March —————————————-
SXSW Interactive
http://sxsw.com/interactive
When: March 11 – 15, 2011
Where: Austin, TX, USA

DevConnections
http://devconnections.com
When: March 27-30, 2011
Where: Grand Lakes JW Marriott Resort Hotel

Web 2.0 Expo
http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2011
When: March 28 – 31, 2011
Where: San Francisco, CA, USA at Moscone West
Technology driven Business

April —————————————-
CodeConf
http://codeconf.com/
When: April 9 – 10, 2011
Where: San Francisco, CA, USA at the Hyatt Regency

Microsoft Convergence
http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/convergence/atlanta11/
When: April 10-13, 2011
Where: Atlanta, GA, USA

MIX11
http://live.visitmix.com/
When: April 12 – 14, 2011
Where: Las Vegas, NV, USA at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center

PHP Community Conference
http://phpcon.org/
When: April 21 – 22, 2011
Where: Nashvill, TN, USA

May —————————————-
Make Web Not War
http://www.webnotwar.ca/
When: May 6 – 7, 2011
Where: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Interop
http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/
When: May 8 – 12, 2011
Where: Las Vegas (Mandalay Bay)

Google IO
http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/
When: May 10 – 11, 2011
Where: San Francisco, CA, USA at the Moscone Center

Dutch PHP Conference
http://www.phpconference.nl/
When: May 19 – 21, 2011
Where: Amsterdam, Netherlands

PHP Tek
http://tek11.phparch.com/
When: May 24 – 27, 2011
Where: Chicago USA

June —————————————-
Lone Star PHP
http://lonestarphp.com/
When: June 21, 2011
Where: Dallas, TX, USA
July —————————————-
OSCON
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011
When: July 25-29, 2011
Where: Portland, OR, USA

Un Announced —————————————-

ZendCON
Usualy Oct/Nov. in SFO/SJC

When I first installed PHP Manager I intended on running it beside Zend Server CE.  I quickly found that PHP Manager took care of most of the functionality I needed in my initial development environment (I like to call it ‘Alpha-dev’).  In Alpha-dev I am concerned with UnitTesting and growth.  I rarely debug or do support from my local computer’s web server.  The bluk of what I want localy is the ability to configure and run with the least overhead.  My Alpha-dev is on a laptop that I format often for security and sanity.  Thus I can’t spend a bunch of time configuring some sudo XML file (yes, I usually just backup the config).  Also when I want to upgrade PHP I don’t want to have to uninstall and reinstall anything.  This is what I have found to be the best path with Zend Server CE, to uninstall and reinstall the latest version.  In fact it would be nice to just be able to add an arbitrary version of PHP to a particular application/site and proceed to use it.  Further it would be great to be able to run PHP4 for testing code that should be compatible, and the latest version of PHP since I have a framework that lives there.

While PHP Manager isn’t quite as slick as simply backing up my config files on a Linux box, it is stupefyingly easy to setup.  All that is needed is to download the Win binary PHP version you want in a zip file, extract it, and select the php-cgi.exe from the PHP Manger in IIS.  You can set a common version at a machine level.  Then for each odd application, you can select the desired PHP version on a site level, or even an application pool level.

Also included with PHP Manager is a configuration tool.  This tool is quaintly Microsoft-like and will make even your most skeptical MS admin comfortable.  A couple of times I got a notice on the configuration tool that set me back at first.  It said that I didn’t have optimal settings, and to ‘click here’ to fix this.  The control freak in me really hates it when my computer tries to do tasks that I don’t want it to.  This warning however was to simply tell me that the tool wanted to monitor the php.ini for changes.  If this is the extent of the ‘fix’ we are golden.  Time will tell.  As I have been using PHP Manager for a while, I haven’t seen anything that was negative, just green fields waiting to be developed.  If MS is going there that is.  I doubt that they will be developing anything to compete feature-for-feature with Zend Server CE, but they don’t really need to.  Leave it to the community and they will build applications packaged in WPI to take care of any additional functionality you may need.

This does not mean I think that anyone is looking to take the lead from Zend Server as my enterprise PHP platform of choice.  There is a feature set that is solid for creating, maintaining and scaling applications, which is decidedly separate from PHP Manager’s targeted feature set (as far as I know).  PHP Manager is simply a nice tool for configuring IIS servers and sites with multiple versions of PHP.  It will be even better when it learns how to play nicely with Zend Server, and thus may find itself making its way into production websites of mine.

Until then it will be making me happy on my laptop development environment.

But getting over myself and realizing that ‘targetFramework’ obviously indicates it doesn’t recognize .NET 4 since it was installed before IIS I opted for a bit of searching.  I found the documentation for aspn_regiis.  Reading through the documentation I found out it was quite an easy command to use.  The documentation itself says “The i, ir, iru and enable options are typically the only options that you require in order to register ASP.NET applications with IIS.”.  So, I went to the directory of the version of .NET I wanted to register and ran the command with a -i switch (‘install’) it did the trick.  What I ended up running was:

c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

Next time I run into this, hopefully I will remember.

To get to the PHP manager, simply select your server name from within IIS for global settings. On the right hand pane you will see the icon for the PHP Manager. Open it and you will be presented with several sub headings: PHP Setup, PHP Settings, PHP Extensions.  My first thought was that it was going to be easy.  I clicked ‘Register new PHP version’, browsed to the php-cgi.exe and clicked ok.

It told me that there was not a sub-directory for extensions.  Here is where things got hung up a bit.  It seems that the manager expects things to be situated a certain way.  I didn’t want to disrupt things.  I thought it might be nice if I could make a simlink like I would on Linux.  I never tried the new simlinks in Win 7, so I used the following commands from the directory where the php-cgi.exe was located:

mklink /H php.ini ..\etc\php.ini
mklink /D ext ..\lib\phpext

Once I did this, i was able to register that particular PHP instance.  If this helps you out let me know!

It is $35 for this all day event.  As an added bonus, it will be on gotowebinar.com so you can do the whole thing in your PJs like me.

This event looks to be helpful at a key point in my career, and in my year.  I will have just gotten back from ZendCon and some mad networking.  If you are going to either DC4D or ZendCon look me up or leave a comment and let me know what you think.

When I first started my deployment I thought that there were some major differences in the web.config from IIS 7 to IIS 7.5.  Instead, what I discovered is that installing all the IIS modules I needed was key.  There are a few things like ‘Basic Authentication’ that are not there by default.  I had some problems with my URL rewrites that I never did track down.  They didn’t seem to work even after I installed the proper module.  Then while fooling with some other things it just started working.  Some day I will find out what it was, I am bound to run into it again during deployment.  I did however find a tool I want to get more acquainted with called ‘Failed Request Tracing Rules’  which should help me in the future with my URL rewrites on IIS.  Working with the ASP MVC has shown that IIS can be used in some interesting ways without rewrite rules.  I plan on looking into that as well in future releases of Dante.

So should it make sense to host your PHP site on Windows?  I have used Windows as my development desktop for some time.   My reason was that windows was simply given the most gaming attention.   A fact which admittedly has nothing to do with server OS.  I will express my experience/perspective while you draw your own conclusions.

All platforms go through growing pains.  Recently I have experienced that with ASP.NET MVC.  In fact I have experienced similar negatives at one time or another on all platforms I use : Windows, Apple, Linux, BSD, Perl, PHP, Python, Java, C#, VB.NET…  So I really don’t find myself in a ‘camp’ or as an ‘activist’ or ‘zealot’ since I am purely concerned with the outcome of the given task taking into consideration the ecosystem it needs to survive.  Say I was a landscaper that preferred palm trees and someone asked me to put a tree at their Montana home.  I could make one stand and maybe even grow for a time.  However the tree would certainly not last past August.

I have been afforded the challenge of testing PHP in places I didn’t think it would grow.  But like a yucca, you can find it in places you may not think likely.  I have written windows services, servers and daemons using PHP.  I have experimented with desktop GUI applications and have automated all kinds of administrative operations across all mainstream operating systems.  Was PHP always the ideal tool for the job.  Admittedly not.  However it is conceivable that with a little attention, it could be quite a robust tool for any of those uses, and is quite ideal an many cases.

Perhaps this is why in ’07 cross platform compatibility seemed to become a front-seat concern for companies like Zend, who desired PHP reach its full potential on Windows.  My greatest concern at the time was the simple non-existence of some extensions on Windows.  The company I was working for was hosted on Linux at the time, and had gotten accustomed to some extensions.  The local network admin had required Windows desktops which didn’t thwart our development using PHP.  Never the less, there were shortcomings to this sort of practice at the time.  Microsoft ans Zend addressed this.  The solution to solidifying a platform’s foundation on an operating system is to get expert resources involved.  I am happy to say that the WinPHP community is thriving and well today.

Given the attention that is being given to the platform running on Windows I suspect you will see more and more production sites being hosted on Windows and serving up things like WordPress and Dante and even more custom apps.  The truth of the matter is that developing in PHP5 is quite enjoyable.  The ease of bringing anyone from other OOP programing languages like Java and C# on board makes assembling teams much easier.  The fact that PHP 5.3 enhances frameworks and support for Windows native APIs is gravy on the already tasty steak that is PHP.  (apologies to the vegans)

So my recommendation: ignore out-of-date information on any subject.  Do hands-on tests to see if it fits the methods and comfort level of your ecosystem.  Don’t let OS dictate your programming language.

There are quite a few I know of now that develop on Win and host on Linux.  For those I have two tips:

1. Always use a forward slash (‘/’) in path names.
2. Never ignore case.

The reason for #2 is that you will be very frustrated with things not working on a Unix server if you are lazy and ignore case.  If you keep both these points in mind you can easily build PHP applications on any OS and have them run with no code changes on the other platforms.  This is true if you want to support multiple OS or RDMS.  Because the setup you are using could be case insensitive, you could forget the importance of case sensitivity.

Then, as Ruslan Yakushev pointed out, some extensions are simply meant for Linux and are not practical to port from there.  Sometimes when they are ported their effective ness is limited because of the original code taking advantage of specific Linux features.  Enter the WinCache extension.  WinCacheis APC’s win32 sibling.  It offers completely parallel functionality to APC while taking advantage of Windows specific features.  This is very interesting to me since a subset of the framework I work on focuses on exploiting Windows platform functionality.  The implementation of WinCache seems to be well thought out since it makes moving between it and APC dependent code relatively painless.  It seems that Joomla, Drupal, and Sugar have been early adopters.  I also hear rumors of WordPress patches and Zend Framework back-ends.

Beyond op-code caching, WinCache offers enhancement in file caching, resolve path caching and a session save handler.  These seem to target a much needed performance gap that isn’t answered by simply switching to IIS on Windows.  PHP applications on Linux have benefited from this sort of acceleration for ages. In fact, several applications I have written that were heavy in file system operations were unable to leave the Linux wildlife reserve.

As I move forward with projects like Dante Job Scheduler, it is good to know I wont hit any hindrances like second-rate op-code cache performance.  This may have been a showstopper in the past, but as far as I can see, there are no more excuses for not using PHP.  Leave your server OS choice to your Server Administrator and build great web apps!

One of the features of the windows operating system that deserves exploiting is Task Scheduler 2.  Task Scheduler 2 was introduced on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  At first glance you may just see Cron with a GUI.  It isn’t like they dedicated a Microsoft Certification to it and you would be hard pressed to find Task Scheduler training.  However Task Scheduler 2 is much more than run Foo at the given date and time.  You have a wide variety of triggers, conditions and options surrounding the execution of the given command.  Time being one trigger of many including immediate queuing.   This single ‘hidden’ potential could be reason enough to have a single Windows Server in your environment.  Fortunately for us Task Scheduler 2 comes with all versions of Windows desktop and server.  Licensing often being the pivot point in many IT organizations, Windows Webserver 2008 is a modest price and does come with the two important pieces we will be taking a look at now.  That is: Task Scheduler 2 and IIS.

From a programmers perspective, using a piece of technology as different as Task Scheduler and COM may seem to require more effort than they are worth.  Here is where I would like to introduce Dante Job Scheduler.  A project in development, Dante is meant as the broker to your Windows Server’s job scheduling and queuing abilities.  Dante is built on the Crossley Framework which contains a growing number of classes that wrap COM and .NET functionality.  You can easily take advantage of this  in your application.  For now, I would like to show you the early functionality built into Dante’s UI and Rest style application services.

To get started, download Dante, and uncompressed it on your computer running Windows  in a place you can point an IIS site at.  The directory structure is simple, but the one we will be concerned with first is called ‘public’.  Open Internet Information Services Manager and create a new site.  Use the path to the public directory as your value for the ‘Physical path’.

When you point your browser at the site, you will be prompted for a user name and password.  The easiest one to use is one for a known profile on the box. Administrator can work fine but you may want to consider creating a dedicated account for Dante.  If you are working on a development machine it would be great for the sake of this demo if you just logged in as the user you are logged in as now.  This will allow you to see things in action.

The first thing you see is a list of scheduled tasks that may already be there for that profile.  If you logged in with a regular user account you may see things like Google Update listed.  To create a new task click the Create tab at the top of the page.  In this form, you should give it a recognizable unique name.  Then in the ‘Command’ field, enter the path to notepad.exe (c:\Windows\notepad.exe worked for me).  Enter a run date of the present date, and then a time in the near future.  Click submit and then you can view it under the ‘List’ tab.

While you are waiting for it to run (it may not show up the second it is scheduled, it may need a second to show the GUI), click on some of the tasks to see their details.  You may notice the XML link at the bottom of the details list.  This is the XML definition of the task.  An application can create such an XML and pass it to the scheduler as a task envelop.  The ‘Run’ and ‘Stop’ links do just as you would assume: run and stop a executing task.

You can experiment on the task you just created.  Click the details of the task and click ‘Run’ to  see the notepad GUI appear.  Then Click the ‘Stop’ link to see it close.  Not overly exciting unless you understand the potential.  If you have Firebug running you may have noticed the XHR calls being made via jQuery.  Each of these can be imitated from a remote computer.  Say you want to run a task called “MyTest”  you would simply make a request for https://<username>:<password>@<server_address>/tasks/run/MyTest.  The same can be said of creating a new task.  To create a task simply form a request with your favorite HTTP client to: https://<username>:<password>@<server_address>/tasks/new/?tskname=<taskname>&cmd=<command>&rundate=<date>&runtime=<time>.

As mentioned before there are many triggers and options available in Task Scheduler 2.  Most of which will find their way into Dante and Crossley Framework.  Soon a client class will also be available to further simplify your development.  Exposing COM functionality with PHP takes some patience.  Even so, if you are running PHP on Windows, great benefits can be gleaned.

I hope this taste has peaked your interest.  If you are so motivated I encourage you to experiment with Dante and share your thoughts or even code.

How many times have you typed “SECT * FROM foo”?  The key is keeping code generation extensible.  Where technology in general falls apart is where it tries to think for you and have it’s own preference where preference is the only deciding factor.  Frameworks that are good but require you to conform to their school  of thought only find acceptance amongst those who already think that way or don’t have enough experience under their belt to have an opinion yet.  The more generic and customizable the better.

Enter T4, the new code template system in Visual Studio 2008.  This is a great technology. As I learn it I find myself weaving more repeditive code, but with better quality.  It makes CRUD controllers a dream to deal with, and holds the potential for saving alot of time.  As I come across usefull T4 resources I will post them here.

I am interested to see how this changes my perception of my own code generation.  The T4 template usage is interesting.  They really allow for alot of logic within the template makign complicated generation possible.  Already I see this making it’s way into my own generator.