If you’ve been following my Twitter (@AngeloMandato) lately, you may have herd me mention previous Columbus PHP Meetups. These meetups are great for meeting fellow PHP programmers in the Columbus area and a great way to learn about different libraries, techniques and frameworks that are available.

Columbus PHP Meetup web site: http://php.meetup.com/93/

Tonights meetup topic is “The Art of SQL Tuning for MySQL” presented by Jay Pipes from MySQL. I can’t wait to attend this meetup and gain some insightful knowledge how to tune MySQL. Ever since I started my career, I’ve encountered many issues either with server loads and/or time due to poorly written queries. I think I’ve done a decent job deploying indexes, grouping like queries together, etc… but I know there is more to learn.

The past two Columbus PHP Meetups covered the Zend Framework and CakePHP. Both were great presentations.

The Zend Framework presentation from February was very informative. The Zend Framework was written in a way that the developer can decide how much he/she wants to use from the framework. This makes it possible to easily add the Zend Framework to an existing project. I think the word framework may not be the best word to describe it though, perhaps it should be called library and framework. Many parts of the Zend Framework are really just libraries to help with things like email, XML-RPC, OpenID, Flickr, Amazon, etc… I now plan on using parts of the Zend Framework in some of my projects.

I learned a lot from the CakePHP presentation from March as well. CakePHP is definitely a “framework” with all of the University taught thinking of object oriented programming and separating presentation with logic integrated. What I found interesting is CakePHP took somewhat of a Ruby on Rails like approach in managing your SQL queries. I think this type of development is fine for small to medium size projects but anything where you need full control of the queries or presentation you may find yourself feeling restricted. The presentation side of things reminds me of Smarty Template Engine, which my past experience with Smarty started out great but ended with frustration that I couldn’t add the logic I wanted at the presentation level.

I would like to learn more about CodeIgniter. CodeIgniter is the application framework that Joe used for developing the registration system for PodCamp Ohio.

Related news, I purchased a copy of the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide. I own a copy of the Zend PHP 4 Certification Study Guide and loved the book till the pages started falling out. It is not just for those who want to be certified in PHP, the content is perfect for a developer who already knows how to program but just wants something to reference for the language. You should already have some background in C/C++/Java/PHP before you read this book though. I’m very pleased with this addition as well as the first one. I think I may order the Guide to Programming with Zend Framework next.

So are you attending PHP meetups in your area? If so, what sorts of things are you learning?

If you are looking for excellent resources for the MetaWeblogAPI and derivatives (Blogger 1.0, Wordpress, MovableType APIs), look no further. SixApart has an excellent web site that documents all of the APIs pretty well.

www.sixapart.com/developers/xmlrpc/

If you ever needed to display reports of information in a visual way in your web application then you’ll appreciate Open Flash Chart.

This flash based charting library has everything. From line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, mixed line/bar graphs and more with the ability to add hovers, custom colors, sizes and web links. The quality of these charts is remarkable. If you have ever used Google Analytics, these charts and graphs match, if not surpass, in quality.

Lighttpd web server, also known as Lighty, is an excellent web server and has potential to replace Apache completely.  I am slowly migrating web sites that use feature specific settings in Apache to use Lighty.  A few months ago I ran into a problem with Lighty’s ModRewrite alternative for rewriting URLs.  Lighty uses two separate modules to handle internal rewrites and Location: redirects.  It uses the common HTTP 301 Moved Permanently status code.  For most circumstances, this works well but in some cases the application may require that the redirect only be temporary and return the HTTP 302 Found status code.  Instead of modifying the mod_redirect.c source and changing the http_status code value from 302 to 301, I added new code to support a new url.redirect parameter url.redirect-found.

I’ve posted the source to the Lighttpd bug tracking system in hopes it will be added to a future version of Lighty.  http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/ticket/1446

This addition should help the Lighty web server to be capable of handling the appropriate HTTP status codes for all situations that may arise for the web site in question.

If you like to monitor MySQL, you are going to love this application.

http://ajaxian.com/archives/779

AJAXMyTop is a simple web application that allows you to monitor the currently executed queries on your MySQL server.  It is pretty useful, especially when you are trying to diagnose page loading issues.

We got upgrade copies of Dreamweaver 8 at work recently, which meant I could free up my personal copy of DW8 I installed at work. After trying to uninstall and reinstall, I quickly found there was no easy way to change the product key.

After many many attempts, I came up with a procedure in order to switch the product key in the installation.

1. Uninstall Dreamweaver 8
2. Delete/Rename this folder: C:\Documents and Settings\All
   Users\Application Data\Macromedia\Licensing\Products\Dreamweaver 8.0
3. Reinstall Dreamweaver 8

There may be an easier and quicker way to do this but I was unable to find a solution with my web searches.