March 22nd, 2005

As old man winter finally begins to take a vacation, New York PHP is proud to have Open Source industry leader SourceLabs in town for a presentation on the certified LAMP stack. Due to the length of February's meeting, join us at this meeting for SEO Series Part II, with John Andrews. All this as the weather warms in midtown Manhattan at IBM.

SourceLabs and the Certified LAMP Stack

SourceLabs is releasing it's first enterprise LAMP stack this Spring, and wants to come share with the New York PHP community what is special and different about it, including detailed results of SourceLabs CERT7 stress and scalability testing on the LAMP stack.

Part of the strength of the open source development is its distributed, participatory process. But a byproduct of this strength is a lack of integration. Today open source projects are not tested together as integrated systems, forcing users to integrate, and test the open source "stack" themselves, which slows open source adoption and increases costs of deployment. SourceLabs CERT7 process enables testing and release of projects together as an integrated stack, with a level of thoroughness and process transparency that exceeds that of commercial vendors. SourceLabs' Jeff Ort will explain how SourceLabs has adapted the enterprise software testing methods used by vendors such as Oracle, IBM and SAP to create CERT7. CERT7 augment the open source development process to deliver highly dependable and well integrated software stacks.

Details provided include:

• Descriptions and examples of the scalability, security, failover, stress, regression, and integration tests included in the CERT7 regime.


• How CERT7 has been applied to LAMP for stress and scalability and the test data generated by that process


• How LAMP users can adapt and build on CERT7 and what's involved

Jeff has 14 years of software engineering experience working for leading companies such as Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Cirrus Logic and Openwave, and has been granted 9 patents for his hardware and software inventions. Cool technologies Jeff has worked on include digital video, 3D rendering technology, mobile IM platforms and open source CMS systems. He joined Source Labs as the Certification Team Lead, and is the architect of SourceLabs CERT7 testing process.

PHP SEO Series, Part II (moved from February)
PHP site optimization, Search Engine Optimization and PHP

John Andrews continues the SEO/Website optimization series with a follow up discussion of Custom 404 exception handling applied in a customer-friendly and SEO-savvy manner.

During the first SEO presentation, John highlighted the need to smartly handle missing file errors, and emphasized the importance of serving up appropriate content instead of a generic error message. Based on feedback from the community, John will briefly review available Apache and PHP mechanisms for 404 exception handling, and present a didactic example of an SEO-savvy implementation co-developed with Stefan Antonowicz of Vespa Technologies.

Also presented was an update on the 302 redirect hijacking issue discussed in January, including best steps to get out of such a redirect problem.

John Andrews is an independent professional Website Optimizer with 9 years of experience planning and building goal-oriented websites using LAMP technologies. The SEO mini-series is intended to help prepare the PHP programmer, site designer, or webmaster for the kinds of challenges that can be expected should a site be considered for search engine optimization (SEO). The mini-series will introduce and address common problems and typical solutions implemented by professional optimizers.

Join New York PHP this March as we continue looking at moving LAMP into the enterprise with SourceLab's certified stack and Part II of the SEO Series.

Thanks to Dan Krook and Platinum sponsor IBM for providing a great presentation space with seating for plenty.

As a service to our community, New York PHP Community meetings are always free and open to the public.