Blimey, exhausted after PHP UK Conference. No idea how the speakers have managed to have their pre-conf, then speak, then have a post-conf! I suspect there will be many PHP developers passed out on the streets of London later tonight.
While it’s all fresh in my mind though, I just wanted to make a few notes on todays talks – please excuse typos, I’m tired. Perhaps I will expand on things a bit more later, but really it’s a bit of a note to myself so tomorrow I haven’t forgotten what I’m thinking tonight.
Keynote talk: The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades
Official: Aral is a mad man. How he had this much energy in the morning is beyond me 
Aral gave a great talk, the main point I took away is that we should approach application development from the angle of solving our users problems – not our own problems. It sounds pretty obvious really, it puts a bit of an emphasis on where a project begins.
My only disagreement was the notion of “just get things working [in code] then refactor” as opposed to “think then get things working”. That’s great if you’re just prototyping an interface, but I think if you’re doing anything more, you’d be pretty silly to write spaghetti code to make it work then refactor. Keeping it in context of user interface design though, then fine, I think I agree with the idea of just getting it working and seeing how it works out before investing real time in anything.
What’s new in PHP 5.3
It was good to hear Scott present some of the new features of PHP 5.3, and to have a breif chat with him later in the day. It really makes me feel like I should be moving from an anonymous userland-er to contributing back to the PHP project. Perhaps when I have time to brush up on my C skills, I should consider giving something back.
Of Lambda Functions, Closures and Traits
This tied in really nicely with Scotts talk, where Sebastian went in to more detail on PHP 5.3’s lambda functions / closures and touched on their internals – such as the new magic __invoke() method – and gave us a look in to the upcoming Traits so solve the problem of multiple class inheritance.
Using the create_function() method has always been something I’ve tried to avoid using, so having a decent syntax for anonymous functions is really a great addition to PHP. Although I’m not convinced that it’s an addition comparible in revolution to objects in PHP4, as was suggested at the start of the talk!
Living with Frameworks
Gradwell have begun the process of moving away from (what I presume is) procedural spaghetti code to some nice Symfony-based internal systems. Stuart spoke about the implications of moving to a framework from more of a business point of view, including the pros and cons of frameworks – their impact on productivity and costs – and emphasised the killing of ‘dead’ code. He had a great way of putting it – I think it went “Dead code is like a Vampire. If you don’t kill it properly, it will keep coming back to bite you until it’s bled you dry”.
The moral of the story for me was use frameworks and kill old codebases properly – don’t attempt to actively maintain two versions of the same code. He gave a lot of practical advice on the hiring of developers, too. Interesting to note that none of the Gradwell developers had used Symfony before working for them (don’t turn developers down just because they haven’t used the framework already, but be prepared to train them!).
Myphp-busters: Symfony Framework
Despite being blackmailed in to wearing an Avagi t-shirt, Stefan dispelled a whole bunch of Symfony myphps – explaining why it isn’t (or as least doesn’t have to be) slow, bulky, overly coupled or hard to learn. It was a great talk and it’s a shame I only had the time to say “Thanks” to Stefan just before leaving the conference!
State Machines to State Of The Art: Smart, efficient design using ReST & MVC
Blimey, what a topic to end the day on … just as we’re all running out of energy, we’re presented with something we have to think about! REST is something I’ve taken quite an interest in lately. Rowan’s talk really did cement a few of the concepts that I’ve been learning with regards REST recently and he tied it all together with some practical examples which used the Zend framework. While people say you should avoid code in slides, I think it was really useful to have the theory explained and see some example code of its implementation.
The most recent PHP|Arch magazine has a great article about REST and, coupled with Rowans talk on the subject, I really do feel I’ve learnt a good deal on the subject in a very short space of time.
A great day, and I’ll be looking forward to PHP UK 2010!
28/02/2009 at 8:56 am Permalink
If you get a chance to watch it on the phpuk website then the talk by Hank Janssen is well worth a watch. I didn’t realise Microsoft was pouring so much money and effort into getting open source applications running better and faster on windows.