The 7PHP.com site, in collaboration with the Nomand PHP user group is giving away two free tickets to attend this month's user group event (happening May 22nd).

NomadPHP is like a virtual PHP User Group mainly for people who do not have the chance to avail of a local PHP user group. But it is open to ANYONE around the world. NomadPHP is an initiative brought forward by the icon of The PHP Community, namely 'His Awesomeness' Mr Cal Evans. It will kick-start its first group talk session on the Wednesday 22nd May 2013 (i.e in some 16 days as from the date of this post). The speaker is the PRO PHP Guy / PRO Zend Framework Evangelist and author of the book Zend Framework in action, Rob Allen. Rob will be introducing and talking about Zend Framework 2 - it is a must for anyone willing to learn ZF 2.

The Nomad PHP user group is designed to be a "user group for those that don't have one". It's a virtual group meeting once a month that you can attend anywhere in the world. You do have to purchase tickets, however. This post shows you how you can enter to win one of the two free tickets, though - either via email or by writing a PHP article for 7PHP.com.

If you've wanted to get involved in a PHP user group but either don't have one in your area or travel so much it makes it impractical, there's a new group that might interest you - Nomad PHP. It's a virtual user group that you can attend. It's still in the beginning stages, but you can express your interest and get more details as they come.

Tired of seeing all the great speakers other PHP User Groups are hearing and lamenting that there is no group near you? Nomad PHP User Group is just for you. We meet on-line, so you can participate wherever you are [and] will have well known as well as brand new speakers. You'll also get access to the recordings to review later.

They point out that this isn't intended as a replacement for a local user group if you have one - interaction with peers and being a part of the community is still important. This is just an alternative. If this sounds interesting, head over and enter your information to be contacted with more info about the group.

Cal Evans has officially announced his latest in his series of full-day virtual conferences aimed at PHP developers - the PHP Master Series, Volume 1 (from the Day Camp 4 Developers):

There is a lot of good information shared at conferences and sadly not event 1% of developers who identify themselves as PHP developers, ever get to attend one. This makes me sad. So I'm trying something new. [...] I went through the PHP conferences from the second-half of this year and picked out 6 that really stood out. This was a very difficult task; the PHP community and conferences are blessed with a bounty of great talks and speakers. The criteria I used was topics, joind.in score, and speaker. I tried to find talks that were on topics that are of interest to developers, that others liked, and that were given by speakers I know, and know do a good job.

This one-day virtual event is happening December 21st (a Friday) and is made up of six different talks from six different speakers:

• Designing Beautiful Software - Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Cryptography For The Average Developer - Anthony Ferrara
• Javascript Best Practices & BackboneJS for the PHP Developer - Ryan Weaver
• Your code sucks, let's fix it. - Rafael Dohms
• Building a Firehose - Ian Barber
• From POX to HATEOAS, A Real Company's Journey Building a RESTful API - Luke Stokes

You can pick up your ticket to attend for just $50 USD as a regular attendee (or voice only for those that just want to listen in). There's also an option for an "Office Party" for $100 USD if you have more than a few folks that would like to attend.

Justin Carmony has shared his success story about the use of Vagarant and PHP as a platform to make setting up and configuring developers' environments simple.

Now-a-days, you have frameworks that need to be setup [as a part of your environment], include paths that need to be changed, modules that need to be installed, web servers that need to be configured for your routing, etc. Then you might not just have MySQL, but Redis, Mongo, Couch, Memcached, Postgres, or any other dozen other servers. Then in Production you might have load balancers, multiple web servers, clusters of databases, and the list goes on. Simply put: web development environments are complex.

He introduces Vagrant and talks a bit about how it helped them with the setup and configuration of two new remote developers they had limited contact with. After some initial quirks, Vagrant made it simple for them to get up and running with new environments in a day.

In this new post Juan Terminio shows you how to set up a new virtual machine (VM) that hosts a Debian system (replacing the setup of his previous tutorial for setup of a Ubuntu system) in VirutalBox.

Previously, I created a tutorial on installing a 32-bit Ubuntu VM with PHP 5.3.x. I've since moved on to PHP 5.4.x and Debian, which is universally considered a safer bet for a server OS. This tutorial is what I will point back to in the future when I want to show people how to create a VM, so you should consider the Ubuntu-based tutorial obsolete. In reality, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so the bulk of this tutorial will be very similar to the Ubuntu one, albeit with some minor changes here and there.

He starts with a few reasons to use a VM over the more traditional single development system mentality including keeping the "server" off your desktop and the dev-to-production similarity needs. He shows how to use the VirtualBox software and a Debian ISO to create the VM, complete with screenshots of each step of the way (for both host and guest OSes). He also helps you get a few things installed including sudo, setting up the network, configuring the hosts file and installing some common utilities as well as the MySQL, Apache, PHP and Samba combination (with PHP compiled from the 5.4.x source).

Following up on his previous article, Alejandro Gervasio has a new post to PHPMaster.com with the second part of his series on using virtual proxies in PHP.

Resting on the foundation of Polymorphism (dynamic Polymorphism, not the ad-hoc one often achieved through plain method overriding), Virtual Proxies are a simple yet solid concept which allows you to defer the construction/loading of expensive object graphs without having to modify client code.

He shows how to create a collection of domain objects that use proxies to populate their data. He includes the code for creating a "Post" interface/object as well as a Comment interface/object. These are put into a "CommentCollection" and, when it's accessed, pull the item in the collection out, only populating the data on demand.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial from Alejandro Gervasio about using virtual proxies in your application - a method in development that provides a layer of abstraction on top of domain objects and makes it more efficient to work with (and lazy load) them.

Often referenced by a few other fancy names, the substitute is generically called a virtual proxy, a sort of stand-in that exploits the neatness of Polymorphism and interacts with the actual domain objects. Proxies aren't new to PHP. Doctrine and Zend Framework 2.x make use of them, although with different aims. On behalf of a didactic cause, however, it would be pretty instructive to implement some custom proxy classes and use them for lazy-loading a few basic aggregates from the database, this way illustrating how virtual proxies do their stuff under the hood.

He starts off by setting up a domain model for a "Post" and "Author" - a typical blog example.Based on the definition of these classes, he creates a mapper class to generate Author objects and an "AuthorProxy" class that uses a "loadAuthor" method to only load in the author's details when a property is requested. He gives a bit more code showing it in action and the difference between using the normal Author and AuthorProxy class.

On the Nefarious Designs blog there's a (very complete) guide to Vagrant and using it to set up easily reproducible versions of your development environment.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past couple of years, Vagrant is the latest development in easily controlled virtualised environments. [...] Vagrant automates creation and provisioning of virtual machines within VirtualBox via the command line, whilst also allowing for easy distribution and reuse across multiple projects. In this article, I'm going to look at how it can make life considerably easier when dealing with development environments.

Included in the post is just about everything you'll need to get started using this powerful tool:

• A link to Vagrant images
• A guide to the VagrantFile
• the Provisioning process
• Interacting/Controllig the Vagrant VMs

He also includes a basic setup of an environment (with the Vagrant config to create it) and an example of using Puppet to provision the Vagrant VMs.

In this latest post to his blog Ben Ramsey shows you how to, inside of a virtual machine, set up a server with PHP 5.4 installed (using CentOS 6.2).

In case you haven't heard the news, the PHP project released version 5.4.0 last Thursday. Naturally, I decided it was time to install and give it a try. I chose to install to a clean and bare-bones CentOS 6.2 virtual machine using VirtualBox. I did this for two reasons: 1) I wanted a clean environment for the build, and 2) I wanted to play with CentOS. At the time of this writing, there are not yet any official CentOS RPMs for PHP 5.4, so I had to build PHP from source. What follows are the notes I took during the installation and build process. I hope you find them helpful.

His instructions cover the full process:

• Installing the CentOS operating system
• Creating a non-root user
• Setting up the network for local access
• Installing the packages for PHP (via yum)
• Grab PHP 5.4 and compile it
• Testing out the web server with a sample phpinfo file

He includes a lot of extensions in his installation, some you may not need like pspell, tidy, calendar, ftp or xsl.

For those fans of virtualization (and running VMs for development) you're not stranger to VirtualBox. Over on the Google Code site, there's a project that wants to make it easier to work with your VirtualBox instances via a PHP-driven interface.

An open source, AJAX implementation of the VirtualBox user interface written in PHP. As a modern web interface, it allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. Much of its verbage and some of its code is based on the (inactive) vboxweb project. phpVirtualBox was designed to allow users to administer VirtualBox in a headless environment - mirroring the VirtualBox GUI through its web interface.

The tool isn't designed to be a management tool for a "hosting" type of environment, but rather to help you admin all of your VMs at once (no "ownership"). It uses the SOAP service (vboxwebsrv) that comes with VirtualBox servers to create a clean interface.