In this edition I talked with Derick Rethans the Father Of The PHP developer's Swiss-Army Knife aka Xdebug. Derick is an expert when it comes to the PHP Internals; no wonder he is viewed as a vibrant and "man of action" within The PHP Community. As a PHP Core Contributor, he has been at the crux of many PHP extensions and variations; the mcrypt, date and input-filter extensions, bug fixes, additions and even leading the QA team.

Derick answers questions about how he got involved with PHP and how he thinks it compares from then to now. He also talks some about what tools he uses for his development and more details behind Xdebug's origins and PHP extensions in general.

It has been a while since I have written anything. In the last few months I have been busy rewriting the connection handling parts of the MongoDB driver for PHP. [...] Some time ago, my friend Ligaya Turmelle suggested that I should come and talk at the JaxPHP/JaxWeb, the PHP and web developers usergroup in Jacksonville, Florida. And while I was there, why not visit a few other user groups too?

From September 18th through the 24th, he'll be visiting the following cities (and bringing swag with him):

• Boca Raton, Florida
• Orlando, Florida
• Jacksonville, Floria
• Atlanta, Georgia
• Nashville, Tennessee

MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, document-oriented NoSQL database. [...] This talk introduces MongoDB for developers who aren't familiar with it with a detailed introduction of how to work with MongoDB from PHP. This talk will cover the basics from installing the PHP driver and connecting to MongoDB to creating, inserting, querying for, and updating documents. Schema design will also be covered. This won't be a duplication of the previous MongoDB presentation we had earlier this year.

The event is happening Friday, September 21st from 7-9pm (note that it's September, not this month). More details on the event are to come, so if you're a PHP (or MongoDB) developer in the Atlanta area, stay tuned for the latest info.

Cal's "three questions" for Derick involve

• How did you come up with the idea and how did the project get started?
• What's been the most fun and interesting part about building the community around XDebug?
• What's the hardest lesson you've learned about running a project like XDebug?

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can also subscribe to their feed to get the latest as they're released.

Derick gives a little background about himself (including being a PHP evangelist for 10gen) and how he ended up working with MongoDB. They talk about how MongoDb is different and some of the involvement he has in contributing to open source projects and the OpenStreetMap project.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the file directly.

One of the challenges that comes with moving to MongoDB is figuring how to best model your data. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for designing schemas for RDBMSs, these rules don't always apply to MongoDB. The simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema-free data structures means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. Not only that, MongoDB has several unique features, such as atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of schemas that make sense.

For more information, check out their event page, complete with details about the venue and maps to the location.

Have a user group meeting coming up you'd like to announce? let us know!

The web is full of useful advice focussed on pushing out the last bit of performance of your code. They mention trivial changes. like changing every occurrence of print with echo even suggesting to use for instead of foreach. These optimisations help, but you are not going to notice it unless they're in a tight loop with many iterations. It is also a wrong approach for tackling performance issues.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. You can also page through his slides as you listen.

Cal's questions mainly revolve around Derick's contributions the PHP core (and one on OpenStreetMap):

• Do you consider the current way PHP is developed functional or broken (and why)?
• What would you do to change the way PHP is developed and why would you want to do it that way?
• Explain to us what OpenStreetMap and why you think this is an important project.

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

This session explain a certain set of design issues for library code that either is often extended, or created with extending and inheritance in mind. There are many ways how a library can be designed to make it both easier to test, as well as for external developers to consume and use. This presentation provides techniques for doing so.

You can either listen via the in-page player or download the mp3 directly. Be sure to check out the other great episodes too!

A first look at the topic (Date and Time) might get you thinking, "Why the hell do I need a book to teach me about time?" But further investigating, and some life experience will show you that dealing with Date and Time is not always as straightforward as "Its twelve o'clock". Derick's book gives you an in depth look into handling various factors of date and time such as timezones and days that did not exist, as well as finally delivering something missing from php.net: documentation of the DateTime Object.

Rafael mentions some of what the book contains - an introduction to date/time, calendar switches, daylight savings, manipulating date/time values and how the internals of the language uses timezones.