Ibuildings Blog

Dutch PHP Business Seminar

nospam@example.com (Anouk Ilic) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:54:00 +0100

On March 2nd, we are organizing another PHP management seminar in The Netherlands. In one afternoon, we'll update IT managers, CIOs, CEOs, CTOs and (web) development managers on some of the latest developments in PHP development. Topics this year are:

Service APIs; More and more applications are written using webservices, and in this session we'll show you why.
Performance: As the internet presence of companies grows, performance is an area many people continue to struggle with.
Cloud computing: In a few years time, we will all be working with clouds. Now is the time to prepare and learn what this means for your application development efforts.
Make or Buy'; this eternal question deals with choosing between using off the shelf applications or building your own.

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Productivity in PHP from a fun perspective

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:25:12 +0100

One of the reasons so many people choose PHP for their web development is that it's fast. Not necessarily in the gazillion-requests-per-second sense, but in terms of developer productivity. One sentence you'll hear me say regularly is: "PHP is not pretty, but it gets the thing done, and gets it done well" and even in my 'PHP in the Enterprise' evangelization, the productivity argument is one I often use.

Every once in a while things happen that prove this point, and this is a post about such proof.

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PHP in 2009 - A year in retrospective

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:09:00 +0100

2009 just ended, and since we've only just commenced work in 2010, there's still time to look back at 2009 and see what events have shaped the way we work with PHP and what happened in the general PHP ecosystem. PHPdeveloper.org has a nice overview from a community perspective. I'll cover some community aspects briefly as well, but will focus on the broader PHP ecosystem, including its adoption in the enterprise and industry participation.

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Disruptive events and information flow

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:20:03 +0100

This weekend The Netherlands (and many other countries too, but for the purpose of example I'll stick to NL) experienced something that happens only every few years. We had up to 25 centimeters of snow, which is unusual for us, so it disrupts life significantly. On sunday, buses and trains were canceled, destinations became unreachable, and at Schiphol airport alone, over 700 people had to spent the night because it was impossible to get anywhere.

Snow continued to fall Sunday evening, so this morning most news outlets expected chaos in traffic. The Ibuildings Netherlands offices already advised all its staff to work from home on Monday, but not every company is able to tackle it that way, so the number one question for many people this morning was: "Will I be able to get to work?". The answer to the question should be simple: either trains and buses ride normally, they have delays, or they don't ride at all. Still, many of the Dutch public transport companies struggled to get that information across. Read on for an overview and an analysis, using the public transport companies of the Dutch major cities as an example of how important it is to do 'peak management'.

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137 CMS Systems

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:48:00 +0100

At the moment, Wikipedia's list of content management systems features 137 unique CMS products. 59 of these are written in PHP.

And that's only the ones that Wikipedia finds 'notable', which means these are the ones that have significant usage or large enough communities to be mentioned. There's at least twice the amount that aren't notable, and if we count all the CMS systems that many web development agencies produce, then there's a whole lot more CMS systems out there.

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New white paper: Introducing Service APIs

nospam@example.com (Soila Patajoki) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:35:00 +0100

Every company starts with a single website or web application, but as a company's online presence grows, many different applications and sites are deployed. With a traditional approach of treating each of these applications as separate solutions, a number of problems occur:

Inconsistencies in common functionality
High maintenance costs
Long time-to-market

Service APIs can help you reuse a set of common functionality, which is implemented only once into the service layer. They can also help integrate third party applications in a consistent and robust way, and work around possible performance limitations.

This new white paper, written by Ivo Jansch, explains the steps required to successfully migrate to a service API, from functional analysis all the way to documentation. It gives examples of common problems in the media and travel industries which can be solved with a service layer solution.

Download a PDF copy now (free, but we ask you to leave your contact details)

Incorporating Social Media

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:27:00 +0100

In an article that was recently published by Finextra, we can read that spending on social media is on the increase. While this is an interesting article and I agree with their conclusions, they do not help managers decide on what to spend on social media and how. To avoid imminent Dilbertesque "hey, I've read that we should increase our social media expenditure, make it so." scenarios, Iâm providing an overview of how I think social media should be approached.

What are social media?

Perhaps a question everybody knows the answer to, but since I encounter quite a few people that have heard the term but can't name an example of social media, here's a short answer anyway: social media are internet sites and applications where the core functionality revolves around the social interactions between people. The most well-known examples are Facebook and Twitter, but there are many more applications. Often these are targeted at a particular niche, to bring together people with similar interests or to promote collaboration. Wikipedia and Last.fm are examples of social media too. Where web 1.0 was about information, web 2.0 and social media in particular is about people.

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PHP Caching on Windows: A managers perspective

nospam@example.com (Cal Evans) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:35:00 +0100

Putt's law:

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. -- Archibald Putt

Recently Microsoft released its opcode caching solution for PHP on Windows. On techPortal we've published a benchmark. In this article, I want to look at things from a manager's perspective.

As PHP extends its reach further into corporate networks, IT managers have yet another technology that they have to understand so that they can properly deploy. In many situations, PHP code is being developed that - running on its own - creates a bad user experience because of the nature of the language. Because each PHP script has to integrate and compile all of the files with code in them before the results can be output, the more complex systems get, the longer it can take for scripts to respond to their client. Much of this delay, and the user unhappiness that always accompanies it, can be mitigated with the proper opcode caching solution.

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It's not a job, it's a challenge

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:42:39 +0100

With the worst of the economic downturn behind us, we're seeing an increasing demand for our services, so we are ready to expand again. We've had a steady growth since our inception in 1999, and have always been cautious not to grow too fast in too short a timeframe, which has helped us grow steadily over the years and remain stable even when the economy turned its back on us. This means that we often say 'no' to potential customers simply because we do not want to compromise on quality and stability by growing too fast. It also means that no matter how hard we're looking for new talent, we do not compromise on our recruitment practices and we have quite a thorough process.

In this post, I'd like to share a bit on what our recruitment process looks like, what we look for in people and what working at Ibuildings means for our staff. If you're interested to work for Ibuildings, read on. We currently have openings for medium and senior developers in our UK office, medium and senior developers and a project manager for our Dutch offices and finally several medium and senior developers in our Italian office. A complete overview with full job descriptions can be found on our website.

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ICT Inquiry: How do managers feel about ICT staff training?

nospam@example.com (Soila Patajoki) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:36:00 +0100

e-skills UK recently published their latest ICT Inquiry carried out during the first quarter of 2009. Based on more than 2,000 telephone interviews with individuals in ICT management roles across the UK, the survey makes an interesting read of the concerns and needs of IT managers with regards to staff training. (The site requires registration, which is free.)

Concerns over flexibility, value and content

The biggest concern (a major issue for 53% of respondents) was understanding exactly what training was needed among the ICT staff, followed by finding good value training (a major concern for 31% of respondents). Many respondents also found it difficult to find training that can be delivered flexibly (25% of respondents).
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Choose Your Stack Wisely

nospam@example.com (Cal Evans) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:36:00 +0100

Gone are the days when a development team had clear cut definition of what their development and production 'platform' is. Today the term platform includes not only the choice of language (i.e. PHP) but also the persistent data storage, the operating system and increasingly, the selected cloud infrastructure as well. All of these factors combine together to become your platform.

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Too Big to Manage

nospam@example.com (Cal Evans) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:06:00 +0200

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one."
-- Mark Twain

One day recently, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Harvard Business Ideacast and the topic was the recent events of the recession. In talking about banks, the guest speaker said "We believe these entities are too big to fail, but are too complex to manage". That statement hit me like a brick. I've seen several projects go off the rails and looking back at the ones I was involved in, the projects were too complex to manage.

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PHP enters top 3 of most popular programming languages

nospam@example.com (Ivo Jansch) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:45:46 +0200

The company TIOBE, founded in 2000, is involved heavily with Software Quality. They call themselves 'the coding standards company' and deliver tools to assess the quality of software by checking coding standards, among other things. Unfortunately, despite the fact that their website is written in PHP, they do not support PHP yet with their tools (at least as far as I can tell from their website), but they have one activity that is of interest to us in the PHP ecosystem: they collect statistics on the popularity of programming languages and have been doing this for a few years now.

In their latest analysis PHP has entered the top 3 of most popular programming languages, and that is something that both makes us proud and provides further proof that PHP is still growing and here to stay.

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Oh Be Careful Little Eyes What You See

nospam@example.com (Cal Evans) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:57:00 +0200

The children's Bible song starts off with the line "Oh be careful little eyes what you see". Regardless of whether you agree with the religious doctrine behind the song, the advice from the first line is, none-the-less, applicable to the PHP community these days.

The web has made it easy for anyone to become an instant pundit, regardless of their background. The tools exist so that anyone can quickly and easily publish anything and call it a fact. Nowhere is this problem more visible than in the software development community at large and the PHP community in specific.

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Migrating a dev team to an OO team (Part 1)

nospam@example.com (Dennis-Jan Broerse) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:57:00 +0200

For many years Object Oriented Programming was rare in the PHP world. Many PHP programmers donât know OO simply because PHP isn't natively an OO language. But with PHP5, PHP really entered the world of objects.

Still many PHP programmers feel that OO is too much for PHP. They don't see the benefits of object oriented programming. This is the start of a series of blog posts to investigate the topic.

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