On the NetTuts.com site today they've posted the transcript of a panel discussion they had with several developers about exceptions and whether or not they should be used for flow control.

I'm pleased to release our first ever round table, where we place a group of developers in a locked room (not really), and ask them to debate one another on a single topic. In this first entry, we discuss exceptions and flow control.

The opinions vary among the group as to what exceptions should be used for (even outside of the flow control topic). Opinions shared are things like:

• Exceptions are situations in your code that you should never reach
• Errors cause Failures and are propagated, via Exceptions.
• So, essentially, exceptions are an "abstraction" purely to model the abnormality.
• Personally, I envision exceptions more as "objections."
• Exceptions like this should be caught at some point and transformed into a friendly message to the user.

There's lots more than this in the full discussion so head over and read it all - there's definitely some good points made.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their second episode in the "It's the Booze Talking" series as recorded at this year's php|tek conference in May. In this new episode several community members talk about user groups (some as organizers, some as members).

Community members joining Cal on the podcast are:

• Ryan Weaver
• Jason Austin
• Jake Smith
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Adam Culp

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and other great episodes.

On the Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, the latest episode has been released - FIG, PUD & FOMO, a discussion with members of the PHP Standards Group: Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Jeremy Lindblom and Paul Jones.

Cal's questions center around the Standards group and what kinds of discussions they have about the language and the progress the group has made so far (like PSR-0):

• What's the purpose of the group?
• Is the purpose of this group to take PHP from everyone's hands and enforce the "one true grace" on everyone?
• Is the group fulfilling its purpose or is it wandering off the path?

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

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has varied from it's usual interview style in this new episode - a panel discussion with several members of the PHP community, "Sexism in Tech".

Guests for this episode were Elizabeth Naramore, Laura Thompson, Anna Filina and Elizabeth Tucker Long. Cal and the panel discuss a few questions including:

• Given the tech in a male dominated industry [...] why are women entitled to change a culture that doesn't want to be changed?
• Does it make it okay if the material in question is generated by a woman if it objectifies women?
• Does the Forbes article [on sexism in tech] carry more weight because it was written by a woman and do you agree?

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

Hugh Williams has a new post with his recap of the "PHP at Scale" panel from this year's PHP UK Conference.

The good news was that Rasmus and Nikolay couldn't see any reasons why PHP was particularly challenging. What we saw were general challenges in scaling applications to large traffic volumes - and that's pretty much where the panel discussion went. Here's a few key points from the discussion.

Highlighted points included: removing bottlenecks to help performance (simple in theory, hard in practice), the fact that PHP should never be the bottleneck, the "odd direction" of HipHop, challenges/growing pains in moving from startup to a large web property. There was also a less technical discussion about "scaling teams" and finding the right (motivated) people to do the job.

Phil Sturgeon (an expert in all things related to the Fuel PHP framework) has written up a tutorial for NetTuts.com about creating a basic admin panel for your application based on the framework. This is the second part of a series looking at Fuel, building on the topics from the first.

In the first part of this series, we took a look at the basics of the FuelPHP framework. In this second-part, we'll be stepping it up a gear and move onto some more advanced topics! We'll be creating an admin panel for our application, cover the common uses of the ORM and use the Authentication package to restrict access.

He walks you through setting up Oil (the command-line tool that comes bundled with Fuel) and using it to create a new application. There's a few steps of configuration to connect to a database and setting up a few access groups (like "Banned", "Guests" and "Administrators"). Oil is used again to create users in the database and to auto-generate a lot of the controller/view code you'll need for the admin tool. He then gets into the more technical parts - updating the current code to be able to do things like using the ORM to fetch database results and being able to add comments to posts.

If you missed out on the Future of PEAR/Pyrus webcast event put on by Engine Yard, you're in luck - they've posted a recording of the event.

In this panel discussion, we tackle topics including the direction PEAR and Pyrus will be going in the next few years, obstacles that may be on the horizon, and more.

PEAR is the package library of standardized packages for a variety of common development tasks. Pyrus is a new package manager to make installing and maintaining PEAR packages simpler. Engine Yard's next webcast will cover the Lithium framework with core contributors Nate Abele, Garrett Woodworth, and John Anderson on December 1st.

EngineYard, a company that recently merged with the PHP platform as a service provider Orchestra.io, has a new live panel podcast about the Future of PHP, specifically involving PEAR and Pyrus.

If you are a PHP developer using PEAR and Pyrus, we invite you to join us this week as we explore the future of PEAR and Pyrus. We'll be discussing issues such as where PEAR/Pyrus will be going in the next few years, what obstacles may be on the horizon, and how they're going to get where they're going.

The live panel, hosted by Elizabeth Naramore, will include experts from the two projects: David Coallier (President), Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, Brett Bieber, and Till Klampäckel. There's still time to sign up to attend - the show happens on November 17th. To put your name in to be a part of the event, fill in the info here and you'll be sent more information about attending.

Matt Curry has this recent post looking at the CakePHP Status plugin he's developed and how to add in a custom Ajax-powered panel.

Last time we made a simple panel that showed the last 10 users that signed up for you web app. [...] This time we'll do a panel that shows the number of sign ups based on a time frame. We'll add a drop down that let's you select day, week, month or year and it'll show a breakdown of new users for that period. The updates will use ajax.

He includes the code to create the element, set up the javascript to interface with the backend and the PHP to create the controller for it to interface with. His example grabs the most recent signups from his Users information.

On InfoQ.com there's a recent discussion with three members in a virtual panel discussing a common question among businesses all over the world considering PHP - is it ready for the Enterprise?

Although PHP boasts of being the most widely used environment for web application development, it has been traditionally considered as not suitable for the enterprise. InfoQ has conducted a virtual panel regarding the evolution of the language/platform and its suitability in enterprise environments.

The three members of the panel (Zeev Suraski, Rob Nicholson and Derick Rethans) are asked about PHP's interoperability with other platforms, the trend of scripts moving into a JVM, the transitions from the major versions of the language (ex. PHP4 to PHP5), the role more advanced features might play in PHP and if PHP might be considering a move into more functional programming.