PHP Vikinger is over again. With about 35 attendees, I would think it was a great success. After opening the event, we figured out which topics people were interested in. After voting for the topics, we came up with a nice couple of topics. First we had a little discussion on QA and Testing, which Thomas Nuninnger moderated. I include my (raw) notes from this:

Selenium takes a long time to run tests, so Thomas only uses it for front end only, whereas phpunit is used for as much as possible backend code. Selenium apparently has some functionality for parallizing ( selenium grid), but there are some issues as well as you can not tell it to run specific tests parallel. WebDriver does exactly the same, except for running it in the same browser. But it's going away from actually using a real browser... which sorta defeats the point of Selenium. Thomas also mentions that sometimes a fixed value as recorded by the IDE is not good... but you can "fix" that yourself in the PHPUnit tests that Selenium can export. The IDE is getting better BTW. CruiseControl, phpUnderControl, phing (phing is not gnu make) - a port of Ant.

After this, we had a discussion about the deployment of web applications, where we discussed some different approaches such as "svn check-out", but also tools for doing so such as Capistrano.

Sebastian then explained a little bit about the PHP Object Model. We also tried to figure out a strange profiling issue in one of Zoë Slattery's applications with Xdebug, but we could not manage to figure out what it was just yet. The last talk before lunch was from Kore Nordmann about CouchDb.

After the pizza lunch provided by Klosterøya, we continued with presentations on Project Zero, by Ant Philips of IBM; the new lexer in PHP by Scott MacVicar and a talk by Sebastian Bergmann on the eZ Components' Workflow component. The last talk of the day was by Tobias Schlitt on database abstraction with eZ Components.

I will put the slides online at the PHP Vikinger website once I receive all of them.

Merci Bård pour l'info. Thanks Bård for the information

Plus d'informations (sérieuses) sur la eZ Conference 2008 d'ici quelques jours...

The second beta version of the eZ XML Installer has just been released.

Please see here for details.

Please go here to download and test this version.

eZ Partner Granite Horizon will be running eZ Publish Developer Basics training at the University of California, Berkeley from August 5 - 8. Note that this is not an Official eZ Training course, but it is based on eZ Systems material and is run by a certified eZ Publish developer.

The eZ Components development team is happy to announce the eZ Components 2008.1 release. Starting from this version, eZ Components requires PHP 5.2.1.

In this release, there are three new components:

• The Document component enables you to convert documents between different formats.
• The Feed component parses and generates RSS1, RSS2 and ATOM feeds.
• The new Search component provides a unified interface to different search engine back-ends, quite similar to what the Database and PersistentObject components provide for database access.

The eZ Components 2008.1 release also comes with a new version of my workflow engine, Workflow 1.2. Here are the highlights of this update:

• Support for the Cancel Case Workflow Pattern has been added.
• A plugin system that allows developers to hook into the workflow engine at well-defined extension points has been added.

A new tie-in component, WorkflowSignalSlotTiein, has been added to allow integration between the Workflow and SignalSlot components.

Exciting ! Only two days before eZConf and the eZAwards !

So a year is gone since last time I trampled the Norvegian floor and I'm ready to go there again. Why ? Simply for the best :

1. The bigger CMS conference in the world
2. The eZAward after party
3. Salmon
4. Grenland

As a nominee, I would like to wish a good luck to everybody.

However, I've got bad news for everyone, it won't be a pleasure like last year. It seems that we will have bad weather suring the conf but it will be better just after.

And now, a little trick in order to make accept eZFlow by women.

See you in Skien !

During Stefan Priebsch' session at the Dutch PHP Conference on PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 - A look ahead a discussion popped up about PHP's namespace support. One of the things that came up is the conflicts that can arise with internal classes.

Take for example this code:

<?php
use PEAR::Date::Interval as Interval;
?>

In PHP 5.3 this would alias the class Interval in the namespace PEAR::Date to the class Interval. For now, this code would work just fine. However, if PHP would introduce a class "Interval" at some point in the future (and PHP can do this as it owns the global namespace) then the above code would suddenly stop failing. So in order to use namespaces properly, you always need to have at least two elements left, like:

<?php
use PEAR::Date as pd;
$interval = new pd::Interval;
?>

You need to make sure of course that the short name that you pick is something that does not sound to much like a class name otherwise you'll have exactly the same issue. It's not very likely that PHP will introduce a class pd though.

We are pleased to announce that Seeds Consulting is nominated for the eZ Awards 2008 in two categories: Contribution of the year for the Swark extension and Publication of the year for the Helper Child Nodes: User-Friendly Search Results and Preventing Full Node Views article.

For those who haven't heard of "Micro-blogging" wikipedia defines it as: Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging,

In case you haven't seen the comments generated out of my last couple of posts, this is intended to be a summary. Thanks to all the fine eZ crew that jumped on and clarified things. It appears that jagels missed the middle '0' in 4.0.1 in his initial comment, making it seem (to me at least) like eZ were recommending that 4.0 should not be used and to hold off until 4.1. The advice was