April 25th, 2006

We all know that the Internet has global reach. But as obvious as it sounds, when developing, this very success factor of web applications is often forgotten. Carlos Hoyos, Team Lead and Architect for ibm.com's Global Production Services Tools Team, takes us on a tour of the vital considerations and technologies involved in supporting a global audience. Join us this April for yet another leading presentation at New York PHP Community.

Carlos writes:
You are president of your own web development company, and have deployed a web tool where clients can login and submit changes to their pages. Business is going great and before you know it, you have your first customers overseas. Will your tool work correctly? What about timezones, internationalization and those funny characters? Will the tool be available at 3am during their day? You go back to the drawing board.

Through this example, I will review some of the lessons learned when designing and deploying a global facing web application: internationalization, proper usage of character sets, localization, time zones and time awareness. Including pitfalls and suggestions for PHP 4 and 5.

About Carlos:
Currently working as Team Lead and Architect for ibm.com's Global Production Services tools team, Carlos is in charge of the tools used by ibm.com to handle web content production and web effectiveness.

Carlos is a mathematician and has been programming for a long long time -- his first language was assembly -- and a PHP enthusiast since 2001. Prior to IBM, Carlos worked as an economical advisor for the Colombian government as well as a professor of mathematics.

Thanks to IBM for providing a great presentation space with seating for plenty.

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