The Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup is merging with Fox Valley Computing Professionals. This is that big announcement I promised a few weeks back, and I think it’s a great opportunity for us.

FVCP approached me with their plan to begin offering more technical presentations starting this September, and we decided that we could deliver the best mix of technical knowledge by pooling our resources and the talent of our members. Although there’s some overlap between our groups, this merger gives us over 400 potential members (based on Meetup’s membership rosters for the two groups).

It also gives us access to FVCP’s new home, the Omega 59 restaurant in Warrenville, 1/4 mi north of I-88 on Rt. 59. The restaurant is hosting our upcoming meetings free of charge, which means we are going to stop charging admission. All the restaurant asks is that we buy food and drinks, and to help with that they’re making full wait service and a full bar available to us. I was never happy having to charge money for our meetings, so I’m excited about this new opportunity.

If you’ve never been to a Fox Valley Computing Professionals event, check out their Meetup page at http://www.meetup.com/foxvalleycp/ . They also have a website at http://foxvalleycp.com/, including videos of previous presentations.

I hope you’ll join us on September 14th as we open a new chapter together as the Fox Valley Computing Professionals. Look for an announcement on FVCP’s Meetup page in the coming weeks.

Thanks,
Dave Ross

4.3 – 1.3%
4.4 – 6.3%
5.0 – 0.1%
5.1 – 3.5%
5.2 – 85.4%
5.3 – 3.4%

Also, there’s some big news in the works, and it has nothing to do with Kobe Bryant. Stay tuned for updates in the coming weeks.

The first Google servers

Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr

The MongoDB interactive shell

Original Macintosh Portable (15lbs)

I’m going to try to get a copy of php|architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming to raffle off, too!

After last month’s successful meeting, we’re returning to the IIT Rice campus in Wheaton. Admission is $5.

Thanks to everyone who came out to our new location! The IIT campus was a hit, and I’m trying to book the room again for next month.

Some other links discussed at the Meetup:

• docs.jquery.com
• jQuery UI
• Uniform jQuery plugin for styling forms
• SWiSH inexpensive Flash development tool
• JS-Chi Chicago Javascript Meetup
• Demos of Gordon, a Flash runtime written in Javascript
• JSC64 Commodore 64 emulator using jQuery & Canvas

Here’s info on Eclipse and Netbeans, but no cool videos.

Mike Creuzer’s tour of his workspace and an overview of the tools he uses to code & test:

Thanks again to Mike Pavlak and the rest of the folks at Zend for