Ben Cornwell

Thursday June 12th, 7pm
580 St Kilda Road Melbourne

Databases & PHP - Tristan Penman - 7:00 - 7:45 pm

Tristan Penman will be presenting a guided tour through the database facilities in PHP, including the PEAR MDB2 library. Not only will Tristan be showing you what happens when the library works, but what happens when it doesn’t - he will show how to avoid some of the issues that he has experienced while using MDB2 for a pet project involving databases and AJAX GUIs.

Tristan’s computing background involves programming in numerous languages, with a preference for C and C++ (although he also has a soft spot for x86 assembly language). He organises the MySQL User Group, and often throws industry buzzwords together to see what ideas he can come up with. When not programming, you may find Tristan contemplating how strange it is to write about oneself in the third person.

Self Healing Databases: Managing Schema Updates In The Field - Jon Oxer - 8:00 - 8:45 pm

Database schema update management is a problem that is overlooked by many web application developers initially, but once you have a number of deployments in the field it rapidly becomes a major headache to propagate schema changes in synch with your PHP, Python, or Perl application code.

Internet Vision Technologies has developed a technique for “self-healing databases” for the SiteBuilder web application suite, allowing updates to occur automatically in the field whenever new versions of the application are pushed out. This technique has been used successfully on a number of large scale deployments such as the Siemens intranet which runs on MySQL and uses over 2500 tables. The talk covers the overall methodology with specific examples from the SiteBuilder codebase.

Socialising & Networking 9:00pm onward

Pizza, softdrink, tea, coffee and comfy swivel chairs will be provided with compliments of our major sponsor, Hitwise.

A return to ‘normal’ after July’s Microsoft theme
When/Where

Date: Thursday 9th August 2007
Time: 7.00pm

Address

Hitwise Melbourne
Level 6, 580 St Kilda Rd
Melbourne

Website Usability Testing - Sandrine Balbo - 7:15-8:00 pm

In this presentation on Web Site Usability Testing, Sandrine will cover:

* Why test? Setting testing objectives
* Setting testing objectives
* Choosing appropriate testing methods (expert reviews, surveys,
observations, etc)
* Determining when to test
* Determining the number of users to test (if any)
* Attaining both internal and external feedback
* Considering the cost vs benefit of testing

Unit Testing with PHPUnit - Ben Cornwell - 8:15-9:00 pm

Unit testing is a programming technique that aids in the development of robust, reliable code and gives developers piece of mind in knowing that their code functions as expected. Based on JUnit, PHPUnit is the defacto standard unit testing framework for PHP: it is easy to install, straight-forward to work with, and actively maintained.

This presentation will cover:

* Introducing PHPUnit

* Installing PHPUnit

* Writing PHPUnit test cases

* Running your tests

* Using test suites to ‘group’ your tests, and

* Using mock objects

Socialising & Networking - 9:00pm onward

After the meeting we’ll be moving downstairs to the Cartel Bar, for an informal chat over a few cold ones.

Pizza, softdrink, tea, coffee and comfy swivel chairs will be provided
with compliments of our major sponsor, Hitwise.

In case you’re keen hack around with code used in my PHPMelb presentation last week, you can get the source here.

Perhaps you didn’t come to the meeting, but just want to see how lame my graphic design skills are…
I’m planning to get it running somewhere public on my server eventually, but need to dist-upgrade first to get some updated PHP packages.

In other news, I’ve got three talk proposals under consideration for OSDC 2007 being held in Brisbane this November. More on that soon, assuming at least one of them is accepted.