#php uk 2011

So last friday I headed down to PHP UK 2011 to catch up on the recent goings on in the world of PHP. The trip started off cursed what with me coming down with a chest infection mid last week, then missing my train to London (ouch poor wallet) and then getting no sleep due to the worlds loudest snorer vs the paper thin walls of one of Kings Cross' more budget friendly hotels.

Bleary eyed I headed down to the Business Design Centre in Islington just in time for the talks to start. First up was the keynote delivered by Marco Tabini covering themes on understanding users and delivering some news on phparchitect magazine (which i plan to keep track of this year).

Next up I caught Ivo Jansch's talk on PHP in a Mobile Ecosystem. This was a good talk covering the considerations and approaches in using PHP. I got a few good links from this, in particular http://www.detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/ (for generating backend code on how to deal with particuarly handsets) and a sequence of blog posts on http://thoomtech.com helping introduce objective-c for php developers (which admittedly would have been more useful for me a couple of months ago but I'm still awful at objective-c so plenty of room for improvement).

At the same time as Ivo's talk there was 2 other talks of note, the first was one on HTML 5 and CSS 3 delivered by (believe it or not) a Microsoft Evangelist, the people I spoke to was audience to this talk weren't very happy. On the other hand the talk by Ian Barber called Zero MQ is the answer went down very well and seemed to be many people's highlight of the confrence (not hugely surprising for me as I really enjoyed his talk on fulltext searching last year). Although Zero MQ is a technology i'm unlikely to use in production anytime soon it has inspired me to give it a go locally.

After Ivo's talk I went to see Jonathon Weiss talk about running web apps on Amazon EC2, which is something I've wanted to explore for a while, I just need a project now to justify playing with it. Next up I caught Thorsten Rinne introducing Continuous Improvement concepts and tools, like every similar talk like this I have seen at conferences I came away with a renewed enthusiasm to set up a Continuous Integration server for work and then slowly start employing all the cool techniques that help ensure/improving coding quality. This time I'm going to do it, watch this space.

Next up I caught a great talk by Lorenzo Alberton called NoSQL: What, When and Why. Lorenzo focused first on the academic concepts of NoSQL databases which explained how they can work in distributed environments and be resilient to problems. Prior to this talk I only had brief knowledge of document databases like CouchDb and MongoDB, I had no that NoSQL had 4 different kinds. I recommend checking out the slides for a great introduction to NoSQL that's not clouded by the buzzword hype bubble.

Last up I caught Advanced OO Patterns by Tobias Schlitt. The talk was actually quite different to what I expected (my expectation had been crazy design patterns pulled out of dusty computer science text books applied to PHP) It actually focused on a few common design patterns: Dependancy Injection, Active Record and Data Mappers. It did open my eyes to how much of an active record pattern Doctrine 1.2 is (despite the spin) and it will be interesting to see if using Doctrine 2 will feel like active record or like a less typing Data Mapper, we will see!