Well, in a few short hours I'll be hopping on a plane for San Jose, CA for the Zend/PHP Conference where I will be speaking on Wednesday about how we've begun making big use of PHP where I work. The first day focuses on hands-on tutorials and the rest of the conference is for the speaking sessions. Just like the DC PHP Conference, the Zend/PHP Conference should give the State of Iowa some good exposure within the Open Source/PHP communities and give me a chance to learn a few wrinkles we can adopt....

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One of the biggest gripes I get from people is that MVCnPHP requires an XML file for the configuration of the controller. The whole notion of convention over configuration is something they Ruby/Rails community has gotten right. Why should you have to edit an XML file just to add a new view or command to your system? You shouldn't? That said, I'll be beginning work on MVCnPHP version 4 that will make this happen. The biggest impact is that the naming conventions of the views/commands will completely change. To illustrate let's run through the process:

1. Controller...

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Most simple examples I have demonstrating MVCnPHP simply shows a single controller giving access to all views and commands within a system. However partitioning your views and commands amongst multiple views and controllers can make a lot of sense in many cases. For example, Geeklog 2 uses an extensive plugin model where the main Geeklog 2 controller can forward process to any of the plugin controllers. In that scenario the main Geeklog 2 controller is merely a proxy to another MVCnPHP controller. Another example, which I do religiously at work, is to seperate administrative features out from public facing...

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I've release MVCnPHP v3.1.2 to fix the path to the XSD. For the record the XSD will be in the /path/to/PEAR/data directory and during the post install of the package the path to the XSD in the XMLLoader.php will be hard-wired. That means that if you will be packaging MVCnPHP inside 3rd party applications without reference the PEAR directories on your server you will need to edit XMLLoader.php to use the PATH you need. This release also cleans up some unused files that used to be in the distribution. As always to install:

#>pear channel-discover...
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Well, I'm finally digging out of the trip to DC for the DC PHP Conference & Expo. The conference could have been better for a few reasons but before I expand on that I should make it clear that the conference was a pretty good success given it was the first year. I'd especially like to thank Robyn Wyrick and staff as they did their best to roll out the red carpet at the classy L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in DC. You can get quick access to my presentation from here.

That said, let me start...

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Apparenty the PEAR package for v3.1.0 of MVCnPHP doesn't properly install the XSD that is required for the controller's configuration file. I'll be releasing v3.1.1 this week to fix that issue. In the meantime you can grab th XSD from the tarball and make sure you put it in the same directory as the Controller.php file (e.g. /path/to/PEAR/Geeklog/MVCnPHP/).

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I'm not sure how to best catalog these thoughts but until I figure out who the right be people are to talk to about this and until they are willing to listen here is what I have.

PHP SOAP Support is broken.

No, not broken in the traditional sense that you can't use it, but broken in the sense that if you want to write web-services or consume web services in PHP that interoperate with other technologies (.NET, Java, etc), you must be willing to cobble together enough 'stuff' that you can get it working. What is it lacking specifically?

As...

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Well, when it rains it pours. Turns out I'll also be giving my talk on Moving an Enterprise to PHP at the 2006 DC PHP Conference. Unlike the Zend/PHP Conference, this is a new PHP conference with a focus on the public sector which is right up my ally. This only a two day conference but despite the brevity, I hope it will boast a great first-year turn out. If you will be in DC for the conference feel free to look me up.

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Yours truly has been selected as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo in San Jose, California which will run from October 30th through November 2nd. Where I work I have been architecting Java and PHP applications for the past 5 years and we've gradually grown our competency in PHP. My talk, Moving an Enterprise to PHP, will cover the tangible business justfications behind why our organization has chose to make PHP our technology of choice. Our Java compentency has really strengthened during my tenure and while we have achieved success in delivering...

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