On the Ibuildings blog, Soila Patajoki has posted about two upcoming events in the UK and Irish PHP communities.

Following the success of our two PHP seminars in London, we have decided to make it a tour and to visit other parts of the UK and Ireland as well. Next up are Leeds and Dublin - come and meet us in your city! Find out more about our events below.

The first is a talk on source control happening September 9th (as presented by Lorna Mitchell) and the second being a talk from Ivo Jansch in Dublin - "Enterprise PHP and Zend".

Check out the blog post for more information including how to register (do it before the Early Bird special ends and get a copy of CTO Ivo Jansch's book Guide to Enterprise PHP Development).

The Zend Developer Zone has a review posted of a report that the O'Reilly Radar group put out concerning Open Source software and its place in the Enterprise business today.

It's not often that a report generates this much excitement but "Open Source in the Enterprise" says a lot of what needs to be said to C-Levels considering making the jump to Open Source.

Cal mentions one of the 6 factors that are driving more and more businesses to open source software (like PHP) - the community that surrounds them (how vibrant is it?). He also points out the concept of "vendor lock-in" and how open source can help companies accomplish it by ridding themselves of proprietary software. The report can be gotten from the O'Reilly Radar group for $399 for an individual copy or $995 for a sitewide license.

This new post on the PHP::Impact blog talks about the enterprise level web service framework for PHP, an implementation of WS02 for PHP - WS02 WSF/PHP.

It is the only PHP extension that supports a wide range of WS-* specifications. With the framework enabling the use of PHP in SOA implementations, WSO2 WSF/PHP is the ideal extension for integrating PHP legacy systems into enterprise SOA.

Federico notes some of the features of the framework including secure services/clients, binary attachments, automatic WSDL generation and interoperability with .NET and J2EE. You can find more information on the project at its page on the ws02.org site.

On the Ibuildings blog there's a quick new post from Joni Overbosch looking at Ivo Jansch's recently released new book, php|architect's Guide to Enterprise PHP Development.

Last year he confided in me, said he wanted to write a book. And he actually did, within the year, 275 pages describing the complete development life cycle. For each phase in the development cycle, Ivo describes the common pitfalls, ways to get around them and tools others use to keep things running smoothly.

You can find out more about the book on its website including a link to order a copy of your very own ($36 CAD for print and PDF, $32 CAD for just the PDF).

Ivo Jansch has posted about the official release of his book hot from php|architect's presses, the Guide to Enterprise PHP Development.

It's true that it's one of the few books that's not about PHP code, but about the entire development life cycle. I owe a lot of thanks to Elizabeth Naramore and Marco Tabini of php|architect, for getting this book out. If you order the book, also check out its companion website. I will collect feedback on that site, and will regularly post errata or other updates.

Get more information (and grab yourself a copy) from the php|architect website - the print/PDF will cost about $30 CAD and the PDF only runs about $27 CAD.

Paul Wander has posted to the Ibuildings blog today about a new seminar (non-web) one of their CTO, Ivo Jansch, will be giving on the 10th of June at the King's College London:

Are you a sophisticated PHP developer, or a newbie? Either way, you need to make the best of your resources, be they people delivering projects, or hardware serving your customers. Take this opportunity to learn from the industry experts the importance of PHP best practices.

Ivo will be talking PHP in the Enterprise - how good developers are hard to find, keeping code up and running well and how important scalability is to you and your business.

If you would like to attend, you can find contact information at the bottom of this page.

As is pointed out both by Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone, there's been another article posted due to the response from the (now infamous) CIO article - "PHP's Enterprise Strengths and Weaknesses, Take 2" (by Zend's John Coggeshall).

So, in the digital toolbox of the developer, where has PHP been designed to work best? And where is it, perhaps, not the best tool for the job? [...] While other languages can surely be used to solve The Web Problem, in this article I explain why PHP is the premier solution for server-side Web scripting.

John talks about how PHP was written for the web, how it approaches and handles web requests, the security of the language and some of the major software packages that are being used in PHP development today (like the Zend Framework, PHPUnit and PECL extensions).

Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interesting article over on the CIO magazine website that has some in the PHP community a bit up in arms about comments it makes towards the language.

The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.

Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:

• Security and PHP
• Working with PHP and the shell
• Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)

These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.

Community Comments:

• Cal Evans
• Luke Welling
• Harun Yayli

As the PHP Web Services blog points out today, there's some training offered for developers looking to get into working with web services (using SOAP and WS-Security specifically).

Here's the description of the course

This training helps you create secure Web services and clients using SOAP, and WS-Security, which are inter-operable with Java and .NET systems. It also teaches you how to work with WSDL and binary attachments when using Web services in PHP.

The class lasts for three hours and requires that you have some level of experience with web services (enough to know XML and the concepts behind passing it as messages back and forth). The cost for the event is $199 USD and the next session for it is coming up on January 16th starting at 9am (PST). You can get additional details on it from the detail page on the wso2.com website.

Ivo Jansch is very happy to announce that it's official - he will be authoring a book for php|architect all about PHP in the Enterprise:

It will be one of the first books about PHP that will not cover PHP code. It is loosely based on my 'enterprise PHP development' talk at the Zend UK Business Conference last year. It will cover the entire development lifecycle of a software project, but targeted at PHP development teams.

He points out that the first version of the book will be handed in in March so ideally it will be released soon after that. He's also open to ideas/content suggestions/etc that you might want to post to his blog for consideration.