Andrei Zmievski

This past Tuesday I was a co-presenter at GeekSessions, an event that brings together speakers on a particular topic and the audience interested in it, or, as their site says, “a place with smart people and free beer.” This Geeksessions event was, of course, centered on PHP and the other speakers were Cal Henderson of Flickr, Lucas Nealan of Facebook, and Sara Golemon of Yahoo!. We each had 15 minutes, but everyone had excellent talks given the time constraints.
Thanks to Cindy and Shon Burton and Christian Perry for inviting me and for organizing the event, and to Terry Chay, for being the MC.
The slides from my 15 minute talk, all 40+ of them are on the Talks page.

I am back from Atlanta. This was a pretty good conference and also my first visit to that area. There were some very interesting talks, and the closing keynote was supremely funny and inventive – great job, Sean (and Marco). A few of us ventured into the city in the evening and had the best LHB event so far.
Slides for my keynote and VIM presentation are available on the Talks page.

Ed Finkler, or funkatron, as he prefers to be known (although I’ll have to investigate this claim of “tron”ing the “funk”), put up a Guide to php|works Atlanta. He has good judgement to highlight both of my talks (your pick of a beer at the conference, Ed). Apparently, Matt Mullenweg won’t like whatever it is I have to say in my keynote, which means I can make whatever extravagant claims I want. And yes, “Vim for (PHP) Programers” should be very nerdy, yet very, very hot. Oh yes. Work it, baby. I’m almost positive someone will go into the Insert mode during the talk.
Off to Atlanta tomorrow. I hear that the ratio of single, attractive, funny and intelligent women to, well, men over there is about 9:1. ‘Nuff said.

PHP internals mailing list has been filled with massive threads lately, mostly concerning PHP 6. Nothing too surprising in the amount, topics, or quality of polemic there, but I just love it when someone pipes in with a post like this:

I don’t really know much about topic X, and to be honest, I don’t really
know much about the internal workings of php. I’m going to suggest an implementation suggestion… Keep in mind I havent
hacked around with php source, so my variable naming etc will be wrong…
and its all psuedocode, so its not
[a page of C++ snipped]
I think this would provide a very fast implementation of what is trying to
be done.
Im just making a suggestion, and feel free to ignore/criticise me if im
wrong. I don’t know anything about phps internals… Just an idea

That’s just awesome. We totally haven’t considered that before, but your brilliant, yet humble and self-deprecating idea has shined new light onto the issue. Don’t worry about PHP internals, it’s just some hackish code we had lying around.
I just have to wonder why someone would post this without bothering to research the issue at hand for at least 15 minutes. It’d be like me going to the space shuttle designers and saying, “Hey, I know I don’t have a degree in rocket engineering and it’s just an idea, but that problem with the insulation foam you’re having.. have you thought about putting some duct tape on it?”
Every message like this leads me to change my default presumptions about the cluefulness of the new posters to the list, and unfortunately, not in a better direction.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have namespaces.

Just finished giving my second talk, VIM for (PHP) Programmers, at the PHP Québec conference. The first one was the usual Unicoding with PHP 6 one, and this is next to last time I’ve given it (php|tek in Chicago will be the last one). Both are available on the Talks page. I also updated the VIM resource files which I encourage you to download.
Unfortunately, I did not beat Rasmus’s talk this time, so clearly there is room for improvement.

Linux.com published an article based on the interview that Bruce Byfield did with me at the Vancouver PHP Conference. It’s a pretty good overview of the Unicode effort in PHP 6, albeit with a couple of minor inaccuracies.

It looks like we have finally settled on an approach for HTTP input (request) decoding in PHP 6. There have been no fewer than 4 different proposals floated before, but this one combines flexibility, performance, intuitiveness, and minimal architectural changes, and has only a couple of small drawbacks. Let’s take a closer look.
As you probably know, correctly determining the encoding of HTTP requests is somewhat of an unsolved problem. I know of no mainstream clients that send the charset specification along with the request. This means that it is up to the server or the application to figure out the encoding, which can be done in a number of ways, including encoding detection, looking at Accept-Charset header, parsing request to see if _charset_ field is passed, and more. Unfortunately, none of them are completely reliable and the best you can do is guess the encoding with some degree of confidence.
Continue reading “PHP 6 and Request Decoding” »

People, enough with new frameworks already. I know you might be lusting after Rails for some reason and want to have the fame, the glory, and the dancing girls of DHH, but are we not going to be satisifed until Sourceforge is filled with the object-oriented diarrheal remains of our overblown egos and delusions of grandeur? I counted no less than 3 separate announcements about new PHP frameworks today, just by scanning the front pages of phpdeveloper.org and planet-php.net. As well intentioned and technically robust as these efforts might be, do we really need yet another patterns-based abstracted MVC-driven buzzwords-filled concoction? Look at the list of existing PHP frameworks, are they really all that different? Why start another one? Why? How long are we going to be suffering from the NIH syndrome? Oh, the humanity…
If you have an itch that only frameworks can scratch, then my advice, should you choose to take it, is to find an existing mature framework that gets as close as possible to your requirements and work on it. Add features, fix bugs, write documentation, promote, contribute, and improve in general, but resist the urge to spew out a torrent of code into our environment simply because you thought of an oh-so-clever moniker and need to stick it onto something. Please, no more new frameworks.

The slides from my Unicoding with PHP 6 talk are now available on the Talks page. VIM slides and resources will be coming up shortly.
I want to thank Shane Caraveo, Audrey Foo, Peter, and the rest of the organizers for the excellent, well-run conference. I really enjoyed the variety and quality of the talks.