September User Group:: Building the PHP-stack for the enterprise

PHP has become ubiquitous when it comes to personal blogs, content management systems, ecommerce sites and more. Take any list of Web 2.0¹ sites and you’ll find that more than 50% have PHP as back-end technology. What is less known is that PHP is also making significant inroads in the enterprise.  Join BostonPHP, IBM and Zend as we discuss where Enterprise PHP (and OSS) is going and how it's going to get there.  This promises to be a great evening with plenty of "horsepower" to answer your questions:

• Mark de Visser - Zend's CMO: In his presentation Mark de Visser will cover case studies of Enterprise PHP, and will discuss what drives the adoption and what still needs to be accomplished. He will cover the role of Zend and other commercial vendors in the PHP ecosystem, and will present a roadmap for the coming year of Zend’s main PHP products and services.

• David Boloker - IBM's CTO of Emerging Internet Technology: IBM's QEDWiki (written in PHP 5) began as a research project in 2004 to enable Line of Business professionals to remix Enterprise data in various ways using a graphical assembly tool. QEDWiki is part of a larger solution that creates catalog feeds as well feeds from things like Excel spreadsheets, SQL, XML documents, SAP/PeopleSoft/Siebel information and RSS/Atom feeds.  Upon creation the feeds can be transformed and remixed using another tool that filters, annotates, merges, publishes and transforms them.   Finally, the newly created feeds can be used by QED to create mashups.   In his presentation, David will review the business drivers behind this idea as well do some extensive demonstrations of this technology.

May User Group:: PHP Frameworks part III

How many of us have searched Source Forge for a project that appears to fit our needs only to find there's no community or documentation behind it; or the code is really poorly written; or the project is about to fork...Sometimes selecting an open source project is like renting B-grade movies at the video store; it's not so much the cost that concerns you, but rather the time wasted if you select a dog.

Please join BostonPHP as we continue our panel discussion on how to select a robust PHP framework culminating in a "PHP framework bake-off".

This month's showcased frameworks:

• Andromeda - Kenneth Downs (founder)
• Drupal - Moshe Weitzman (core-developer)

April User Group:: ODF what's in it for you?

The Open Document Format (ODF) standard has been developed by a variety of organizations and is publicly accessible. This means it can be implemented into any system, be it open source or a closed proprietary product,without royalties. The ODF is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats so organizations and individuals can enjoy document portability, a common taxonomy and vendor independence.

Public entities (e.g. federal, state and local governments) have a unique obligation to their customers (i.e. the taxpayer) that private sector enterprises do not. From accessibility, to availability, to archiving, public documents must withstand a higher level of scrutiny all the while operating within the confines of strict public budgets. ODF plays a crucial role filling that requirement.

Join BostonPHP along with Tim Vaverchak (Manager of Shared Services from the Commonwealth of MA IT Division) and Greg Rundlett (Technical Services Manager from OASIS) discuss the Commonwealth's business reasons for deploying ODF and the technical/PHP methodology to access, manipulate and create ODF documents.