tek ’12 is coming to Chicago May 22nd – 25th, 2012. Yes, there is going to be an uncon that goes till all hours of the morning. Yes, there is going to be a hackathon packed with programmers and cool projects. Of course there are going to be some off-the-hook evening activities that people will talk about for years to come.

We know that’s not why you come to tek though. You come to tech for the talks. Each year we strive to put together a schedule unmatched by any other, and we think that tek ’12 is the best one we’ve done yet.

Check out the schedule for php|tek ’12 now and get your ticket before the Early Bird discount expires.

Git is a great version-control tool designed for today’s nimble, distributed teams. For those of us who come from the world of CVS and SVN, however, mastering its features takes… some getting used to.

Fear no more, for your friends at php|architect have put together a great half-day event dedicated entirely to Git called the php|architect Live! Git Summit. With talks from developers who have first-hand experience using Git in a variety of environments, this is your opportunity to learn Git without leaving your desk (in fact, you can even listen in on your iPad, so you may enjoy the Summit on your favorite couch, too).

Best of all, the price for this great event is just right: single seats start at $25 for our premium subscribers, and we even have a discounted rate if you want to get your whole team in on the fun. Seating is limited, and we’re already 50% sold, so don’t delay—get your tickets today.

As a rule, we normally shy away from political speech here at php|architect. On this particular topic, however, we feel that we should take a firm stand against SOPA, and explain our position.

Why You Should Listen to Us

We make our living by selling intellectual property. Our books, magazines, and training materials are precisely the kind of content that is all too easy to copy and distribute illegally through the internet. Plus, don’t forget that Blue Parabola is not some multinational industrial conglomerate; we are a small company, which means that selling digital content is what pays our mortgages, keeps our houses warm, and sends our kids to college. And, of course, the same applies to our authors.

I say this because, if SOPA were really about protecting the interests of copyright holders, this post would be a glowing endorsement of everything it stands for because we would have a direct interest in seeing it become a reality —but it’s not, and we don’t. We’re taking a stand against SOPA, and we urge you to do the same.

I won’t deny that seeing our products copied and distributed without our permission is unpleasant and hard to take; however, I —and everyone else here— am also firmly convinced that a punishing law like SOPA is not going to stop illegal downloads.

The simple reality is that honest people—the vast majority of us—are happy to pay a fair price for products they need, want, and enjoy. As long as the price is reasonable, the purchase process is sane, and the licensing terms do not stray into the draconian, our statistics show that most people have no problem with paying for digital content.

What of the rest? Do they deserve to get away scot-free with what amounts to theft?

No, of course they don’t, but they are —and remain— a tiny minority; one that is not easily deterred by digital locks and oppressive laws that only end up annoying and inconveniencing the very people who behave honestly.

Besides, we already have laws that are designed to deal with the criminals—laws, I should point out, that are already widely used with a reasonable amount of success to block large criminal organizations that perform piracy on an industrial scale.

SOPA Fixes the Wrong Problem

Piracy is better fought by creating better products that respond to the real needs of customers who value our work, not by trying to punish those who don’t with overly broad legislation.

We learned this lesson a few years ago, when we removed all forms of DRM from our electronic publications, and our sales went up as a result. All our products have been DRM-free since, and—well, we’re still here, alive and well. In fact, we’ve been able to invest the money that would have gone towards maintaining increasingly complex digital protection schemes into making our products available to customers in more formats, which has benefited both our bottom line and their enjoyment of everything they buy from us.

SOPA is simply an extension of the same way of thinking that has foisted DRM on our computers for the last twenty years: It’s the final, desperate blow of an industry whose business model is predicated on controlling its customers rather than adapting to their needs. Much worse than that, it’s a piece of legislation that opens the doors to all sorts of nefarious attacks on the freedom of speech which makes the internet such a delightfully messy—and immensely vibrant—melting pot for all the ideas of our generation.

The Internet We Want

This is why we do not support SOPA. At the end of the day, we do not see any significant benefits from it, even for the large media conglomerates that seem to think they will reap its rewards. All we see is a slippery slope, at whose end is an internet that we do not want to be part of.

If you haven’t submitted your proposals yet, now is a great time to do so (you know, before the new-year celebrations kick in, and you get distracted by more… urgent fun). Don’t forget, you don’t need to be a professional speaker to present at tek—all you need is a great idea and an infective passion that will rub off on your fellow attendees. Some of the best speakers we’ve ever hosted were first timers—and we love to invite new people to speak every year!

Well, what are you waiting for? Head on over to our CfP page, where you can find out more about the proposal process, and submit several of your ideas. We look forward to hearing from you.

As the week winds to an end and the festivities inch closer, our final promo gives you access to our wonderful online training classes for half price. This means that you can take a full 19-hour course, analogous to (but much better than) three days in a real classroom, for as little as $250!

Don’t wait—grab your seat before they’re all gone. The promo runs until 12AM EST on Monday, December 26th.

The Mag Is Back!

Did you miss the premium subscription + full back issue catalogue promo that we ran on Monday? No problem—we’ve brought it back for one more day. Make sure to take advantage of it—at the end of the Friday (EST), it’ll be gone for good!

One more thing…

I’ve been told that there might be one more surprise in store for next week—this one, though, will only be available to those who are on our mailing list (if you’ve bought anything this week, you should be on it automagically; if you’re not, you can always sign up).

I can’t say what the surprise is… but I’m sure it will be a good one.

Until next year, from all of us at php|architect, happy holidays to you and your families, wherever you are and wherever your travels may take you.

Download the mp3 here

Supporting links:

• phpcloud.com
• Zend Technologies
• ZendCon

Disclosure:  I – personally and via Blue Parabola – have a long relationship with Zend. I attended ZendCon this year via a press pass they granted php|architect. Further, while Cal Evans is unavailable, I have served as (fake) Editor of DevZone a number of times. Further, before phpcloud was made public, we were granted preview access and gave feedback.

First of all, I wanted to thank our sponsor, Adobe, who made the whole thing possible. They stepped in to sponsor both the East and West Coast tours. The interesting thing is that although they’ve been criticized pretty heavily for the Flash-and-everything-related-to-HTML5 battle, their presentations in each of the cities has been focused on tools such as jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, their general contributions to HTML5, and how they’re pushing the boundaries but still playing nice. I’ll save the surprise demos for those of you who will be on the West Coast Tour simply because I can’t do them justice in words.

We kicked off the tour in Madison, Wisconsin, as the guests of Madison PHP and our very own Elizabeth Tucker Long. As the first city, everyone was still tuning their timing and their jokes, but the sessions came together without a hitch. As a special treat, we had  Supreme Allied Commander Matthew Weier O’Phinney in to talk about the new MVC architecture of Zend Framework 2. While he covered the dispatch model and how Events are handled, he hinted at a number of other things in the pipeline.

The next stop was Cal Evans‘ stomping ground of Nashville where we began way too early for a Saturday morning. Luckily, the local Nashville PHP User Group turned out, so we weren’t all alone. I finally had the opportunity to meet Ryan Weaver, who serves as the documentation lead for the Symfony Framework. While he could have preached the benefits of Symfony over ZF, he put together a great session called “PHP Harmony” where he pulled together components of Symfony, ZF, and Lithium to build a single application. It was a great example to show how we can still have the “best of all worlds.” Also, due to some travel difficulties from our Adobe representative, I had the opportunity to give an hour long Twilio demo. We started with a simple Text to Speech voice and had phones ringing and texts texting throughout.

In Baltimore, we were back at Johns Hopkins University where we had my good friend and fellow trouble maker Eli White present on Scaling in the Cloud with Amazon Web Services. He touched on topics ranging from failover and stability to pricing and performance. Whether you’re an old pro at AWS or just getting started with it, you should check out his slides and make sure your conclusions still fit the facts behind the scenes. As we expected, the Baltimore PHP and DCPHP groups attended, and we were pleasantly surprised to have the leader of the Lehigh Valley PHP Group from north of Philadelphia as well.

In Raleigh, we found an unsuspecting children’s museum where Jason Austin could discuss “How Beer Made Me a Better Developer.” No, I’m not kidding. He talked in great detail how passion and the community changed the direction of his career and accelerated things beyond what he could expect… and it happened to revolve around BreweryDB. Once again, the local user group – Raleigh PHP – made a solid showing, but even more exciting was the birth of Wilmington PHP the following day.

Congrats.

Finally, we wrapped the East Coast effort in Orlando. Once again, we were in a children’s museum, but this time our guest speaker – David Rogers of Orlando PHP – covered the tools and concepts that fill his technology tool box. While many of them were PHP-specific, a number were general text, connectivity, and productivity tools. If you haven’t checked out his slides, check them out as soon as you can.

Also, I wanted to thank each of the happy hour hosts: Orchestra.io hosted the happy hours in Madison, Nashville, and Orlando, MojoLive hosted us at Brewers’ Art in Baltimore, and finally SugarCRM in Raleigh. Orchestra is a cloud hosting platform focused on PHP integrated directly with your source code repository. MojoLive is the [redacted] of [redacted], and we’re all looking forward to their beta launch on [redacted]. SugarCRM is the leading open source CRM system out there.

As I write this post, I am sitting in the back of the room at one of the CodeWorks ’11 stops. I think back to all the friends – new and old – that I’ve talked to on this tour, and I begin to realize something important. While the PHP community is made up of a bunch of great developers, almost all of them work in more than just PHP. Many develop front-end code in JavaScript. Some work in mobile using Java or Objective-C. Some work with Ruby, Perl and Node.js in additional to PHP. Our professional lives are more complex than can be described by a single community. We are all still members of the PHP community, and I hope we all still identify ourselves as PHP developers, but we are all so much more.

That is what we are looking for at tek ’12; we want to know what you are working on and how you are integrating PHP and other technologies to build new things.

Of course, we are looking for good, solid PHP talks; there are always people who want to brush-up on the fundamentals. Integration, though, is what will catch our attention.

So put on your thinking caps and pull the strap tight. Look at what you’ve worked on in the past 12 months. What have you done to integrate PHP with other technologies? What have you learned that you want to share with others? What have you built that is cool? Answer these questions, and you are well on your way to a winning presentation.

A side note, a lot of people ask me “How can I improve my chances of getting a talk accepted?” I’ve written on this in the past “Tips on how to get accepted as a speaker at a PHP conference” and all of those points are still valid. I would like to add one that we will call tek specific, because I don’t know about how other conferences feel. For tek, submit multiple talks. We try to get each speaker on-stage twice so we not only need a good idea form you, we need two. Some people submit as many as eight or nine, I don’t necessarily encourage that behavior but give us more than one.

I hope to see you at tek ’12!

=C=

Stripe bills themselves as “payments for developers”; so right away, you know they have identified a group – me – that needs a service – payment processing – and is targeting just that group. I love their single-minded focus. I also love companies that don’t take themselves too seriously, and if you take a look at their FAQ, you begin to realize that even though their service is dead serious, maybe they aren’t.

So when I started hacking together a simple script to sell my new book online, I decided to give Stripe a chance, assuming I would fall back to PayPal all too soon. Not so this time. Using nothing more than their tutorial, I was able to start processing test transactions in about 20 minutes; that was incredibly cool.

To get going, you have to set up an account. This involves the normal churn of email address, password, etc. However, then they add a twist; you have to complete a test transaction. You can do so in the browser or use the curl code they supply to do it from your server.

Once you are verified, you are ready to process all the test transactions you want. Getting to the point where you can process real transactions takes a bit more information, though.

It would be silly of me to publish code here since everything you need to process a test transaction can be found in their “Forms Tutorial”. Complete that, and you can fire off test transactions, play with their code and mold it into something that can work for you. Once you have the front end working, follow through to their “Payment Tutorial”, and they will show you how to finish the transaction in either PHP, Ruby or Python. Seriously, 20 minutes of copy ‘n paste, and you’ve got a working system that you can dissect to see how it works and how you can integrate it into your system.

The thing I like most about Stripe is that it keeps the credit card information off my server totally; thus eliminating the need for it to be PCI-compliant. They encrypt the credit card number in JavaScript and send it to their own PCI-compliant server via an Ajax call. What comes back to you is a token representing the transaction. You send that token to your server and complete the transaction. It is a beautiful system, and I am honestly surprised someone hasn’t done it before. Then again, the best ideas are like that.

The only downside I have found so far – and this may be a deal killer for some – is that they hold your money for 7 days before paying. Given the ease of implementation and the convenience that Stripe provides, this is a limitation I am willing to live with, at least for this project.

If you need to incorporate payment processing into your system or are building out something that needs payment processing, you need to at least consider Stripe. It’s not right for every project – no tool is. It is however, a solid tool that you need to be aware of for future projects.

This is a FREE event, so please come out and enjoy: http://www.meetup.com/South-Florida-PHP-Users-Group/events/40433602/

Topic:  PHP in 2011

A look at the state of PHP in 2011 and how it fits into the current technology stack followed by an overview of what you should and shouldn’t be doing along with a summary of new and upcoming features in PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4. This will be a 90 minute talk with an extensive Q&A session will follow.

ABOUT PRESENTER

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years.  He spent 7 years at Yahoo and has since worked for and consulted with various startups. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. You can follow Rasmus on Twitter or find him on Google+.

For further information:

The South Florida PHP Users Group meets the second Wednesday of each month and tends to focus on many of the technical concepts in and around the PHP community. In recent months they’ve covered topics ranging from an Intro to Git to Lithium to Cake. If you’re based in South Florida – or even just visiting – stop by and say hello.