I will present two sessions at the Conférence PHP Québec 2009:

Of Lambda Functions, Closures and Traits

Lambda Functions and Closures allow the quick definition of throw-away functions (for use with array_map(), for instance) that are not used elsewhere. Traits reduce some limitations of single inheritance by enabling the reuse method sets freely in several independent classes. This session introduces the audience to the implementation of lambda functions and closures (which are new in PHP 5.3) as well as traits (which will be added in PHP 6).

PHP Code Review (together with Stefan Priebsch)

Attendees of this lab will learn how experts look at code, what good code and bad code looks like, and how to a ......

The PHP Object Oriented method of programming brings many exciting possiblities to application code. Many of the theories surrounding PHP Object Oriented code comes from some simple concepts. To the new comer, some of these concepts seem a little abstract, and with good reason. Abstraction is a key concept on Object Oriented code, but to the un-initiated, may seem rather vague.

This tutorial attempts to bring to light, the concept of abstration, class hierachies, and polymorphism. But rather than boggle the mind with pages of theory, lets look at how it works.

去参加网志年会这几天中，虾米网发布了 Beta 版。

尽管众多人喊着互联网寒冬，这群虾小米们忙活的热火朝天。在广州参加 UED 书友会的时候，话题恰好是关于音乐网站。我推荐了虾米网。然后描述了一下我眼中的虾米网特点:

• 0) 这是一帮热爱音乐人建立的网站，团队成员中有前摇滚乐队主唱，有民谣歌手；南瓜同学本人就是杭州很多音乐 Party 的组织者；


• 1) 高品质音乐。如低于 192K bps 不让上传，我们生活在噪音的花园，不用再亏待自己的耳朵 ...


• 2) 版权问题已经基本得到解决，商业模式很清晰，网站本身可以看作一个经济体；而高品质的音乐本身就足够值得用户掏钱，何况在现在电子支付手段已经成熟的情况下；


• 3) 用户有足够高的参与程度。而我在上面 ......

New on the Zend Developer Zone there's a tutorial written up by Wil Sinclair looking at building dynamic PDF files in PHP with help from Haru.

This incredible versatility also applies to the topic of today's article: the PDF, or Portable Document Format. Not content with just one, PHP actually comes with two different extensions that allow developers to dynamically generate PDF documents: the PDFlib extension, and the libHaru extension. Over the next few pages, I'm going to take a quick look at the Haru extension, providing you with a brief overview of its functions and demonstrating how you can use it in your PHP development.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the extension and seve ......

Jani Hartikainen has followed up on a post from David Otten about standard classes in PHP and how they provide the base for much of what the language does.

David Otton posted a short but thought-provoking post about stdClass, which many think is the "base class" all PHP classes automatically inherit from. I have to admit that I had this misconception as well. [...] This [difference in PHP from other OOP languages] presents some room for analysis in how things are handled in dynamic and static languages, and how those differences affect things...

Jani talks about dynamic and static typing in languages and how that effects the base types things are extended from as well as some of the benefits that having a standard base class affords developers.

Last night the CNMA awards were held here in Toronto, and I turned out to go home with an award!

Although I still feel I didn't really deserve such a prize, I feel honored and proud of the team.

Thanks guys! Its been an amazing ride so far, and also thanks to the CNMA organization and judges.

After some discussions on the OpenSQLCamp 2008 conference we decided to move our development to Launchpad, to be in stream with other MySQL related projects.
We published our patches there https://code.launchpad.net/percona-patches, it is supposed to be main repository for the patches.
We advise to use Launchpad bug system to report bugs and also for feature requests.
[...]

The PHP Quebec conference has posted the official schedule for this year's conference (happening March 4-6th, 2009 in Montreal, Canada).

Speakers include Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Derick Rethans, Sara Golemon, Sebastian Bergmann and many more. Topics include software lifecycles, unit testing, extensions and PHP in the enterprise. Talks will be given in English and in French.

You can still register to save your spot for the event. Early Bird pricing comes in around $500 CAD and a regular ticket after that it's bumped up to $600.