LornaJane

I'm wildly excited to be able to tell you that the PHP North West Conference now has a date and venue confirmed! The event will be at Manchester Central (apparently this used to be the GMex), on Saturday 22nd November with an early bird ticket price of £50. At the moment we have no website, no confirmed speakers, and no other information to release ... but rest assured there are lots of plans being worked on behind the scenes!! The site for the PHPNW user group and conference will be at http://phpnw.org.uk and there is a mailing list you can sign up to already.

The event is aimed at people working with, or wanting to work with, PHP in the north of England. We'll have a selection of sessions, with the technical content intended to be accessible to a whole range of audiences - it will also be multi-track so there's sure to be plenty of material to interest you, whatever your background. We will be having a call for papers for the sessions, and we're hoping that we'll get some good submissions - particularly from senior developers around the area and the wider UK. Whether you're hoping to speak, hoping to learn, looking for a good crowd to mingle with on a Saturday, or you just really like PHP geeks - put 22nd November in your diary and I hope I'll see you there!!

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about this event, just let me know (I'm not organising the whole thing but I'm helping!), either by leaving a comment or by contacting me directly.

I've made a new case for the camera, using bubble wrap as padding. The inside is microfibre cloth (note to self: don't ever use this again, its too fluffy for words and frays much too easily!) and the outside is crochet with a button fastener.

I started by making the inner microfibre liner with bubble wrap around it:



I then made the crochet outer, using some gorgeous dark turquoise wool I bought in Germany last year and which has been waiting for a project just like this one! Its quite fluffy but that doesn't matter as the bag is lined. I added a button to close it, a carabiner to hang it from, and a place to hook the tripod onto if we are taking that too. Here's the finished product - it looks a bit strange because its empty, since I was using the camera to take the photo!



(there are a few more photos on flickr )

Recently I started writing a REST service. I began in the usual way, writing a php script, calling it with a GET request, accessing the variables using the PHP superglobal variable $_GET. I wrote code to handle a POST request and used the variables I found in $_POST. Then I tried to write a PUT request.

PHP doesn't have a built-in way to do this, and at first I was a little confused as to how I could reach this information. It turns out that this can be read from the incoming stream to PHP, php://input.

The above line provided me with a query string similar to what you might see on the URL with a GET request. key/value pairs separated by question marks. I was rescued from attempting to parse this monster with a regex by someone pointing out to me that parse_str() is intended for this purpose (seriously, I write a lot of PHP, I don't know how I miss these things but its always fun when I do "discover" them) - it takes a query string and parses out the variables. Look out for a major health warning on str_parse() - by default it will create all the variables all over your local scope!! Pass in the second parameter though and it will put them in there as an associatvive array instead - I'd strongly recommend this approach and I've used it here with my $post_vars variable.

This loads the variable $post_vars with the associative array of variables just like you'd expect to see from a GET request.

Simple Example

Its a bit of a contrived example but it shows use of the REQUEST_METHOD setting from the $_SERVER variable to figure out when we need to grab the post vars. Firstly, here's the script:


And here's what happened when I request the same script using two different HTTP verbs. I'm using cURL to show the example simply because I think it shows it best.

Via GET:


Via PUT:


Purists will tell me that I shouldn't be returning data from a PUT request, and they'd be right! But this does show how to access the incoming variables and detect which verb was being used. If you're going to write a REST service then the correct naming of resources and the correct response to each resource being accessed in various ways is really important, but its a story I'll save for another day. If you use this, or perhaps you access the variables another way, then do post a comment - there aren't a lot of resources available on this topic for PHP.

I am an increasingly avid flickr user and have a growing collection of photos on my flickr account. It seems daft to upload photos twice all the time so I tried the flickr plugin for serendipity (my bloggling platform) but I couldn't get my account to connect correctly. In the box labelled "flickr username" I added my flickr username, "lornajane", which appears in my photos URL. However the plugin seemed to think my photos should then be at a URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/64718621@N00/

which they obviously weren't. I played around with this for a while, also trying my yahoo user id and getting nowhere.

Eventually I tried another flickr plugin on another site and got identical behaviour - at which point I logged a support ticket with Flickr to ask what I was doing wrong. It turns out that "username" in this case means this label here:



Never noticed that before, and its certainly not how I refer to myself, so I'm a bit confused - but hey my plugin is working! I hope this helps someone (probably me, next time I try to plug flickr in to something else) confused by flickr seeming to think you have the wrong username!

My employers, Ibuildings, have been running a series of seminars where we invite a few people (and it is a few, they are generally small events), bring some of our developers along, and have some technical tutorials, demonstrations and general discussions, and some food. The previous events have all been well-received and sound very civilised (and there's food, which is always good!)

I'm happy to announce that Ibuildings is venturing north of the Watford Gap - and the next event will be in Leeds, on the 9th September, the full details are at http://www.ibuildings.com/events/leeds. The main tutorial session will cover source control with Subversion, including advanced concepts such as merging and repository structures. We'll also look at deployment strategies for different types of software development processes and tools that can be helpful in this area. I'm delivering the main tutorial at this event, and if that wasn't enough incentive, I'm also bringing the nabaztag as my glamourous assistant!

We'll be running events in a lot of other areas of the UK as well, so if you can't make this one then watch out for more announcements or tell us where we should be running the next one! If you have any queries about any of these events then feel free to contact me, I hope I'll see some of you in Leeds in September.

Once upon a time there was a girl geek called Sarah Blow, and she wanted to hang out with her girl friends and geek out at the same time (and who wouldn't?). So she founded the phenomenon of the Girl Geek Dinner in London. Well this great idea has spread and spread around the world and eventually to the North of England - first to Manchester (next event, this Friday 25th July!) and eventually to Leeds.

So I'm pleased to announce that, on Wednesday 13th August there will be the first Leeds Girl Geek Dinner!! Tickets are £10 and if you needed any further encouragement, I'm one of the speakers for the evening. If you're going, or have any questions, leave a comment below - and I'll see you there!