The Zend Developer Zone has announce their "Coffee Cup of Service" winner for the month of June 2017: Sara Golemon.

It is time for the June 2017 PHP Community (coffee) Cup of Service award. This month it goes to someone who has been giving to PHP for more than 15 years, Ms. Sara Golemon.

Sara is a regular speaker at PHP conferences worldwide, an active core contributor, [and] one of the release managers of PHP 7.2.

Please join us here at Rogue Wave in saying thank you to Sara for her more than fifteen years of service to PHP and the PHP community.

This is the second winner of the "Coffee Cup of Service" winner with the first being Michelangelo van Dam himself who the award was inspired by.

The SitePoint Web blog has posted a "smackdown" comparing two popular languages, PHP and Node.js, based on several different points.

The web is ever-changing technology landscape. Server-side developers have a bewildering choice of long-standing heavy-weights such as Java, C, and Perl to newer, web-focused languages such as Ruby, Clojure and Go. It rarely matters what you choose, presuming your application works.

But how do those new to web development make an informed choice? I hope not to start a holy war, but I’m pitting two development disciplines against each other: PHP and Node.js.

He goes through ten "rounds" of evaluations on various points including how easy it is to get started, help & support options, development tools available and hosting & deployment options. In the end, it's his opinion that the winner overall (it was close) is Node.js. However, he does end with one word of advice:

My advice: assess the options and and pick a language based on your requirements. That’s far more practical than relying on ‘vs’ articles like this!

The Run Geek Radio podcast has posted their latest episode today. In it (episode #5) host Adam Culp talks about time estimation, thoughts on conference talk ratings and the contest winner from his standing desk contest mentioned in an earlier episode.

This episode Adam Culp announces the winner, David Stockton (Colorado), of the contest launched in Run Geek Radio episode 004. [...] Adam also talks briefly to clarify his views on “soft talks” versus “soft skills talks”, and how he was misrepresented as disliking soft skills talks though the opposite is true. [...] Then this episode is rounded out with a detailed coverage of time estimation in relation to projects, and why it is so vitally important to be accurate. Adam also speaks about how important proper requirements gathering is to the process.

You can either use the in-page audio player to listen to this latest episode or you can download the mp3 of the show. Be sure to subscribe to the feed if you enjoy the show and want to hear more from Adam.

Lukas Smith has posted some of his thoughts on who the framework winners are right now and which might pull ahead in the future including Symfony and Zend Framework.

I have not been that active on the conference scene in the past few years, but the ones where I did attend I also tried to take a peek at what others are doing. Also this post is kind of exploratory to see what other people think, hopefully without inviting a flame fest upon myself. So with this disclaimer out of the way, I think the big 3 frameworks for the next few years will be Lithium, Zend Framework 2 and Symfony2.

He looks at each of his "winners" and explains his rationale behind their selection including community support, features offered and the overall structure and feel of the framework. He mentions two other interesting frameworks of note that have come out of other projects - Flow3 and Nooku. Comments on the post suggest even more frameworks to look to in the future including Yii and mentions of Nette and CodeIgniter.

Recently Microsoft sponsored a contest where the entries were PHP applications built on the Windows Azure platform. Brian Swan has posted an interview with Ben Waine, the latest winner of the contest who created an application called the "Twitter Sentiment Engine" that analyzes the sentiment towards various search terms on Twitter.

I recently had a chance to catch up via e-mail with Ben Waine, winner of the 2011 PHP on Azure contest. [...] I only followed the contest from a distance while it was happening, but after hearing that Ben had won the contest (I had the good fortune of meeting Ben in person at the 2010 Dutch PHP Conference) and after reading a bayesian filter he developed to help filter out some of the twitter spam.

As a part of this year's php|tek conference, the folks at php|architect once again put together their choices for the "Impact Awards", a special recognition for projects that have really made a mark over the last year in a few different categories.

As part of the grand finale of php|tek '11, Keith Casey announced the winners of the first annual php|architect Impact Awards. These awards are selected by the subscribers of php|architect magazine. They represent the projects that have had the most impact on the day-to-day lives of PHP developers. php|architect is proud to announce the winners of this year’s Impact Awards.

Winners this year included the Frapi (in Up & Coming), MySQL (in Data Management), Xdebug (in Integration/Development) and the Best Overall Product winner - the Zend Framework.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the results of their Ibuildings challenge where the developer had to create a script able to play "Four in a Line" based on an abstract Player class provided.

Four in a Line as game has been mathematically solved and the advantage lies with the player taking the first turn. To level the playing field, we allowed each player to fight against all the others; in this way, any player had the chance to begin with the first move advantage playing against all the other opponents at least once, sharing the elements of luck and making it easier to spot skill.

There were three different categories - junior, medium and senior - and one winner for each:

• Junior: Xavier Van Herpe (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Medium: Piotr Mlocek (won a DPC2011 ticket)
• Senior: Tomas Creemes (won the iPad)

They also include some observations about the code submitted to the competition including adherence to coding standards and overall performance.

Ibuildings has officially wrapped up their "Elephpant Challenge" contest they were holding to solve a routing problem that involved a globe-trotting PHP ElePHPant. Their latest post (from Ivo Jansch) reveals the results.

Contestants had to write a script that calculated the shortest route for the Elephpant. The contest has several side goals: entries were not not only validated against the given landmarks and a second secret set of landmarks, they also were scored based on their performance, code complexity and code size.

The shorted route, found using the Haversine Formula, involved stops in Mexico City, Cupertino, Hawaii and the Tower of Pisa. The winner for the Medium category was Andy Thompson with an average of 10 landmarks with 38 lines of code (in 333 seconds). The winner in the Senior category was Michiel Brandenburg with coming out on top with a runtime of 50 seconds in 46 lines of code.

The post also includes some interesting observations they found about the event including contestants' general adherence to the specs, how the choices the developers made really made a difference in the outcome and how difficult running a contest like this could really be. Congrats to the winners!

The PHP.net website has posted the official winner results from this year's TestFest event:

A group of winners of PHP elePHPhants or TestFest mugs have been picked at random from the people that contributed the 887 tests during the 2009 PHP TestFest.

Winners of the elePHPants included Patrick Allaert, Fabio Fabbrucci and Jason Easter. Winners receiving a mug including Havard Eide, Francesco Fullone, Daniel Convissor. Congrats to all winners and many thanks go out to everyone who helped make the event such a success!

The PHP Women have announced the winner of their "I am..." competition - an entry coming from a user of their forums going by the name Rowd.

We’re delighted to announce the winner of our “I am” competition. Entrants were asked to complete the sentence “I am a PHPWoman because..." Rowd wins a $50 gift certificate to spend over at php|architect - if you want to read the other entries then check out the competition thread in the forums.

So what was Rowd's entry? Short and sweet: "I am a PHPWomen member because...I enjoy coding in PHP and discussions with people who know what being a woman in IT means."