PHP

Yesterday Helgi and I gave a workshop on RAD with PHP. The central project was an example forum that Helgi and I threw together. Helgi had the backend working, while I only had a few basic templates done. Unfortunately this crossed somewhat with my studies, so I didn't have as much time as I wanted to prepare the frontend. However, I think the backend and theory were good enough to present our topic.

I'll try to recap the entire session and provide a link to the appropriate code here later.

Some attendees of yesterday's workshop indicated further interest in the presented example project. As a result, Helgi and I will be continuing to develop it. It currently is under GPL, but considerations will be made to license it otherwise on specific request.

The Monty Hall brainteaser, (Wikipedia entry) also known as the 3-doors brainteaser, is a rather popular, but notoriously difficult problem. On a purely mathematical level, it has long been solved and has been used for various scientific investigations. However, I did not come across an open php implementation of a solution for it, so I implemented my own. I'd be happy for any feedback, though it comes out with the expected results. You can find the results and documented source code here.

This morning, Lukas and Toby are presenting PEAR and using it to create a demo application that accesses Ebay. A large number of developers here either haven't used PEAR before or are relatively new. So far, this is a very nice advocacy session. I'll be updating this post throughout the day.

One complaint: the hotel's internet connection wasn't set up with so many users in mind. Apparently they have an ADSL 3mbit connection (my guess), but it might be slower, as it isn't handling the number of users properly. On the bright side, it's now free. (In 2002 you had to pay for it.)

UPDATE: Toby went through the steps of creating a package, including setting up package.xml. He gave PEAR_PackageFileManager a huge plug. He also went through karma for php, pearweb and package. Also, it is worth noting that the demo app is running on PHP5 and uses PEAR_Exception.

UPDATE: Lukas and Toby also showed a wiki they created for their talk in Amsterdam this spring. You can get the slides for that workshop here. It is based on Text_Wiki with MDB2, and Liveuser.