The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest interview with a member of the PHP community. In this latest show host Cal Evans talks with Paul Jones in the first live online interview for the show.

Cal and Paul talk about one of Paul's new projects, the "PHP Package Development Standards" project including why he started up the initiative and what kind of goals he has for it going forward. He also talks about the research done before making the proposal and if there's an intent for this to become a new method for standards definition. Paul also talks about issues with standards definitions overall and the difference between non-code and code-based standards.

You can listen to/watch this latest episode either through the in-page audio and video player or you can watch over on YouTube directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to keep up with announcements of new shows as they're released.

The Day Camp 4 Developers online "conference" has officially announced their latest event, "Debugging Beyond var_dump()", happening Friday September 18th from 9am through 3pm (CST). This time around they're putting it on with the help of the fine folks at php[architect] too.

This latest edition of the excellent event features several well known speakers talking about debugging tips and sharing tools that can make you a more effective developer:

• "PHP Profiling, an Introduction" (Fabien Potencier)
• "Debugging: Past, Present and Future" (Derick Rethans)
• "Characterization Testing for Legacy Applications" (Paul M. Jones)
• "Modern Tools for API Debugging and Testing" (Neil Mansilla)
• "Don't Reboot, Debug!" (Joshua Thijssen)

Much like it's siblings, the Day Camp 4 Developers event is completely virtual and is held via a webcast. Tickets will soon be sale and, compared to the usual cost of a conference ticket, are quite cheap. There's even group tickets available if you'd like to hold a "watch party" in your office.

Check out the Day Camp 4 Developers site for more information or to pick up your tickets!

The PHPClasses.org site has posted a book review of Paul Jones' "Modernizing Legacy Applications" ebook today covering some of the content in the book and the reviewers own personal opinions on what was good and what could use improvement.

The current technologies we have today and the numerous improvements to the PHP programming language, makes our legacy applications operate "below today’s standards". They need to be improved or rewritten, but who would want to rewrite an application of many thousands or millions of lines of code?

That’s why you should read this book, ‘Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP’ by Paul M. Jones. It explains the nitty-gritty of how PHP applications were built over a decade ago and why they are now called legacy applications. He explains why your legacy applications are not meant to be rewritten, but optimized and improved to support today’s standards.

The reviewer goes through each chapter of the book, giving an overview of each including topics discussed and a few of the handy tips. Overall he recommends the book not only to those experienced in the industry but also those new to developing in PHP, helping to prevent bad behaviors before they start.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a review of Paul Jones' "Modernizing Legacy Applications" book. The book share's Paul's gathered knowledge about migrating legacy code into a more modern, maintainable and robust application.

Chances are you’ve come across some horrible legacy code once or twice in your lifetime as a PHP developer. Heck, if you’ve worked with WordPress to any degree, I’m sure you have. I myself have had the satisfying task of modernizing a monolithic ZF1 application, and it was the most mentally exhaustive (but, admittedly, the most educational) year of my career. If only I had had Paul M. Jones’ “Modernizing Legacy Applications In PHP” book back then, I would have been done in half the time, and the work I did would have been twice as good.

Bruno talks briefly about the contents of the book and its goals (from legacy to MVC really). He goes on to point out that the target audience for the book is not the beginner PHP developer but someone that's familiar with good software design concepts and application structure. He goes through the technical side of things, commenting that it's "sound - amazingly so" and how it seems to be taken from a real-life project's refactoring. He wraps things up with a list of some of the pros and cons of the book and a recommendation along with a 4.5 of 5 "elephpant" rating.

The PHP Town Hall podcast has released their latest episode, hosted by Phil Sturgeon and Ben Edmunds - Episode #29: Don't Mention PHP 6 v PHP 7. In this episode they're joined by guests Paul Jones and Daniel Lowrey.

Paul has recently been talking a lot about "Action Domain Responder" which is billed as a more representative replacement of the often mis-used "Model View Controller" architecture. Luckily he does a good job of ELI5 so we don't get too lost, and we talk a bit about how ADR helps with putting content negotiation in a logical place. Daniel then goes on to talk about a few awesome topics, including some of the OpenSSL changes in 5.6, and a HTTP server he is working on built entirely from PHP. It's async, non-blocking and web-scale.

They also talk about HTTP2, the Aura framework and the PSR-7 HTTP messaging proposal. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the live recording from the Google+ session.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their latest episode in their community interview series. In this new episode Cal Evans talks with Paul Jones (lead developer on the Aura PHP framework).

They talk some about Aura project and the current status, including the work on the version 2 components and what's to come (recombining v2 packages back into the vs framework). They also talk about Paul's book Modernizing Legacy Applications.

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

Based on his popular conference session "It was like that when I got there", Paul Jones has announced the release of an ebook covering the migration of legacy applications to a more recent, well-structured system. The book, "Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP", is still in the works, though.

My upcoming book, “Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP”, [shows how to improve your application with small changes]. Using my talk “It Was Like That When I Got Here” as a starting point, I condense 15 years of fixing PHP codebases into a collection of specific steps to complete in order. As you apply these small fixes, each one building on the last, you will be able to restructure your codebase from a spaghetti mess to a testable, organized, modernized application, free of globals and mixed concerns.

If the premise sounds interesting, be sure to sign up to be notified of updates as they happen. There's also some freebies that'll come along with the subscription including a pre-publication chapter.

The /Dev/Hell podcast has released their latest two episodes, one in the usual format recorded prior to the True North PHP conference - Episode 37: Jets vs Sharks - and the other following, Dark Secret Branding.

In episode 37 they talk with Paul Jones of the Solar/Aura projects about "lots of stuff about confusing things like dependency injection and human behavior in tribes".

In the second of the two episodes they talk with Jonathan Snook about Twitter application development, Jonathan's past and more.

You can, of course, listen to either of these via the in-page players or you can download the mp3s directly for offline listening: Episode 37, Dark Secret Branding.

In the wake of the success of the PSR-0 standard (used in autoloading structures across frameworks and various applications), the PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) has start on drafts of other standards to help provide some guidelines to standardize PHP development across projects.

Among the group, Paul Jones has been writing serveral proposals under the PSR-1 standard banner that include:

• The basic draft of the standard
• An extended draft of the same
• A more advanced version, PSR-2 that also includes some survey results on various syntax elements.

If you want to know more about the PHP-FIG group, you should listen to this excellent panel interview of the group from the Voices of the ElePHPant podcast. Paul and others get into the point of the group and how the standards are progressing.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode today, another interview from the Microsoft Jump In! Camp - an interview with Paul Jones, lead architect of both the Solar and Aura frameworks.

Cal and Paul talk about the Aura project, a PHP 5.3 framework and how it relates to some of the base work that the Solar framework provided for it. He mentions the work being done on the database components to work with SQL Server and how some of the coming SQL Server features will be implemented.

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.