August 2006 :: Coffee Talk

We had so many great new people with great new questions and things to discuss that we actually postponed the scheduled talk until next month.

I want to thank everyone who dropped by for keeping the conversations constructive, open and alive. Hope to see you all next month!

July 2006 :: Users need tools too!

In this month’s meeting, we discussed the SpellingPages library as well as the FCKEditor (That’s FredCK Editor). Both of these easy to drop-in libraries could find a place in nearly all of our applications.

SpellingPages was something that my colleague Vincent Miller showed me. We will be using it on our own site management system back at the office. While it is not as “sexy” as a little red-wavy-underline, it certainly does the job better than I could hope for…and it is just near trivial to work with.

The other item we talked about was the FCKEditor…I find myself needing to call it the FredCKEditor or just “f-edit.” It is so nice to see software reach a certainly level of maturity. We began using a version of this tool back in the day that only supported IE. Now look at it! Lots of features, very customizable.

My notes, discussion points, and demos are available here on the demo site.

You can find more info on the [url=http://spellerpages.sourceforge.net/]SpellerPages[/url] site, and the [url=http://www.fckeditor.net/]FCKEditor[/url] site.

Hope you all had a great time. Feel free to add to the comments if there was great discussion after I left.

Today’s Topic

In continuing with our easy-yet-cool series, we will be showing off a couple of simple (yet jaw dropping) ways to help your users give content to your site. Whether you are developing your own CMS, blog, or just adding a feedback form; you won’t want to miss seeing these tools in action!

You may even be inspired to write that wiki-less-wiki you have always wanted to write.

See you at the Daily Dose!

June 17th, 2006 :: AJAX Revisited, revisted

Well, it took a whole month, but I did slightly re-tool last month’s demo of SACK (the Simple Ajax Toolkit) to work on our test site. Now, it searches against the kcpug.org member’s list. I’ve also added the “setTimeOut()” functionality to make it feel a little more stable. Be sure to check it out in the index page.

Be sure to check out the [url=http://php5.kcpug.org/ajax-fun/memberlookup/]the ajax-driven member list[/url].

May 20, 2006 :: AJAX Revisited

With all of the changes in the realm of Asynchronous JavaScript driven development, we took this month to introduce some of the updates and simplifications that have occurred. The presentation is available in a variety of forms:

[url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_may/Ajax-revisited.pdf]AJAX Revisited (pdf)[/url]
[url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_may/Ajax-revisited.swf]AJAX Revisited (swf)[/url]
[url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_may/Ajax-revisited.odp]AJAX Revisited (ODF – Impress)[/url]

As I mentioned this week, I’ve added some new folders to the links area of our site. As you explore and use this technology, please add the links that you find the most useful or interesting.

Read more for other random links I saved while researching this presentation.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/11/09/fixing-ajax-xmlhttprequest-considered-harmful.html

http://www.json.org/
http://www.json.org/xml.html
http://www.json.org/json.js

http://developer.yahoo.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/common/json.htm

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/examples/kitchensink/

http://www.symfony-project.com/
http://framework.zend.com/

March 18, 2006 :: The Eclipse IDE and PHP

Eric gave us a great introduction to the Eclipse IDE. For those of you looking for a new IDE, certainly give this a spin. Eric was able to even setup the XDebug extension shortly after the presentation.

For more info, be sure to check out [url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_mar/eclipse.swf]his presentation[/url].

Available in [url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_mar/eclipse.swf]Shockwave Flash[/url] and [url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_mar/eclipse.odp]Open Office.org[/url] formats.

Thanks again Eric!!!

February

We had a nice round-table on security in February. While we used [url=http://safari.oreilly.com/?x=1&mode=section&sortKey=title&sortOrder=asc&view=&xmlid=1-56592-610-2/progphp-CHP-12&k=20&g=&catid=&s=1&b=1&f=1&t=1&c=1&u=1&r=&o=1&n=1&d=1&p=1&a=0&page=0]Chapter 12[/url] of O’Reilly’s [url=http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progphp/index.html]Programming PHP [/url]as a guide, Eric pointed out an [url=http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-security-blunders]article on SitePoint[/url] that you may also find to be very enlightening as well.

March should be even more Fun! Eric has offered to give us a presentation on the Eclipse IDE!! Thank you very much, Eric. Your next month’s coffee is on me!

Topic for February

As many of you know, I almost didn’t have a presentation ready for last time. Now, I know I don’t [i]have[/i] to have one…but let’s face it, I enjoy giving them. (Just for the record, I enjoy [i]watching[/i] them as well. 😉 )

Many of you may be happy to hear that I have actually gotten to take a tiny break from management, and write my first bit of code in quite a while. Now, unless you would like our next presentation to be about transforming csv files with fgetcsv and vsprintf, I suggest you help me pick a topic.

Any topic will do. Selections will be made based on my ability to produce said presentation in the time alloted (which isn’t much). Naturally, any ties among viable options will be weighted based on community interest, etc.

Just to get you started, here are some ideas from the November meeting. Maybe, I just need a little detail on these to get going.

Thanks Gang! I’ll see you in February!

– Dan

[b]November Topic Ideas[/b]
SimpleXML Topics:
* Google Maps – For repeaters?
* Amazon API
* Google Base?
* Frappr
* Exce
* Shipping Interfaces FedEx

Other Topics may include:
* Cake, etc?
* Other Things, Hobbiest – General answers
* A search for a Customized, Integrated CMS.
* Application Authentication using Certificates
* Relationship Management, PHP/MySql OO PHP5
* Forms Managements

January 2006 :: SimpleXML

It’s not quite done, but it will do. Today’s Presentation is a simple intro to [url=http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2006_jan/simple_xml.swf]SimpleXML[/url]. If you are using PHP 5 and need an easy way to get to your data, be sure and check it out.

While the presentation is lacking, at least I actually have [url=http://php5.kcpug.org/simplexml/]working examples[/url] for you to play with on the site! Be sure and check them out.

Aspect Oriented Programming in PHP

From the “Just because you can” department:

Who says you need to be a java-head to play with the cool stuff? Some of you may have heard of an “extension” to Object Oriented design called Aspect Oriented Programming. ([i]I seem to recall something about it in the classic text “The Pragmatic Programmer.”[/i])

Well, it was only a matter of time, but someone built a framework for it in PHP:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/aophp/

[quote]This package can be used to implement aspect oriented programming (AOP) by executing the code of classes that enable orthogonal aspects at run- time. The intention is to provide a means to implement orthogonal aspects in separate classes that may be an interesting add to the application, like logging, caching, transaction control, etc., without affecting the main business logic. The package provides base classes for implementing defining point cuts where the code of an advice class is called to implement actions of the orthogonal aspects that an application may need to enable.[/quote]

I only have some idea what he just said, but I’m sure that plenty of you will find this very cool! You go Dmitry!