Working both in the worlds of SAP and PHP is very rewarding when you are able to have some influence on one world with the other. Joe Haynes, a basis[1] consultant whom I follow on twitter was asking the other day for recommendations on php frameworks. I immediately jumped in and recommended Zend Framework as I have recently started working with it and am very happy with it. I also pointed him in the direction of Paddy and Matthew who both have excellent information on their blogs. Better I might say than the official quick start from Zend.

Looking forward to hearing as update when your project gets going Joe, especially if you get some SAP integration going.

[1] a basis consultant, if you don’t know the secret technical SAP terms, is the guy who installs and monitors your servers

I don’t have an Air and I know Stephen O’Grady has been reviewing his loaner Lenovo X300, but this Lenovo advertisement says it all.

As nice as the Apple interface is, sometimes you can take away too much.

A quick update from the first totally community organised London Community Day. The general consensus was it was a huge success. A full post will be up on SCN later.

We had about 20 or so there for the day and we had some great sessions on the ICF (Internet Communication Framework), Enterprise Services with .NET, Workflow, Dynamic personalisation and landing pages in Enterprise Portal, a session on the Universal worklist and a few others.

The best part of these days is the networking. It was great to meet new people and catch up with many that I have worked with over the years. If you missed out on this day we are planning others. Watch this space.

You can catch up with some of the happenings at the eventtrack feed. Photos and video will be posted “soon”.

If anyone knows about AVCHD M2TS video files and has some tips get in touch. Though google has a few answers it seems.

Most importantly is the SAP London Community Day which is Saturday the 26 April 2008. If you haven’t signed up you may well be too late.

We have some great people coming and some great talks scheduled. We are going to do our best to make sure the lions share of it is recorded and put up for the SAP Community at large. If you are coming and taking photos or blogging or twittering then use the tag ‘SAPLondonCD08‘. I should plug EventTrack at this point because this is exactly what it is designed for.

The other event is SAPPHIRE Berlin 2008 in Berlin on 19 - 21 May 2008. Every time I see the word SAPPHIRE I really see saPHPire, because I would love to see closer PHP integration. Word on the street is that Zend and SAP are working on it but that is all unsubstantiated rumour. So take it with a grain of salt until is announced.

Last time I want to one of these events I got to ask a question to the CEO, Henning Kagerman. (Now Co-CEO with Léo Apotheker.)

This time I hope to be able to ask many more probing questions to all sorts of people. In particular, I too would like to know why SAP is cutting R&D spend.

I am also keen to talk with some of the CRM people and learn more about what others are doing with SAP CRM and get some more details about the new version 7.

Many thanks to Mike Prosceno and his team for the invitation. I am looking forward to meeting up with Sig, Dennis and James and also meeting a few people I haven’t yet met.

pass it on…

03-04-08

Let me talk quickly about one of the most awesome poeple in my virtual world.

Craig Cmehil is the community evangelist over at the SAP Developer Network. He is awesome because he is always out there on the cutting edge pushing the community trying new things. Thinking of new ways to make the SAP Developer Community rock. Introducing new services like twitter and kyte and ustream to take the community events to the next level.

Like eventtrack - tracking people in the moment,  like helping out Chris Dalby (Microsoft MVP) with Chinposin - ambient avatars, like creating a twitter clone for inside the firewall. I could go on.

Craig you rock.

So it’s good people day - who are you going to talk up, praise, shout out?

If you just read this, consider yourself tagged.

Ahh April fool’s gotta, love it or hate it as the case may be.

Did you get taken in by the new Fashion TV mashup starring Trinny and Susanna and Dennis Howlett?

or Virgil ?

Or Microsoft and Yahoo finally inking a deal?

I was going to write some more about SAP and PHP but thought better of it. That can wait for another day.

Update: This post from Chris Shiflet on PHP Easter Eggs was too good not to pass on. The comments are worth reading too.

As Al twittered last night:

thank God 1-4 is over no more stupid April fools for another year.

… that fits into an A4 mailing envelope?

When you can have a beast that sits nicely on top of a ream of A3 paper!

At least I don’t throw it out because is hidden by the ft!

It is now (un)Official. The SAP London Community Day has a green light and is now officially on Saturday 26 April 2008 in Egham just on the edge of London.

The official details are all over on the wiki .

The best part is that it is Free* to attend.

What does Free* include?

Free* includes a venue provided by Axon (thanks guys) and tea and coffee.

You will need to get yourself to the venue and food will be at your own cost.

We are thinking of about 10 sessions in two tracks. If there are more than 10 sessions that get registered we will work that out on the day, so get your thinking caps on and come prepare to contribute not just attend.

The whole day is in a spirit of sharing all the good information we have learned on the various SAP projects, networking with others and having fun.

Oh it is not just for ABAP geeks, functional consulants AKA BPX’s and other TLA’s are very welcome too.

More information will be out as it comes to hand.

That wiki page again is here and sign up by adding your name to this list.

And the most important thing the official TAG = “SAPLondonCD08″ add it to your blog posts, flickr photos etc.

Spread the word.

Just when you thought that framework discussions were gentlemanly, we have guns at dawn. There is name calling and bad language and Terry Chay isn’t even involved.

OK. After the very brief rundown of the day, here is the detail.

The day kicked of with Ivo from iBuildings talking about Enterprise PHP which detailed a rigorous engineering approach to PHP instead of the ’script kiddies’ approach which some people bring to it because the barrier to entry to PHP is low.

Mike Sullivan and Scott MacVicar from continued the theme with more detail around these topics. I know it is a high level talk but when talks say testing is the way forward and then have trivial examples like assert(2, 2, 4); for a function that adds two parameters. It doesn’t really add much more to the understanding. It would be nice to see more real world example so that people making the shift to the testing mindset see how it really works. Being fair though, this more detailed information is the sort of thing you would expect from a tutorial from Sebastian Bergmann, not 5 minutes in a larger talk.

After lunch I went to Marcus Bointon’s mail talks. This was partly a replacement of Wez Furlong’s talk and partly the talk Marcus was scheduled to give. This partly explains why he ran over as there was a lot of content in the presentation. Mail, despite it’s simplicity is a bit topic and you can imagine that someone who sends millions of opt-in email messages is going to know a trick or two. The best trick that I learned from Marcus was the VERP field in mail messages. This field can be populated so that on receiving a bounce you can identify the person who it was sent to . There are more detail in the slides.

The big showdown session was the “My framework is better than your framework” featuring no less than Code Ignigter, Symfony and the Zend Framework. I stayed for Rob Allen talk on the Zend Framework and then bailed for session in the other track on Project Zero. Once I finished that session I came back to the main room and they were still at it. They were in question mode and from what I could gather they session had been pretty civil. the worst it got was when someone from the floor questioned the implementation of MVC in the frameworks and could you do XY and Z in three clicks. The question was a big aggressive and the speakers did well to politely answer the question and move on. Marcus has a blow by blow account of what happened.

But back to Project Zero. IBM in Hersley and Research Triangle are doing some very interesting stuff with PHP running in a JVM Ant Phillips showed off some great REST applications written in a few lines of PHP that looked very cool.

The last session of the day was from Derek Rethans, who took us through a personal journey of his involvement with PHP and how PHP has improved over the years. It tied into the Enterprise theme that Ivo started with - PHP has grown up and it is not as CIO magazine would have you believe that:

 PHP works well for prototyping because it is easy to get a site up and running. Use PHP to design the site, to determine functional needs and to solve performance bottlenecks—but when it comes time for development, tell the development team you want the result to look and act like this PHP site…but in Java (or another enterprise-ready language).

PHP is enterprise ready.

What is very cool is that out of the conference Derek has already added a date function to PHP 5.3 to take care of creating date with a format. Thanks Derek. I want 5.3 already just for that!

The user group will be linking mp3’s and slides of the main PHPLondon website as they become available. Thanks once again for those that organised the event. It was a great day.