LAMPsig - Meetings

Introduction to SynApp2 - Web Application Generator and MVC Framework

nospam@example.com (Jorge Garifuna) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:00:00 -0400

Introduction to SynApp2 - Web Application Generator and MVC Framework

Background - leading up to SynApp2. (When and Where)
Purpose - what is it used for? (What and Why)
Audience: who needs it? (Who)
Example - how do you use it? (How)
Giving it away - am I nuts? (How much)
The MVC's of SynApp2 generated applications

A structured discussion with interleaved Q & A

Anatomy of a SynApp2 powered web application

The database design/schema and engine (Model)
The web browser, DOM, JavaScript (X)HTML, CSS and PDF (View)
The AJAX exchange cycle and PHP (Controller)

* * * *

About the Speaker

Richard Howell has been creating software for many years, both as an independent consultant and as a captive software engineer for several technology companies, including MicroSim Corporation, OrCAD Inc., Cadence Design Systems and Panasonic Avionics Corporation. Throughout his career, Richard's interest in computer-aided design and development has focused on producing effective and practical application programs and tools.

Agile Development thrives in the PHP-powered web applications environment. By using smart tools to almost instantly create web applications that harnesses today's SQL databases, developers further their ability to quickly produce solutions, deploy them and then move on - crisply and cleanly. This scenario is the motivation for Richard's latest endeavor, a free open source software project named SynApp2 - Web Application Generator and MVC Framework. As a full time effort, Richard is continuing to build SynApp2 and spread the word.

Please visit SynApp2.org: http://www.synapp2.org

Contact Richard: richard @ synapp2.org

Twitter: @synapp2

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rhowelljr

Joomla Content Management Systems, Part 3 at 10 AM

nospam@example.com (Jorge Garifuna) — Sat, 15 May 2010 10:00:00 -0400

Continuing his second talk on Content Management Systems, Jorge will further explain the details of the Mambo/Joomla CMS.

Content Management systems offer the promise of publishing tools, user authentication, modular structure and support for plugins, and most of the things an average person or business needs to build a professional looking full featured website.

Mambo/Joomla is both a CMS and one of the highest profile open source LAMP projects going, boasting a substantial user community and a number of open source awards.

Jorge will present a brief history of Mambo & Joomla, clarifying the connection and differences. They will include an installation of Joomla, explanation of the basic paradigms and terminology one needs to know to effectively install, administer and configure Mambo or Joomla, and offer some insight into the extensibility of Joomla from a developer's standpoint, by looking at some of the parts of a Joomla component and Joomla module.

Jorge Garifuna is the CEO of Garinet Media Network. which offers a multitude of Website services for organizations, businesses, entertainers and family members. Jorge joined LAMPsig over four years ago and has added a new spark of enthusiasm to our group. He is quick to answer maillist questions or bring up new topics of interest to LAMP developers.

January Meeting: DNS for the LAMP Developer & SCALE 5 Preview

nospam@example.com (Jim Workman) — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 13:13:00 -0500

Main Topic: DNS for the LAMP Developer by Peter Benjamin
**** Meeting Date Change****: Saturday, Jan 20th, 1-3pm

Most talks on DNS are for bind/named services for corporate LANs, which excludes what the everyday LAMP developer needs to know to create multiple web sites with separate domain names on their office computer. Also, to be included is how the Registrar and Global Registry systems work to create new domain names, transfer names, expire names. In addition, Registrar web interface to multiple accounts to handle domain names will be expounded.

Peter Benjamin is a freelance computer consultant with three decades of experience; he's programmed mainframes and minis, and more flavors of Unix than you can shake a stick at. Peter also leads a Web technology study group called Web Spinners; see http://LAWebSpinners.org

After the DNS presentation we will go over announced SCALE sessions as they relate to LAMP programmers.

February Meeting: An Introduction to Drupal

nospam@example.com (Jim Workman) — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 14:13:00 -0500

Main Topic: Introduction to Drupal by Richard Schave

Richard's quest for social context engines, knowledge management, semantically interchangeable metadata and a user-based paradigm as tracked through the development of the last three releases of Drupal.

Content Management Systems are becoming more and more versatile in quickly building complete Websites with a minimum of coding. Drupal is one of the most popular and best established.

Those who saw our Joomla presentation should check out this comparison of Drupal vs Joomla feature sets.

Richard holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from calstatela (class of '05), and is deeply concerned with building communities that matter as a function of the improved dissemination of information between niche groups. He regularly attends the sisters of jazz sunday night jam at the world stage, and has recently built his first bio filter for his japanese goldfish pond. (They're just being Koi.)

March Meeting: Examining the SourceForge LAMP Stack

nospam@example.com (Jim Workman) — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 21:05:00 -0400

Main Topic: Examining the SourceForge.net LAMP Stack by Ross Turk

Ross will speak about SourceForge's heterogeneous LAMP-based, open source infrastructure, providing in-depth descriptions of several core components, their interactions, and scalability models. He will analyze strengths and weaknesses of the site.

SourceForge.net, the world's largest open source destination, consistently ranks among the busiest 100 web sites. The services provided are various and, in some cases, very complex. Ross will present key site traffic and demographical metrics, and will discuss their constantly changing business requirements.

Ross Turk has served in multiple capacities since joining the Open Source Technology Group family in 2000. Most recently, as the Engineering Manager for SourceForge.net, he has led efforts to improve the site's usability, including the new Software Map and Search along with major navigation and aesthetic overhauls. In his current role, Ross is responsible for communicating with the SourceForge.net community and responding to its needs.

During his twelve-year career, Ross has focused on assessing and optimizing the business and engineering processes of a wide variety of engineering organizations, always with a passion for Open Source methodologies.

Ross recently spoke on this same subject at Linux World. Slides and podcast are available here.

April Meeting: AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript And XML: Zip Code fills in City, State fields

nospam@example.com (Jim Workman) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 15:05:00 -0400

Main Topic: AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript And XML: Zip Code fills in City, State fields
Speaker: Peter Benjamin

There is movement afoot towards thick client applications using AJAX. Combining JavaScript in your web page to go back to the web server and run server side CGI scripts to send back small chunks of information to display on the page is the "thickening" of the thin web client.

Simple database applications are increasing the user friendliness of web forms with prefilling fields based on a just entered value, for example, in the United States entering the 5 digit zip code also defines the City and State values. Why have the customer type those values in as well, when AJAX can do it for them?

AJAX methodology using the XMLhttpRequest method or ActiveX equivalent will be overviewed using the Zip Code as an example. The lesson will be based on JavaScript and PHP and MySQL code.

Peter Benjamin is a freelance computer consultant with three decades of experience; he's programmed mainframes and minis, and more flavors of Unix than you can shake a stick at. Peter also leads a Web technology study group called Web Spinners; see http://LAWebSpinners.org

May Meeting: Free Linux virtual servers with Xen 3.0

nospam@example.com (Jim Workman) — Sat, 19 May 2007 21:16:00 -0400

Main Topic: Free Linux virtual servers with Xen 3.0: a great developer tool
Speaker: David Rolston

David will explain what Xen is, and walk us through the setup on an existing Linux server. He will cover the basics of running multiple instances, and explain how a developer can easily set up multiple virtual Linux servers with completely separate LAMP environments, or conversely, how to clone an existing server with a complete LAMP environment.

David Rolston learned PHP and MySQL during a stint as head moderator of the PHP community site PHPFreaks.com and MySQLFreaks.com, he went on to author tutorials on LAMP and PHP OOP which have been read by over 100,000 people. David has participated in several Open Source projects, including The Serendipity Blog, as the author of the GeSHi plugin, and is the project leader of the Mambo & Joomla gallery plugin PonyGallery. These days he works as a consultant focused on open source technologies used in the creation of interactive web sites and web services.

MySQL Clustering with the NDB storage engine

nospam@example.com (Peter Benjamin) — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 13:00:00 -0400

Main Topic: MySQL Clustering with the NDB storage engine
Speaker: Solomon Chang

NDB is an enterprise-grade, scalable, and highly available clustering storage engine - a share-nothing cluster that has no single point of failure - which is capable of running on inexpensive commodity hardware. NDB allows the construction of cheap, scalable, and exceptionally reliable database clusters, without expensive, specialized or additional hardware or software.

A MySQL Cluster distributes processing over multiple servers, resulting in a single redundant and scalable solution. A cluster consists of a set of computers running MySQL servers to receive and respond to queries, storage nodes to store the data held in the cluster and to process the queries, and one or more management nodes to act as a central point to manage the entire cluster. There are many reasons for clustering a database and several different methods of clustering.

Solomon will discuss the creation, methodology, and usage of a MySQL Cluster, and demonstrate a cluster in practice with a series of virtual machines.

Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current acting director of LAMPSIG. He works as a professional Database Administrator in Venice Beach, and is a co-author of the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.

Multi-Instanced MySQL

nospam@example.com (Solomon K. Chang) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:00:00 -0400

By Solomon Chang

There are whispered rumors from the remote corners of MySQL configuration gurus concerning the Dark Art of running more than one instance on MySQL on the same machine. Like a body possessed by a legion host of demons (well, MySQL daemons, actually), a single machine could serve multiple instances of MySQL that each may respond to different names, ports, and... dare I say it...? IP addresses! Oh, the horror! The terror! The memory consumption!
However, just as summoning and binding nether-worldly entities into an unwilling mortal shell has its own nefarious uses, so too does the black magic of invoking two or more instances of mysqld on the same single machine. Slowly and surely, it is a gateway for you to embark upon other unspeakable database experiments, such as Replication and Distributed Clustering, whilst obviating the need for any other machine. Replication with but a single computer, you say? Yea, it is an abomination! But this abomination you can configure for yourself while dangling your sanity between hard drive capacity and memory usage!
Muhahahahaha!
Ph'nglul mglw'nath MySQL Instance Manager R'yleh!
MySQL Fhtagn!

Black robes and candles optional.

When he is not obsessing over the stories of HP Lovecraft, Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current acting director of LAMPSIG. He works as a professional Database Administrator in El Segundo, and is a co-author of the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.

Managing MySQL Permissions

nospam@example.com (Solomon K. Chang) — Sat, 17 May 2008 13:00:00 -0400

By Solomon Chang

There comes a time in the life cycle of a company where everyone has to stop connecting as password-less root to their central database. All the inherent security protocols (such as "We only have 3 users," or "No one here is malicious enough or knowledgeable enough to crack our Production database!") begin to lose relevance as the DB user base starts to grow. This talk aims at the "why" and the "how" of setting user permissions, as well as how users are generally authenticated into the system. This talk also delves into the granularity of permissions for those who require extremely fine-tuned access to database resources.

Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current acting director of LAMPSIG. He works as a professional Database Administrator in Venice Beach, and is a co-author of the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.