After php[tek] this year (and the awesome mentorship summit), I wrote up a blog post detailing how I go about creating proposals, as well as giving some insight into how we chose proposals for Distill.

You can read that blog post on the Engine Yard Blog.

As every year, the JsDay and PhpDay conferences were taking place mid-May in the beautiful italian city of Verona. According to tradition, a bunch of Liipers visited both two day conferences. This year we were a crowd of twelve people, eager to learn the latest techniques for producing great web applications.

Both conferences are organised by the italian PHP user group GRUSP since a couple of years. Meanwhile the visiting crowd is quite international. Also there are speakers from all over the world, but GRUSP tries to still give a chance to as many locale speakers as possible. While the conferences grew a lot since the beginnings, the atmosphere is still really warm and personal. One reason for that is the proximity of the speakers who one can talk to both at the conferences themselves and at the social events organised by GRUSP. One also gets the opportunity to catch up with friends or meet new ones. Among Liipers, the conference got the reputation of beeing very educational and worth visiting, which is also the reason Liip decided to sponsor it this year. Obviously a big plus is also the great italian food served throughout the conference ;)

Image: Happy Liipers at italian dinner (clockwise, starting at the gap): Geoffroy Perriard, Alvaro Videla, Gilles Meier, David Jeanmonod, Donato Rotunno, Bastian Widmer, Lea Hänsenberger, Adrian Schlegel, Dorian Villet, Reto Ryter, Alain Horner, Photographer: Christoph Ebert

So whats left to say? A big thank you to GRUSP and I definitely recommend visiting JsDay / PhpDay 2014 - I sure will be back.

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The growth of mobile web users is staggering. While some of us have been browsing the web on mobile devices for nearly ten years, most of the world population is only now getting there.

The number of mobile web users is already at 1.5 billion, which happens to be quite close to the total number of Internet users back in 2009.

And it is growing rapidly. In 2015 there will be an estimated 2 billion smartphone users which is quite close to the total number of Internet users currently.

In the developed world, this is likely to be a mixture of tablets, smartphones, and traditional desktop computers, with most users having at least two different web-capable devices. In the developing world, the smartphone is the computer.

Considering these statistics, it is insanity to design websites and services PC-first, with mobile only as an afterthought.

How to prepare

Just some years ago, the mobile web was a slum. Instead of getting full-featured websites, many sent us out to poorly-built and featureless m. sites. Now more and more sites go with responsive web design that makes the site itself adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions.

But even with responsive design, it is easy to go overboard. Tools like WordPress Jetpack and jQuery Mobile oversimplify the site itself by trying to make it look and feel like a native app. In the mobile-first world this is not the right way to go.

In The Rise of the Mobile-Only User content strategist Karen McGrane makes a valid point (emphasis added):

Mobile users should get the same content. It's frustrating and confusing for them if you only give them a little bit of what you offer on your "real" website. If you try to guess which subset of your content the mobile user needs, you're going to guess wrong. Deliver the same content as your desktop user sees. (If you think some of your content doesn't deserve to be on mobile, guess what — it doesn't deserve to be on the desktop either. Get rid of it.)

There is no pixel-perfect

In this new world users will access your content or software using a wildly varying set of devices. And each of them has the reasonable expectation of being able to access the full experience and the full set of features you're providing.

This changes web design substantially. Even in the old world of different PC browsers, pixel perfect web design was rarely that. With responsive design, it is even less so.

Instead:

• Think in visual components instead of full pages. The composition of a page out of these components can vary for different screen sizes
• Design the compositions always for at three screen form factors: a full-sized desktop or tablet screen, a smartphone screen, and the 7" tablet in between
• Make your user interface elements big enough to be used on inaccurate touch screens
• Never, ever require a plugin to access some content or functionality

CSS Media Queries make responding to different form factors quite easy. And besides that, they also make it easy to optimize for the different screen densities we now have. This way your images will look sharp on anything the users have, from the "retina-class devices" to the lowest-specced Chinese smartphone, while requiring the user to only download the assets that their device can utilize.

The devices people use to access the services you provide will vary greatly not only in their display capabilities, but also in the ways you can do input. Some will have mice and physical keyboards, but an increasing amount will instead have a touchscreen. For these users, it is a big service to use the correct HTML5 input types so that the on-screen keyboards

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 4317 bytes)

At this years IPC Spring I gave two sessions about different JavaScript-Topics. Eventhough most of us are PHP-Developers at their heart, in todays world JavaScript has become an integral component of most webapplications. That's why I give a lot of trainings about JavaScript these days. Take your chance to peek at the two sessions I just presented.

The PHP development team announces the availability of PHP 5.5 RC3. This release fixes some bugs against RC2. THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION! You can find an incomplete changelog of PHP 5.5.0RC3 here : Fixed bug causing segfault in gc_zval_possible_root)Fixed bug about a heap based buffer overflow in quoted_printable_encodehash_pbkdf2() truncates data when using default length and hex output To get the full changelog, please, check the NEWS file attached to the archive. For source downloads of PHP 5.5.0RC3 please visit the download page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/. We were pleased if you could test this release candidate against your code base and report any problems that you encounter to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker. Thanks you helping us making PHP better.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.16 and PHP 5.3.26. These releases fix about 15 bugs, including CVE-2013-2110. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.16.For source downloads of PHP 5.4.16 and PHP 5.3.26 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.

On the train back I'm just uploading the slides of my talks at the International PHP Conference in Berlin, which ended some minutes ago. In my first talk I captured my experience with designing RESTful web services, summarizing pitfalls and low hanging fruits under the topic "Pragmatic REST". The second talk dealt with Behavior Driven Development on basis of Behat. Find the slides for download here.

We are excited to announce that IBM has partnered with Zend to offer a self-service Enterprise PHP platform on IBM SmartCloud PaaS. This IBM offering will ensure that IBM customers have a single point of contact for their application delivery requirements. IBM’s customers will get the benefits of Zend’s solution and expertise in enabling enterprise PHP, coupled with IBM’s innovation and support around the cloud, as well as the joint innovation, integration and support that the partnership delivers.

Highlights of the PHP Platform include:

- IBM & Zend have built self-service, ready-to-go Enterprise PHP application environments. These deployments are auto-scaling and fault tolerant out of the box.

- IBM is being very aggressive in how they are pricing the offering. No doubt, IBM is serious about the cloud. They are innovating both on functionality and the overall business model in order to deliver a differentiated value-proposition.

- Zend Server’s DevOps & automation capabilities integrate deeply with IBM SmartCloud‘s automation capabilities. [See Zend Server DevOps Video for a short overview of Zend Server]

- Zend Server’s mobile gateway makes it incredibly simple for customers to build and deploy API-first architectures for mobile apps. These APIs can easily be deployed into IBM SmartCloud and leveraged by IBM Worklight.

- Zend Server’s Web and mobile monitoring capabilities make it easy for customers to tie application-specific metrics and monitoring data into their single pane-of-glass monitoring & management systems.

- Zend Server not only allows existing IBM customers to interoperate with their existing IBM assets, such as IBM DB2 and IBM WebSphere, but also has out-of-the-box option for Web-centric assets such as MongoDB, MySQL, social platforms and other technologies that are critical to meet the requirements of modern Web and mobile apps.

IBM & Zend have had a strong strategic partnership for many years. We have jointly enabled a broad set of IBM customers including Starbucks, DHL, Prada, and many others. These customers have been able to take full advantage of opportunities in Web and mobile, due to PHP and Zend’s ability to deliver faster, more iterative apps while retaining high quality.

We all recognize that enterprise development and operations teams are under extreme pressure to more effectively deliver value to their business owners. This is especially true in the age of mobility and cloud services, which is a big paradigm shift in how companies engage their target audiences. Also, business owners in this day and age are becoming increasingly opinionated with regards to the user experience they wish to drive. Businesspeople themselves are consumers of a broad set of engaging mobile applications and cloud services.

In this new era of engagement, PHP continues to shine in its ability to deliver value rapidly and at a high level of quality to Web and mobile users. PHP runs over 39 percent of the Web workload [Netcraft: PHP Grows & Grows]. Seventy-five percent of developers using dynamic languages for mobile apps are using PHP [Evans Data Survey: Mobile Development Survey 2012, v2]. Therefore, it makes a huge amount of sense for IBM, the leader in enterprise IT and Zend, the leader in PHP app development, to partner to deliver a great solution for the mobile-first Enterprise.

It has been a great pleasure to have worked with the IBM on building this out over the past year and a half. We are very much looking forward to supporting IBM in rolling this offering out into the market and winning over enterprise customers for this platform. We are also looking forward to partnering on further innovations from both IBM & Zend, some of which are already in the pipeline, in order to strengthen the solution for enterprise customers.

If your company has interest in exploring the IBM SmartCloud, feel free to contact me and I’ll route you to the right person or sign-up on the IBM Web site for a Free 60 day trial of IBM SmartCloud.

Happy PHP’ing!