Entries by Jim Workman

For many developers, testing their code is one of those tasks that they prefer to avoid as much as possible. But one of the easily applied aspects of Extreme Programming is the practice of test-driven development in which the tests are the first part of the development. We will look at the benefits of writing tests before
writing the code which it tests and how to use the PHPUnit testing framework to make the practice of writing tests for your code easy and even fun.

Donald Hosek has been programming for over 25 years and has worked with PHP since the PHP3 days. He is currently employed by cars.com and has done development for a wide variety of companies including Fox Filmed Entertainment, Beckman-Coulter, and the Chicago Stock Exchange among others.

This weekend will be an open Q&A session.

In MySQL, a storage engine is a mechanism or methodology by which data and indexes are archived and managed. Different storage engines have different features, and quite often different requirements. Solomon will provide a brief introduction to the various storage engines supported by MySQL and describe the environments most likely to use them.
This talk will be briefer than usual, and afterwards, there will be also an open Q&A session to see what topics members would like to see covered in the future.

Main Topic: Free Linux virtual servers with Xen 3.0: a great developer tool
Speaker: David Rolston

David will explain what Xen is, and walk us through the setup on an existing Linux server. He will cover the basics of running multiple instances, and explain how a developer can easily set up multiple virtual Linux servers with completely separate LAMP environments, or conversely, how to clone an existing server with a complete LAMP environment.

David Rolston learned PHP and MySQL during a stint as head moderator of the PHP community site PHPFreaks.com and MySQLFreaks.com, he went on to author tutorials on LAMP and PHP OOP which have been read by over 100,000 people. David has participated in several Open Source projects, including The Serendipity Blog, as the author of the GeSHi plugin, and is the project leader of the Mambo & Joomla gallery plugin PonyGallery. These days he works as a consultant focused on open source technologies used in the creation of interactive web sites and web services.

Main Topic: AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript And XML: Zip Code fills in City, State fields
Speaker: Peter Benjamin

There is movement afoot towards thick client applications using AJAX. Combining JavaScript in your web page to go back to the web server and run server side CGI scripts to send back small chunks of information to display on the page is the "thickening" of the thin web client.

Simple database applications are increasing the user friendliness of web forms with prefilling fields based on a just entered value, for example, in the United States entering the 5 digit zip code also defines the City and State values. Why have the customer type those values in as well, when AJAX can do it for them?

AJAX methodology using the XMLhttpRequest method or ActiveX equivalent will be overviewed using the Zip Code as an example. The lesson will be based on JavaScript and PHP and MySQL code.

Peter Benjamin is a freelance computer consultant with three decades of experience; he's programmed mainframes and minis, and more flavors of Unix than you can shake a stick at. Peter also leads a Web technology study group called Web Spinners; see http://LAWebSpinners.org