell, I have to click on the project in the left hand side to make sure the update happens for the whole project (otherwise it only happens on the current file). Region selection is another example.
• Komodo is not free. Again, this is personal belief (religion?), but as much as I appreciate Komodo for using Mozilla, I don't like the fact that the useful version of Komodo is not free. Had I not received a license for free, I'm not sure I could justify the cost.

All that said, I don't know that I've fully made up my mind yet. Because it's built on mozilla, Komodo is fully extensible - perhaps I could write extensions to make it just how I want it. Right now, however, I feel slow and clumsy in Komodo.

I'm going to keep trying - there is part of me that really wants to like it - but I'm not sold yet.

Yesterday marked the end of the Vancouver PHP conference, which was a lot of fun and went quite well (I thought). I led two sessions : one on OpenID (with Johnny Bufu from SXIP). For those who don't know, I've been working a lot lately on getting OpenID support into Drupal - and it was nice to demo some of that work. I also covered how to use JanRain's PHP Library to OpenID-enable your PHP app (check out the slides here).

I also led a session on beginning Drupal module development. Those of you who attended the DrupalCon in Brussels may remember this as the infamous pants talk - always a crowd pleaser ;)

Thanks a lot to the organizers and sponsors from Vancouver PHP, I had a great time. Oh, and a special thank to Shane from ActiveState - part of the speaker shwag package was a license to Komodo IDE. I've heard good things about the latest Komodo, can't wait to check it out.

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but in a couple weeks I'm headed back to Vancouver to present at the Vancouver PHP Conference, February 12th and 13th. I'll actually be giving two talks (back to back even): the first will be a joint presentation with SXIP on OpenID going through background and explanation and also looking at PHP code for openid (maybe even some drupal code ;). The second presentation - just me, sorry - will be an introduction to drupal development. Not to give anything away, but there may just be pants involved.

I should also note that fellow bryght guy and drupal ninja, Steven Wittens, will be presenting. But, if that's not enough, there will also be some other PHP developers you may have heard of giving talks like Rasmus, Derick Rethans and more - check the schedule for the complete list. Now, go register.

I don't usually blog much... and certainly not about things like releases of new PHP versions. However, I think it's worth noting that php 5.2 has been released. From the sounds of things, and certainly from my minimal experiments with it, it seems that php 5 may have finally arrived.

Anyone out there running php5 in heavy (large scale) production? Is it time to move beyond the safe "known entity" comforts of php4?