Yes, that’s right - I’ve officially signed away my life for the next year to be the member of a gym. Will I use the darned thing? Probably so, believe it or not.

See, here’s the scoop: Melissa loves staring at Jamie Bamber’s naked (oops, I mean half-naked) body. I’ll admit, he’s a good looking British stud, but I can’t let him win over me with regards to looks! So, I’m “bulking up” - or at least trying to loose some of that pudge of mine and maybe tone myself a little better.

But besides that reason, I actually am trying to get into the habit of going to the gym for an hour each day, doing at least half an our of cardio (or more on just cardio days) in order to get back into shape and make myself a lot healthier than I’ve been recently. I realize that in probably 10 years from now my health will not be in good shape if I keep up what I was doing (not working out, essentially). So, hopefully this will keep me alive longer, make me feel good about my body, and most importantly, make me feel healthier.

It’s a long road, but I’m setting my goals high. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?

As I sit here administrating the CS: Source server during the 12th hour I’ve been working for the IEEE LAN, I feel multiple things.

Happiness

A lot of people turned out for the event, and everyone seems to be having a good time. We already finished the Halo 2 tournament and gave out the prize. Now the CS: Source tournament is heavily underway and people seem to be enjoying themselves. It was a lot better than I had previously thought it was going to be because I was having numerous issues with getting the game server setup and running.

PAIN

My legs hurt. REALLY REALLY HURT. Lack of sleep plus helping to lug massive amounts of equipment around has caused extreme pain.

Okay, so now that I have a chance to blog about what I thought of the conference overall, I figured that I would do it and get it out of the way before I forget and/or run out of time during the week to do it.

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I attended a session today on PHPUnit, the PHP framework for testing your code. I felt as though this was a significant software solution that must be talked about, considering I’d never heard of it before.

Before I begin though, and so others are aware of the general gist of stuff that was talked about at the conference, I want to go over the main “Themes” that the conference talked about. The overall theme was “Creating Modern Web Applications with PHP”. Within that, the sessions and tutorials were broken into 3 different tracks. They were:

• Track 1 - PHP and Web Services
• PHP Development
• PHP Management

A track that was frequented by many was the PHP and Web Services track. Web Services are nothing new, but they certainly are becoming a big thing. If not used for a greater good (ie: Flickr Services, Google Code, etc.), then Web Services are something that are necessary in AJAX based programming. For AJAX based websites, small XML datafeeds are sent with requests to the server, and the server responds with a small XML datafeed - thus, we have a Web Service, only on a smaller scale.

But that’s not the point of this blog post. I wanted to go into the PHP Development and PHP Management tracks. As I put on my first blog post about the “PHP Development Best Practices” tutorial, there were several important things that were mentioned in that lecture. One was documentation - something that has been fronted as long as I have been doing programming. The other, however, was properly testing your code. Now, at OSCON, this was hardly mentioned at all. Speakers either assumed you were testing or just decided not to mention it. Nevertheless, testing was a key component in the development and management aspect of the Zend/PHP Con.

So, what is meant by testing? Do we just type some code, hit refresh, and expect it to work? No. The PHP5 coding methodology is going in the way of OOP. Thus, making a change to a page which is strictly OOP and no spaghetti code will simply make your debugger scratch it’s head because it doesn’t know where to begin. This is where Unit Testing is coming in. Unit Testing (though seemingly been around for a while) will test each specific function and class to verify the output came out as expected. So, this is cool, but does this mean you have to write extensive code to test your already massive bits of code? The answer is No. This is what PHPUnit is for.

PHPUnit is, again, a framework which you build on top of to run the Unit Tests on your PHP5 code. When you tell PHPUnit to do it’s thing, it will run through the tests as you have set them up and will tell you if any fail.

My opinions

This is a truly marvelous idea. Although I’ve been doing PHP coding for ~3 years now, I had never known something like this existed, but now with all of the new knowledge gained about PHP5 and coding styles, I’m certain to go straight to implementing this in our code. I’m very excited as I can look forward to decreased testing times and more productivity. Now if I could only convince my boss that we need to start moving the OOP way…

Well, I’ve been at the Zend/PHP conference in San Jose, CA since Sunday. The tutorials began on Monday, and with the beginning, I recognized a HUGE diversity gap. There were plenty of Americans, Canadians and Britans who were speaking English, but as I sit here typing this there are 3 individuals speaking French (could be Canadian and not French individuals, don’t know specifically). Additionally, there is a lot of Hebrew floating around. I had forgotten on the first day that the Zend company is headquartered in Israel, so this would explain the Hebrew. It’s different - OSCON was nothing like this.

The conference is going well thus far. The two tutorials I attended were “PHP Development Best Practices” and “Extending PHP”. I think when I first signed up to take Extending PHP, I was thinking it was something other than writing extensions. I had attended a seminar at OSCON about writing extensions, and I was thoroughly unimpressed. It was quick and didn’t really catch my interest. However, the speakers giving it this time really caught my attention, despite their assumption that everyone in the classroom knew C. Nevertheless, although I was not understanding half of the lecture, it does make me want to learn C so that I can go through and create PHP extensions for my business (and possibly TAMU).

I got to network with several individuals at a ZCE & Speaker only party on Monday evening, and it was quite intriguing. I learned about ExtremeBlue (a very unique programming challenge for students) from 3 IBM representatives (2 from the UK one from Canada), and finally met Paul Reinheimer - the individual who trained me online for the PHP ZCE Certification. Additionally, I got to talk to several individuals with superior cameras (D200 and SP-D800 flashes) and I’m totally envious and know what I’m going to upgrade to. I also got to talk with Chris Shifflet who seems like a real laid-back individual, but quite intelligent when it comes to PHP.

In any case, the first Keynote of the day is about to begin. Gotta run.