Bitestats: from API to PDF

A session at Future of Web Apps London 2012

Bitestats.com draws in data from your Google Analytics account, feeds it through Google Charts, and delivers a very simple one-page PDF to your inbox. Under the bonnet though, it's a PHP/Zend Framework application with a Gearman job queue included, doing a lot of web service interactions to fetch and format a range of data, including OAuth, Google Charts, data parsing and of course the maths required to present onto PDF. The end user gets a very simple, automated report showing far less than all the data available, but still of greater value as it is simple enough to understand. This session is a geeks' tour through the nuts and bolts of how we built the various components that make up this service and the lessons learned in the process.

About the speaker

This person is speaking at this event.

Lorna Jane Mitchell

Freelance consultant, PHP developer, speaker, writer of English as well as Geek, and all-round open source evangelist bio from Twitter

Lorna is an independent PHP consultant based in Leeds, UK. She leads the joind.in open source project, which provides a platform for real-time, public feedback at community events. She is an experienced event organiser and speaker herself, having hosted the Dutch PHP Conference and co-founded the PHP North West conference and user group. She has spoken at technical events across Europe and beyond, predominantly on technical topics around PHP and APIs, but also on topics around business, projects and open source. She regularly delivers technical training sessions and is also active as a mentor with PHPWomen.org. Author of the book PHP Master from Sitepoint, Lorna loves to write and is regularly published at a number of outlets including netmagazine and of course her own blog lornajane.net.