Well, ZendCon day #1 has drawn to a close. By day #1, I mean that I sat in on Sara Golemon, Wez Furlong’s, and Marcus Boerger’s tutorial on “Extending PHP.” Reading Sara’s book is one thing, but hearing it first hand from the masters themselves is another. Also, a little later in the day, my colleagues from Schematic showed up, along with some former colleagues from Community Connect Inc., so quite a good day overall.

Ah, the smell of Fall is in the air…oh, no…wait…that’s the stench of ZendCon approaching. :) Next week, I’ll be attending and speaking at the Zend PHP Conference in Burlingame, CA, right near San Francisco. I’ll be giving two talks…well, 1.5. First, I’ll be debuting my talk “The Grown-Up Company’s Guide to Development.” This particular talk focuses on increasing the quality of work by way of coding standards, code reviews, using robust development tools, and adopting a framework/toolkit. I’ll be presenting it at Atlanta PHP on October 4th, too.

I figured it best to give an example to back up my last post entitled “Who’s Online with PHP and Memcached.” First, let’s look at the WhosOnline class itself. This class is meant to be a Singleton, so you have to access it with WhosOnline::getInstance(). Also, DISCLAIMER: I wrote this code in about 20-30 minutes. There may be little odds and ends-type problems with it, but please post comments if you’ve got feedback!

Whenever you Google around for things like “Who’s Online php”, you’ll find that a lot of the solutions are centered around using a database. However, is this really necessary? For a site with, say, 50,000 concurrent users making, say, one page request every eight seconds, this could be a lot of database traffic if you’re recording the user’s activity on every request. One goal here: get Who’s Online functionality off of the database. We’ll explore a possible solution with Memcached that I’ve personally implemented, and thus far, it’s been working great.

For the like…two of you that read my blog, this year’s php|works conference is here in Atlanta, and it’s this week! I won’t be speaking, but I’ll be attending Thursday and Friday in support of my co-workers Ben Ramsey and Maggie Nelson, both of whom are speaking at the conference. I’ll also be attending the various social events and after-hours things, so I hope to see some of you there! In ZendCon news, I’m wrapping up the details of my presentation, “The Grown-Up Company’s Guide to Development.” I’ve got 70 slides, so I’ve got to ditch 20 or 30 in order to not bore you all to tears. ;) In any case, see you two readers around!