Google I/O Sessions Published

For those who like learning and (like me) could not attend Google I/O developer gathering, many sessions are now publicly available (Google account needed).

dConstruct 2008

This should be a valuable conference to attend for the folks that do design for social Web applications.

• Takes place in Brighton Dome, UK, September 3-5
• Registration opens at 11am on 24 June
• Tickets will cost £125 including VAT
• In 2007 sold out in 6 hours

jQuery Rulezzz

I was in a small seminar that BostonPHP organized about jQuery. For me, as a js-phobic person, it was a real discovery. To avoid coding JavaScript I normally would prefer frameworks like GWT… I also tried Prototype a while ago, but didn’t like it.

Now I have a really nice alternative – jQuery. The inventor of this cool framework, John Resig, was himself giving a crash course in the seminar. I don’t want to repeat it here, the documentation is very exhaustive. Just quick facts/notes:

• Compatible with major browsers
• Backwards compatibility of the framework is ensured via plug-ins
• Huge and active community, many nice plug-ins available
• jQuery UI to show up in a couple of days. Provides many prebuilt widgets
• Performance is great, memory management is great, the size is minimal (~ 15 KB)
• Hosted on Google with other AJAX libraries
• Arround 10 000 000 downloads to date

All in all pretty impressive.

Developing in PHP

Most of my time I spend with JAVA… Unfortunately that’s not my girlfriend :) Recently I started playing with PHP. And I must say I like it. Some time ago I kept considering PHP even worse than JSP. Now I see it’s advantages.

I found out that an easy start for LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) is installing WAMP. For those who don’t want to waist too much time on installing all the separate parts (especially on Windows) this is really a good choice.

Having all the infrastructure setup I began looking for a nice IDE to develop PHP. As I am use to Eclipse, naturally I started looking for plug-ins. There are two of them worth considering: PHPEclipse and PDT. The latter to my mind is better. It comes with some nice Zend features, like debugger. Although it took me some time to configure everything, I finally adopted it. If anyone knows of a better Open Source alternative, please let me know. I guess there should be plenty of them at least for Linux.

Open Source Web Design

While reading a book on Drupal I stumbled on a recommendation to visit http://www.oswd.org – a site where Web designers are publishing there stuff for everyone. Today there are 2080 free designs available, I guess that’s quite an assortment.