PHP and JavaScript Innovation Award Report May 2015 Edition - February 2015 nominees

This is the latest podcast hangout episode on the PHP Innovation Award  and the JavaScript Innovation Award about the nominees of February 2015. We comment only on past nominees to avoid influencing the voting results. This way we are only talking of packages published already in January. The nominees of February were voted on March. In April the results were announced.

You may listen to the audio recording, or watch the hangout video, or read the transcript below.

JavaScript Innovation Award Nominees of February 2015 (00:20)

Rank	Class	Author		Score	Points	Prize
1	JavaScript Smart TV Remote Control a Smart TV from the browser	Arturs Sosins		66.67%	3
2	Social Media Sharing Create social media sharing links	Ovidiu Bokar		33.33%	2	One downloadable e-book of choice by O'Reilly
3	proginoskes Monitor the logs of one or more remote servers	Jason Gerfen		<1.00%	1

JavaScript Innovation Award Rankings of 2015 (06:02)

Rank	Author		Packages	Points
1	Suresh Kumar		2	7
2	Andras Toth		2	4
3	Arturs Sosins		1	3
3	ryan silalahi		1	3
5	Ovidiu Bokar		1	2
6	Jason Gerfen		1	1

Rank	Country		Packages	Points
1	India		2	7
2	Hungary		2	4
3	Latvia		1	3
3	Indonesia		1	3
5	United Kingdom		1	2
6	United States		1	1

PHP Innovation Award Nominees of February 2015 (07:36)

Rank	Class	Author		Score	Points	Prize
1	PHP Native Mobile App Dispatcher Redirect a mobile device to use a native app	André Liechti		27.27%	10	One copy of the Zend Studio
2	PHP Mobile Recharge API Recharge mobile phone account balance	Ruturaj Maniyar		24.24%	9	PhpStorm IDE personal permanent license
3	FusionCharts PHP Class API Generate graphical charts using FusionCharts API	Lucas de Oliveira		12.12%	8	One downloadable copy of PhpED Professional
4	PHP Fast Pattern Matching Match text patterns using ternary tries	Chi Hoang		9.09%	7	One year server license IP to country, region, city, latitude, longitude, ZIP code, time zone, area code database
4	PHP Server Stat Monitor Monitor machine resources using own Web server	wapmorgan		9.09%	7	One subscription to the PDF edition of the PHP Architect magazine
4	PHP Country State List Get the list of countries and states of the world	Richard McFriend Oluwamuyiwa		9.09%	7
7	PHP Math Progressions Calculate math progressions of several types	Ghali Ahmed		3.03%	4	One downloadable e-book of choice by O'Reilly
7	aSQL CLI Parse and extract a command line arguments string	Till Wehowski		3.03%	4	One downloadable copy of CodeLobster Professional
7	PHP DNSSEC Library Validate DNSSEC keys and calculate the DS record	Jan Altensen		3.03%	4	One downloadable copy of Komodo IDE
10	PHP Cloud API Response Parser Parse API responses from various cloud providers	Om Visvanathan		<1.00%	1

PHP Innovation Award Rankings of 2015 (19:05)

Rank	Author		Packages	Points
1	André Liechti		2	16
2	wapmorgan		2	14
3	Vladimir Zurita		1	10
4	Raskin Veniamin		1	9
4	Ruturaj Maniyar		1	9
4	Xavier Pérez		1	9
7	Nadir Latif		1	8
7	Rafael Rodriguez		2	8
7	YoungHyeong Ryu		1	8
7	Lucas de Oliveira		1	8

Rank	Country		Packages	Points
1	Russian Federation		3	23
2	Switzerland		2	16
3	Brazil		2	15
4	Germany		3	11
4	Venezuela		2	11
6	Chile		1	10
6	India		2	10
8	Spain		1	9
9	Pakistan		1	8
9	South Korea		1	8

Contents

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JavaScript Innovation Award Nominees of February 2015 (00:20)

[Music]

Manuel Lemos: So now, we are going to move on with the Innovation Award winners, this time starting with the JavaScript Innovation Award.

We'll be talking about the nominees of February, so packages that were posted in February, then in March they were voted, and then in April, the results came out. So now, we can talk about them.

And for JavaScript, we started getting more packages fortunately. As I've mentioned before, there has been a growth in submissions and this month, we had three nominees. Since the first one is written by Arturs Sosins himself, Arturs, would you like to start and talk about your package?

Arturs Sosins: Sure. Let me just switch window. So, basically, what this JavaScript component does, it allows you to control your TVs, different TVs that are listed there... Philips or LG... from your browser.

For why such class? I can answer that. I worked on another third-party project MYM.io, which stands for Make Your Magic, where we develop magic wand controller to control different devices, and my objective is to integrate it with third-party services.

So I started with this, and interesting fact that they all share the same environment that you could all do in JavaScript. And I thought, why don't let's create such class?

So basically here it is, and probably, I can't surely demo anything right now. My TVs are off, but you can select TVs, and then it would query what keys it could send or send a text, and you could do it from your browser, if your TV supports it. LG, NetCast, and Philips to be with JointSpace API, which I think all the newest TV have.

Manuel Lemos: Yeah, I think I found it very curious and innovative because I have never seen anything like this before. I didn't know you could control a TV from your network. I suppose TVs have Web servers to accept those requests, right?

Arturs Sosins: Yeah. You can discover old TV using UPnP. Unfortunately, you can't do in browser. That's why you need to set IP address directly. But then, yeah, they are controlled by either REST APIs or WebSockets service, stuff like that.

Manuel Lemos: So you don't have any means to discover the IP address automatically. You need to see it manually.

Arturs Sosins: Yeah, because HTTP request can't send this M-SEARCH header to make UPnP device respond. And even if they respond, they can't receive it. Basically, there are lots of problems in communication, but all others is possible.

Manuel Lemos: Yeah, well, it was very interesting.

And on my behalf, I also would like to comment about the other two packages. The first one is from Ovidiu Bokar from United Kingdom. He created a simple package that can help you to put links to share Web pages on social media pages. And this package that's what it does, and it uses the Bootstrap library to show some nice icons near those links.

It's a very simple package, but still innovative compared to what you have on site. So congratulations for Ovidiu Bokar, and he picked a downloadable book by O'Reilly.

The other package that I want to comment, this one is not trivial to understand. It is a package by Jason Gerfen from the United States. He has been a nice contributor with several nominated packages. What it provides is a package that uses Node.js to monitor the activity of, for instance, a group of servers, so it connects to those servers via SSH, and it monitors the changes on log files and brings the content of those log files to a central server.

So, that's basically what it does, and Jason sent a package for this. We don't have many Node.js packages, so they are always welcome here because Node.js is reasonably popular. So I encourage everybody else to send more innovative packages based on Node.js as well.

JavaScript Innovation Award Rankings of 2015 (06:02)

Manuel Lemos: Now, regarding the Innovation Award of 2015, actually these rankings already consider packages published on I would say March, right?

And given that, we have here in the first place, Suresh Kumar from India with two packages and seven points, Andras Toth with two packages and four points. Then, Arturs comes with one package and three points, then Ryan Silalahi (one package and three points), then Ovidiu Bokar (one package and two points), and then, Jason Gerfen with one package and one point.

By country, the ranking is more or less...

Arturs Sosins: Basically the same.

Manuel Lemos: Basically the same because we still have few packages. It's basically the same countries. So you have India, Hungary, Latvia, Indonesia, United Kingdom, and United States by this order, with the same points and packages that we mentioned before because there is practically one author per country that is listed that submitted packages.

Well, next month, since we have more packages being nominated, this will become more interesting.

PHP Innovation Award Nominees of February 2015 (07:36)

Manuel Lemos: Now, we are going to talk about the Innovation Award of PHP Classes that is more competitive, has many more authors participating. Arturs, would you like to start talking about your preferred nominees of February, 2015?

Arturs Sosins: OK, let me zoom it right.

So the first class I would want to mention is PHP Native Mobile App Dispatcher by Andre Liechti from Switzerland. And what it does is that you could provide links to your apps for different platforms, and then when the user visits the web site, it determines your platform based on user agent and displays the proper link, so you could suggest to use native app instead of your website.

Manuel Lemos: It's very, very interesting. Because it addresses a problem that until you develop your own mobile application, you don't know how to solve. Which is, for instance, if you have a web site, but you also a mobile application that provides a better user experience, you could redirect the user but the user needs to go to the actual page to install that package.

Depending on the device that you have , you need to go to the right page. Also, it needs to compute a sort of one time password parameters to send you to those packages, to those pages of the applications.

So this is very interesting. I even have mentioned this class in the article that I talked about adapting your web sites to mobile. If you're going to develop an application, you could use this package to redirect the user to the right page to install the applications from your device.

Arturs Sosins: And Andre got one copy of the Zend Studio for this package.

The next one I wanted to comment is FusionCharts PHP Class by Lucas de Oliveira from Brazil. And probably lots of PHP developers that are backend developers don't really like to mingle with the frontend code, then this class provides all that you need to generate charts using FusionCharts API, which will generate the code to use.

And the usage seem to be quite simple. As you see, you just take the class and provide user data. So that's why I like it. Lucas got one downloadable copy of PHP ED Professional for this class.

Next one that I would mention is PHP Mobile Mobile Recharge API, and this class is developed by Ruturaj Maniyar from India. And basically, what this class does it uses a carrier-specific API to recharge the balance of your mobile phone account. So, you can add to your balance using a REST API. That's actually awesome. Why nobody did one that does that?

Manuel Lemos: Yeah.

Arturs Sosins: But, OK, yeah, that's a client that uses their API, and that's a great idea. He got a PHPStorm IDE Personal Permanent License for his package.

Another package I wanted to mention is PHP Fast Pattern Matching by Chi Hoang. Usually, you'll match strings using regular expressions, for example, and you need to know the syntax, and sometimes it's a little harder. But this class allows to provide you like strings that if you want to match and then try to match them by comparing the substring system. I think it was called ternary tries, yes.

Chi got one year one year server license IP to country for this package.

The last one I wanted to mention is PHP Server Stat Monitor, developed by wapmorgan... probably a nickname... from Russia. Basically what this package does, it monitors the machine resources that PHP script is running on. It could monitor CPU memory usage, swap and RAM.

It actually creates its own Web server to do that, so it doesn't interfere with ready applications that you have there. So probably, if you're using a web site there, you can query the resources of machine and based on that, do something like process something in the background and stuff like that.

That's basically why this class is great. He got one subscription to the PDF edition of the PHP Architect magazine.

I think that's it from my side. I think you're muted, yeah. Again, yeah, let's just...

Manuel Lemos: Sorry. I think on my behalf I also have several packages to talk about. I'm going to start precisely by this one. This is PHP DNSSEC Library which is a package that deals with DNSSEC, which is a standard... My mouse is behaving by himself, I don't know why.

Arturs Sosins: It's a smart mouse.

Manuel Lemos: Yeah, not very smart. Anyway, this is a package that is interesting because it does something that is advanced that deals with the DNSSEC standard for dealing with public and private keys to create records, calculate values.

If you know about DNSSEC, you'll find this package useful, so you don't have to do it by yourself. But this is for people that deal with the network configuration using DNS. And this is a package by Jan Altensen from Germany, and for this package, he has chosen a downloadable copy of Komodo IDE.

Another package that I wanted to comment, this one by Till Wehowski from Germany as well. He has a package that is called aSQL CLI. This is basically to parse the command line arguments, which is something that many packages do, but he also does the opposite.

He can reveal the user interface configuration... I mean, the user command line string... so it allows you to parse an existing command line or add some parameters or remove or parse. So do something useful and then rewrite it, so you can eventually pass to another program that you wanted to add it to the command line.

So this can be useful to implement wrappers around programs adding or removing some parameters. Congratulations to Till for this package. It is interesting. For this, he picked a downloadable copy of Code Lobster Editor Professional.

Next, I would like to talk about another package, which seems to be simpler but in reality, it's something that no other class does. It basically contains all the list of countries and states in the world.

You can do several things like checking, validating when you are filling, for instance, forms that take addresses, it can validate the list of countries and the states to determine if they are correct. Even if you are not from that country, you don't know all the states, this class has all the information about that, and you can validate the countries and state.

And this package was written by Richard McFriend, and his from Nigeria. I did not get any response from him regarding the prize that he wanted to pick. Maybe, he's not reachable now, so if Richard is listening to this, you may still contact the site to get one of the remaining prizes.

So the next package that I wanted to comment is one called PHP Math Progressions, which can calculate several types of progressions of numbers using, well, the progressions that it supports.

There are few classes that implemented math progressions for any field, types of progression, but this one is more complete because it supports all sorts of math progressions... fibonacci, collatz, cauchy, conway, generic arithmetic, and arithmetic progression using this format that it shows here.

This package was developed by Ghali Ahmed from Tunisia. For this, he picked an O'Reilly, a book that he has chosen.

One last package that I wanted to comment. This is a bit different, the PHP Cloud API Response Parser. Anyway, this cloud API specification, I'm not sure if it is something defined by Zend. I think it was. Then, there are several cloud APIs that can provide that response in that format, and this package is able to parse that response and provide it for applications to handle it. It supports for Amazon AWS EC2, Rackspace and DigitalOcean, so it's for several types of cloud providers.

This package was developed by Om Visvanathan, and he didn't pick a prize in this case.

PHP Innovation Award Rankings of 2015 (19:05)

Manuel Lemos: Anyway, now, we are going to talk about the Innovation Award rankings for 2015. As I mentioned, this is a more competitive ranking. So far, individually, Andre Liechti is leading with 2 packages and 16 points, followed by wapmorgan, 2 packages and 14 points, Vladimir Zurita with 1 package and 10 points, Xavier Perez with 1 package and 9 points, then Raskin Veniamin from Russia, also with the same packages and points.

Then, Ruturaj Maniyar, also one package and one point from India, Nadir Latif from Pakistan, with one package and eight points, 7 Rafael Rodriguez (two packages and eight points), YoungHyeong Ryu from Korea with one package and eight points, Lucas de Oliveira from Brazil (one package and eight points).

So this ranking is evolving very quickly because there are many innovative packages being sent. This contributed for the Innovation Award ranking by country to be also more competitive.

So currently, Russia is leading with 3 packages and 23 points, followed by Switzerland with 2 packages and 16 points, then Brazil with 2 packages and 15 points, and then Germany 3 packages and 11 points, then Venezuela with 2 packages and 11 points, Chile (1 package and 10 points), India (2 packages and 10 points), Spain (1 package and 9 points), Pakistan (1 package and 8 points) and South Korea (1 package and 8 points).

[Music]