And just to prove it…

The day started with a keynote speech from Joe Stagner, who work work Microsoft. Now, initially, you may have the same kind of reaction that most people around here would have; “oh God, not Microsoft! What have they ever done for us?!” But the speech kind of gave me hope in a stable and interesting future for PHP on Windows-based platforms and architecture. Joe talked some about SilverLight, Microsoft’s equivalent to Adobe’s Flash technology, .Net platforms and getting PHP working within that, and also about running desktop applications written in PHP.

Some interesting resources that Joe mentioned, which I have yet to check out, are Win Binder – running PHP as a desktop app – and Phalanger – a PHP distribution built to run in .Net. Something else that Joe touched on with SilverLight is that because it’s managed code (as in .Net), it’s possible to not only write the back-end in PHP but also the client front-end! That holds a lot of possibilities, especially if you don’t want to learn another Actionscript type language from front-end development. Of course, you would need to use SilverLight, where you might already be invested in Flash, but the idea is a good one.

The next session was with Paul Reinheimer talking about SPL (the Standard Package Library). He really only talked in depth about two features in SPL, the Iterator and ArrayAccess, but also covered the difference between abstract classes and interfaces. SPL is one of those things that I think I should be using, but haven’t taken the time to make any code use it. But hearing about an example of using the ArrayAccess pattern to give access to rows from a database and then using it for writing those rows back to the db in a random way (given the array index if the primary key) really makes me want to try it out. And a beauty of SPL is that you can extend a lot of functionality, so if you used the DirectoryIterator, for example, you could extend it to automatically skip dot files, or only return certain file types.

Chris Shiflett was up next for me with his Security 2.0 talk. This covered CSRF, XSS, JavaScript Hijacking and more. Lots of information and a few demonstrations on how vulnerable some big sites are, or have been, such as Adobe, Digg and Amazon. This is also one of those talks that the notes would really help with. Very interesting, though.

At this point I was going to Jeff Moore’s talk about Exceptions, but on a whim I went to see Terry Chay talk about.. well, to be honest, I really don’t know what he talked about! It was, as he admitted, more of a rant than anything else, intermixed with a tiny little bit of swearing (only about 56 uses of the ‘f’ word). I have no idea what I really took away from that talk, other than: it was very, very entertaining and Terry really needs to take a few downers to bring him down to normal people speed. OK, I took a little more away than that, but really, it was just fun to watch him rant. It was probably one of those session that I will not really think of again but something will happen one day and I’ll go, ‘oh yes! Terry mentioned that…’

Chris Jones‘ talk about Oracle 11g… Doesn’t really apply to me as at work the ITS/BIS department handle all things Oracle. But I figured that I should get some kind of overview on Oracle and its interaction with PHP. In retrospect, perhaps Eli White’s talk on high-performance PHP would have been better for me to attend.

Then finally, other than the closing keynote speech, came Ed Finkler’s talk on securing the PHP environment with PhpSecInfo. The PHP environment at work is something else that is out of our direct control, so going in to this I was unsure as to how much I could get out of it. However, I do run PHP on my own machine and have a couple freelance people who use PHP, so securing the environment as well as the code is an important thing.

Simple put, using PhpSecInfo is a Good Thing™. It’s only a couple lines to run it, will give you information on how insecure your environment is, and also provides a platform to extend the tests for custom environmental checking. Also, there is an enhanced version within the Zend Framework (though currently only in the incubator) which provides several output formats, more programmatic access to the tests, and so on.

Hope for us all yet, eh?

The day started with a keynote speech from Andrei Zmievski called, “The Future: PHP 6″. The main gist of the speech was to let us know that PHP 6 is basically PHP 5 with Unicode support. Up until now I have just thought of PHP 6 as something that holds only a small amount of interest for me, but nothing I’ll use for quite some time. That goes especially so at work, where they’ve only just got a PHP 5 server installed a number of months ago! But now, having heard Andrei talk about PHP 6, I am very interested in using it.

Unicode is going to be full integrated in to PHP 6, everything from the lowly string functions to PDO, PCRE, SimpleXML and all the rest. Andrei demonstrated this with example code that showed strip_tags removing HTML tags from complex strings containing two different sets of languages, using strlen to return the number of characters (as people use it now – although it actually returns the number of bytes), and similar examples.

Something else I found really interesting with PHP 6 is the fact that you can actually have variable, class and function names all in Unicode! This, I’m sure, is going to be great for those people that want to code in their native language (though impossible for me to read! )

Internationalization (i18n) is handled in a PECL extension (pecl/itnl). Not sure why it’s not integrated in to PHP 6, but I think it was down to the fact that they wanted to offer PHP 5 the same functionality. The i18n features are really cool – giving you the ability to represent numbers, currency, date and time in a localized format.

Really; there’s no excuse not to install PHP 6 when it becomes stable, and I’ll certainly be badgering work to do that.

The next session I attended was Maggie Nelson’s “You don’t need a DBA”. The talk was about good practises when designing database, such as using primary and foreign keys, normalization and stored procedures. Maggie seemed quite nervous, bless her, but I took a lot from it – even though it was mainly focused around Oracle. At work there is a team of very good Oracle developers who know infinitely more about the subject than I do, and on private/freelance projects I tend to use MySQL. Thankfully, though, the topics talked about were quite database agnostic and can be applied to MySQL (well, MySQL 5+, at least) as well as they are Oracle. Stored procedures are certainly something I’d like to use more as it really keeps all the database procedures together (and a lot of data processing can be done on the db level as opposed to only within the PHP script!)

Straight after that came Ben Ramsey’s talk on “Designing RESTful Web Applications”. Lots of information here on the concept of REST and some good real-life code examples on connecting to services such as flickr and del.icio.us. I’m looking forward to getting the slides for this to help me refactor a ‘RESTish’ service I created at work to actually be ‘RESTful’.

After lunch came another keynote speech, this time by Chris Shiflett and titled “PHP 4 is dead! Migrate your code”. Essentially it was just telling us what we already know; PHP 4′ EOL is on 08/08/08, PHP 5 is great, update your code. But Chris’ presentation was very funny and enjoyable. I’m looking forward to hearing him speak tomorrow on ‘Security 2.0′.

Paul Jones was up next with his “Organizing your PHP projects”. The outcome of this was basically to not use global vars at all, write your applications as if writing for a library, namespace everything to avoid conflicts (while remembering to use sensible namespace names and not things like ‘Date’ or ‘Html’), and use the class-to-file naming convention (such as Component_Db_Table would refer to the directory Component/Db/Table).

As I’ve been working with the Zend Framework recently I really took to heart what Paul was saying, as it’s a library with good conventions and structure.

Finally came Jeff Moore’s “Configure $this” talk. This focused around the Dependency Injection pattern, refactoring code so as not to use concrete classes and things like that. I have to admit, I didn’t come away with a lot from this one. Not because what Jeff was saying wasn’t interesting because it was (albeit he was the least animated speaker today), but I think because it was outside of the realms of the work I do, and the fact that I’m not full up-to-spec with my knowledge of design patterns. This is another that I think the slides would really help with.

And that was it for day 1!

There is a party a little later on – a chance to network – or as I like to think of it; a chance to drink beer and not talk very much at all. Actually, I’m really hoping to be able to give out some of my business cards today… Not because I think people will want to contact me, but because I have some really kick arse cards from Moo!

OK, to be honest, I’m not saying anything, but, hey! I’m here. It’s a start.

As part of this conference package I also had the opportunity to do the Professional PHP online course run by php|architect. I enjoyed that, and learned a fair bit, so I’m hopeful for the conference.