Please give a brief introduction of yourself

I am a Mechanical Engineer by education but turned to software industry just after my graduation. I am fascinated with both machines as well as computers. I’ve been working with SANIsoft for the past 6 years. I started off as a PHP trainee programmer and currently working as a Technical Manager.

In my free time I love to read web programming blogs. I also devote some of my time to the Coppermine project.


What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

I am one of the lead developers of Coppermine Photo Gallery, a web picture gallery application written in PHP. I’ve been working with Coppermine team for the past 5 years or so. I started off by submitting small bug fixes and then gradually became the development team member in 2005.

I mentored for Coppermine in Google Summer of Code twice in 2007 and 2008.


What will your workshop be, exactly ?

I will be presenting a talk and conducting a workshop on CakePHP. In my talk I will introduce CakePHP, explain its features and how MVC has been implemented in cakephp.

Workshop will follow the talk and I will be demonstrating how a simple web application can be built using CakePHP. We will be building an application with CRUD operations, authentication and table relationships. If time permits, I will also be introducing cakephp Behaviors and some other stuff.

I expect attendees to bring their own laptops/PCs (with LAMP setup) so that they can code along with me.


What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this talk? What do you expect ?

I want to convey the message that developers should stop re-inventing the wheel. There are frameworks out there which are very powerful and developer friendly. PHP developers should use them to rapidly develop a real world application. Using framework also ensures security (well upto a certain level) and maintainability of the application.

I expect attendees will get some insight into CakePHP framework and they will start using it in their projects.


What kind of PHP applications do you develop ?

I have been developing PHP applications catering to the needs of small businesses to big enterprises. At work, we use CakePHP in almost all of our projects. I have developed applications for different industries like finance, travel, nutrition, care homes etc…

I also love to hack open source PHP applications like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal.


What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people starting out as PHP developers ?

The most important piece of advice would be to get your basics right and develop a logic to solve programming problems. Also I would like to say that joining training classes and php courses is not the best and only way to get a good job. All these classes will teach you the syntax but logic is one thing which you need to develop by yourself and without logic you cannot program a real world application.


There are so many PHP frameworks out in the wild. What made you choose CakePHP over others ?

I love CakePHP for its simplicity and shallow learning curve. Any PHP programmer who has some knowledge of OOP can pick it up very quickly. Other thing I like about CakePHP is its “Convention over Configuration” motto. You just need to follow the convention and a lot of things happen automagically.


If not CakePHP, then PHP framework will you choose and why ?

Hmmm, this is a tough one :) . There are quite a few good frameworks out there but I would go with Zend Framework. I like ZF’s flexible architecture and loosely coupled component libraries.


Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?

This is the first time I am attending gnunify or for that matter any open source conference. I have heard a lot about gnunify and I am sure I will enjoy it a lot.