I recently attended PHPNW conference again (I have been to all but one since it started), this has become another one of my annual geek pilgramages and thought I would drop a few notes down, *Disclaimer: I was a volunteer helper, which means I don’t have anything to do with the organisation, but sometimes the session I am in is not one I would have immediately chosen. Also I did not get chance to go to the un-conferance part, shame that. Please note these individual reviews are marked up with hReview and are therefore freely and easily available for you to share if you so wish.

In summary day 1 was excellent and after the free food and beer that followed the talks, spurned many interesting conversations with some talented phpists.

I flit around languages, PHP, Ruby, Java so I often miss a few things as they come onto the radar, at PHPNW11 I learnt about a new technology to try as part of my testing (thanks to Ben Waine) So I am going to run a few posts documenting this while I try it out.

This PHP North West Conference is happening again this year on October 7th through 9th in Manchester, UK. I have attended 3 PHPNW conferences and they have all been brilliant in every way. Jeremy Coates ( @phpcodemonkey) certainly has and continues to produce a great event. The conference this year will be split over two days on the 8th and 9th of October with 3 full tracks on the Saturday and 2 tracks on the Sunday. There will also be tutorials this year.
If you are into PHP I urge you to go to this event. So yet again I have purchased the blind bird ticket which went on sale yesterday.

I more than often nowadays split my time between Java and PHP and try to adopt the best practices I know, in both areas.
This typically starts with ensuring I can carry out

• Test Driven Development
• Continuous Integration

I have just started to use a framework in Java and have opted for the Spring Framework.
Recently whilst working on a Spring Framework project – I was happily writing Integration tests and testing within the IDE and being new to the framework feeling very happy with my progress. However when I came to committing the code and running it through our Bamboo CI engine I was getting tests failing. (That didn’t fail in the IDE?)
The report showed

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Failed to load ApplicationContext

Turns out the clean I was performing (as you would ) before tests in Maven was causing an issue. So I did a bit of digging and trying to resolve.

So this is here as a reminder and help for other people with the same issue.

You need to ensure you load your files from the classpath.

My code :

@ContextConfiguration  (locations = "classpath:/FormControllerTestCase-context.xml")
/* Note that if no file is specified to @ContextConfiguration, it is derived as -context.xml, */

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
public class FormControllerTestCase  {

    private FormController controller;

    @Before
    public void setup()
    {

         controller = new FormController();

    }

    @Test
    public void testIndexViewShownOnConstruction()
    {

And the key to it all was ensuring the context files and any associated property files were stored in /src/test/resources/

This is the default location Maven pulls from apparently.

I was saddened when geocities closed and yet again I am saddened by the news of the latest BBC cuts which will remove lots of web real estate.
About half of the 400 stand-alone websites and webpages will close. Among the sites facing the axe are the youth-orientated BBC Switch, Video Nation and a number of forums, blogs and message boards, including the 606 community football site.

And these are digital resources containing our memories , for example literally the BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a website between June 2003 and January 2006…” and five years later someone has decided to bin them. The BBC’s decision to actively delete old content (rather than simply allowing it to take up some space on a server) I think is the wrong decision and it made me think what we should do with web content past it expiration date (if there is such a thing) or more likely no longer commercially / economically viable?

As a programmer I often question the design paradigm “Convention over configuration” many developers I am sure do the same thing.
I really like writing code and the interesting part is solving the problems and acknowledge some of it is not interesting.

More and more I find myself coding by convention as I rely on framework code.

I do this a lot in Java, largely because of the lack of underlying knowledge, I still have to think quite a lot about the basics, but with PHP this is different, so I thought I would write down my thoughts on the whole thing, so next time I question should I do this I might look back and take my own advice.

I have created a lot of stuff and earned my badges creating a lot of the standard design patterns from scratch.
So once you have solved the basic problem should I revert to some ready made solution, that is likely to have done it better than I had anyway.

If I need to build a quite large complex system or even one that I know is going to grow quite significantly. There are a number of advantages to using a framework, for the reason I can use other well tested code to achieve large proportions of the functionality,but largely to me code organisation and separation of concerns are the big pluses.

As I write a lot of stuff for internal use and most of the stuff is going to integrate with other systems I seem to have a knack of finding the quirks that make that hard work using the framework code, on both sides, there is a enough to do anyway.

So if I am writing a system should I use a framework — YES

If I am writing a small script forget it – even though I am tempted.

As to which, well that depends on the current trends and functionality you need.

On the 17th and 18th of July I will be attending Wordcamp UK, for the first time. I am looking forward to it.

Is this an advertisement for Wordcamp – yes it is kind of . (Disclaimer I am helping out) You should go , tickets are still available although at time of writing I believe that is only about 30 and the ticket close deadline is less than 24hrs away, and the schedule is really shaping up – see the wiki – If you wish to subscribe to the schedule I have drawn together a webcal / ics WordCamp UK Schedule version here. Which is HTML5 so beware it looks OK on nice browsers and even mobile devices but it may not play nicely with IE.

However I attend quite a few events throughout the year but I have missed WordCamp so far, I did follow online last year but it is never quite the same. Which is really the point of this post.
There is a trend at the moment for online conferences and yes whilst these have environmental benefits there is one big, quite obvious lacking I think, having attended both. - interaction with like minded people
summed up quite recently in a tweet by Craig Rowe

Even if you don’t engage with people much, there is a certain atmosphere with the Geek community, people are welcoming and you can often just eavesdrop on some awesome thing, from some extremely clever people, that are not speakers, that spark ideas for you in your situation. It is kind of social learning. Maybe it is my my lack of Psychology knowledge shows through here but as I understand J.B. Rotter’s theory of Social Learning I think this is reinforced in these environments. We do flourish and adopt behaviours/ideas later, as suggested the “effect of behaviour has an impact on the motivation of people to engage in that specific behaviour”. I usually come away from these events brimming with ideas and enthuisiam. So I suggest especially if you have not gone to one of these type of events before you give it a try. If you have read this and see me there let me know what you think.