LornaJane

Today saw the publication of the schedule for the PHP North West Conference - you can see it in full on their site. There are some great speakers lined up - Johannes Schlüter, Rob Allen and Stefan Koopmanschap to name just a few that immediately jump out of the page. Tickets aren't on sale yet but will be in the next week or so - I know I won't be missing out on this event :)

I didn't post much of a wrap-up after ZendCon - partly because that trip ran into the start of another one and I only got home properly yesterday, and partly because something happened in California that I couldn't talk about until now. One thing I did want to mention is that I gave a session in the unconference while I was there. I spoke jointly with Matthew Weier O'Phinney - despite any previous panicking I may have done about talks, I had very few nerves this time around and really came away feeling quite inspired about speaking in general. We signed up for the slot the day before (many thanks to whichever people were involved in conspiring to get me to do this), put a few slides together over breakfast, and took it from there with surprisingly good results.


(this is us drinking, rather than speaking, obviously)

Back to my ZendCon story. A few weeks ago, my employers Ibuildings announced their PHP Centre of Expertise which we will be building up. Its an initiative to support the wider PHP ecosystem, particularly because so many key PHP community people and contributors are employed at Ibuildings. I'm not usually a big fan of towing the company line on personal blogs, but this story is important to me.

ZendCon finished on the Thursday lunchtime and after a long afternoon hanging around outside and acquiring some really impressive sunburn (English complexion, Californian sunshine, yes I know I should know better!), the Ibuildings people present at ZendCon went out for a meal - with the table booked for one extra person. When Cal Evans walked in the room, I was delighted to see him, and wondered for a moment if he had just popped in for some beer and chatter - but I was completely and wonderfully wrong! Cal is the Chair of the PCE - so he'll be my colleague within a few weeks!! I have known Cal for perhaps two years now, he's a great supporter of phpwomen.org and I count him among my personal friends. Having him move halfway round the world to work with Ibuildings on such an exciting project makes me very optimistic at the thought of things to come. This is Cal and I at the conference:



Ibuildings is often recruiting, and it seems like many friends have joined the organisation already. Could anyone looking for a job with Ibuildings please note that we do have a bonus for employees recommending friends ... ?

Yesterday I attended my little sister's graduation ceremony - she has a BA in Early Childhood Studies from University College Birmingham and I am so proud of her I can't actually express it! She's worked hard to get to here and the path was not always smooth. I uploaded a selection of pictures from yesterday to remember the day by.

I'm also very pleased to have been able to be here to cheer her on and also very pleased that we now have the sequel to a photograph taken at my own graduation day 5 years ago.



Well done, little one!!

I'm currently in California, at ZendCon. I'm having way too much fun to blog but there is a writeup on the phpwomen site of my experiences so far. I've met some great people, and its long days but I'm learning a lot! I've (been) volunteered for an uncon session later on today, at 5:15 I'll be speaking alongside Matthew Weier O'Phinney on "Subversion Tips and Tricks" - if you're here at ZendCon then drop in and say hi.

For everything else, see the zendcon photos on flickr! http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/zendcon08

Having recently written articles about curl and about writing a PHP REST server, I thought I'd complete the circle and put here a few notes on using PHP's curl wrapper as a Rest client. Also I had to look some of this up when I needed to actually do it so next time I need only look in one place!

If you don't know about PHP, Rest, or curl, then I recommend you do a little reading around each of those subjects before reading this as its unlikely to make much sense - I'm not including background on these topics as there are better resources elsewhere.

I've written about using curl before from the command line, but this example uses PHP's curl to access the service. This is just a simple example, but hopefully if you are doing something along these lines you can adapt for your needs.

In the example, we set the URL we'd like to call and initialise the curl object to point to that. Then we create an array of post data, and configure curl to use POST to make the request and to use our data array.

We execute the request and capture the response. Health warning: by default curl will echo the response (for reasons that aren't clear to me), if you want to parse it then you will need to use the CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER flag to have curl return the response rather than a boolean indication of success - this fooled me completely for a while, I have no idea why it works this way. As you can see I've parsed the resulting XML and my script can then continue with the data it acquired. Depending what you need to do next, you can manipulate the SimpleXMLElement object as you need to.

If you're working with PHP and services, then hopefully this will get you started, if you have any questions or comments, then please add them below!

With just over a week remaining on the PHP North West Call for Papers, plans for this Manchester-based conference are fairly racing along. The call for papers closes on 21st September (in time for me arriving home from ZendCon so we can make some decisions before I shoot off again). So far the submissions have been of a very high quality and I'm really excited about this event. In addition we have confirmed Derick Rethans as one of the keynote speakers, more details about that on the PHPNW site itself.

Tickets will be on sale somewhere around the end of September or beginning of October, and we're already finalising some of the sponsorships - thanks so much to the companies who are getting involved in the event. So many of them are really adding to the experience as well as just buying advertising space, its giving the event a very special feel. I'm looking forward to seeing at least some of you in Manchester on November 22nd!!