Bruno and I took the Zend Certification exam here at the conference and I’m glad to announce that we both passed and we’re both ZCE now… 🙂

Here’s my certification authentication.

The exam had some tricky questions and it covers pretty much all of the aspects of PHP but I can’t say it was difficult.

For the ones who want to take this certification I really advise them to read the book: “The Zend PHP Certification Practice Book” written by John Coggeshall and Marco Tabini. You can buy it here.

PHP and Unicode
Andi Gutmans from Zend, Andrei Zmievski from Yahoo!

– Definitions
. Character Encoding Form: representation of a character set using a number of integer codes (code values)

– Multi-i18n-what?
. Dealing with multiple encodings is a pain
. Different algorithms, conversion, detection, validation, processing… understanding
. Dealing with multiple languages is a pain too
. But cannot be avoided in this day and age
Continue reading →

Techniques for Building Enterprise PHP Applications
by Chuck Hagenbuch, John Coggeshall, Rock Mutchler from Zend

Problem: client’s site was slow

Resolutions:
– Profile site lloking for slow pages/functions in current system
. Patch this bottle necks with a faster solution:
for example caching dynamic content with zend platform or fixing poorly written code

– Identify small changes that causae large effect on site performance
. indexing tables properly
. removing large download from apache (with ZDS)
. Rewritting expensive PHP processes
Continue reading →

PDO by Wes Furlong
Ships with PHP 5.1

-The PDO Solution:
. Move PHP specific stuff into one extension
. Database specific stuff (only) in their own extensions
. Data access abstraction, not database abstraction
Continue reading →

Object Caching for high-performance, scalable web applications
by Johann Schleier-Smith, CTO, Tagged LLC
http://corp.tagged.com/obj-cache-zip

– load balancer
– ZP (30 PHP servers)
– memcached (livejournal) (4 servers) (hash based on keys to decide the storage server)
. Oracle 10g RAC

– Low level cache architecture
. Object serialization
. Basic cache operations
– SET($key, $value, [$lifetime])
– GET($key)
– DELETE($key)
– GETANDWAIT($key)
. Advice: pick something
Continue reading →

Service Data Objects by Graham Charters

Service Data Objects (SDOs) enable PHP applications to work with data from different sources (like a database query, an XML file, and a spreadsheet) using a single interface.

– Data Access Services
. Now we have a data structure we need some way to get data in and out of it..
. SDO applications use DAS to read/write to/from differente sources of data such as databases or XML files
. A DAS converts between a data source format and SDO. For example: SDO Relational Database

(cont…)
Continue reading →

* Creating PHP5 extensions

. PHP5 extensions are the same as in PHP4
. ext_skel generates the basic skeleton

– Build PHP Extensions
src/php5/ext$ ./ext_skel –extname=util

1 $cd ..
2 $ vi ext/util/config.m4
3 $ ./buildconf –force
4 $ ./configure –with-util
5 $ make

(cont…)
Continue reading →

Today I’ll attend two tutorials: XML, Web Services & PHP and PHP Extension Development.

Here are the some notes taken on the XML, Web Services & PHP Tutorial.

Speaker: Christian Wenz- http://www.hauser-wenz.de/s9y/

(cont..)
Continue reading →

After a long trip and a lot of flight changes, finally we arrived at Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco, where the Zend & PHP Expo is going to happen. For the next days I’ll post some notes about the Tutorials and Sessions.

Looks like Intel is working with Skype to improve the VoIP service. Intel is about to release new processors that will improve the sound quality in phone calls and the number of users in conference calls.

Skype has around 50M customers and more than 45% of VoIP calls minutes.