by Lorna Mitchell |
| January 26, 2012
It's that time of year again; the Dutch PHP Conference has announced its dates (7-9th June 2012) and the call for papers is now open!
This year, the conference expands into a new dimension with the addition of a new sister conference, the Dutch Mobile Conference, running alongside DPC. All attendees will get access to both events. The addition of an additional strand to the conference is a response to the situation as we see it in industry. Our clients need mobile solutions alongside their web applications, and developers increasingly work across both web and mobile disciplines.
Call for Papers
The calls for papers for both events are open now and we'd be delighted to hear from you. You don't necessarily need previous speaking experience (but tell us if you have), you just need a great topic - and for these events, the more technical, the better! The URLs you need to submit your talk are http://www.phpconference.nl/call-for-papers and http://www.mobileconference.nl/call-for-papers - we can't wait to see what you come up with, but you need to be quick! The calls for papers close on Tuesday 31st January.
Come to the Conference!
Hopefully you've been enjoying our DPCRadio series, where we share the recordings from last year's PHP conference (if not, you can catch up on the DPCRadio page). This year will be bigger and better than ever, and we are sure you'll love the new mobile elements of the event as well - so come and join us, 7th-9th June in sunny* Amsterdam!
To follow along with the news from both events, follow our twitter accounts @DPCon and @DMConf.
* sunshine not guaranteed
by dpcradio |
| January 17, 2012
Tobias Schlitt
You already know Singleton, Signal/Observer, Factory and friends. But, which object oriented patterns are en vogue in the PHP world and how can you seize their power? This talk gives you an overview on Dependency Injection, Data Mapper and more OO patterns the PHP world talks about right know, using practical code examples.
You can find Toby's slides under "Advanced OOP Patterns" here: http://qafoo.com/presentations.html
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by Hilary Boyce |
| January 5, 2012
Here at Ibuildings, we encourage our developers to continue to develop themselves professionally and to gain relevant certifications. Most have the Zend PHP Certification (ZCE) and some have the Zend Framework Certification (ZFCE) and/or the MySQL Certifications. I have recently been working to gain the MySQL Certified Developer qualification which is taken as two exams; each one is an hour and a half and covering a wide range of topics relevant to developing applications with MySQL (there is a separate qualification for administrators). I found some of the course material pretty easy as I have used it repeatedly over the years but there was plenty that was fairly new to me; some features that I haven’t been using and haven't noticed other PHP developers using or talking about very much. Having learned more about them, I thought they were worth highlighting. I’ve enjoyed finding out about these features and look forward to using some of these elements such as subqueries, views and stored procedures effectively in future projects. (more...)
by dpcradio |
| December 14, 2011
Derick Rethans
The web is full of useful advice focussed on pushing out the last bit of performance of your code. They mention trivial changes. like changing every occurrence of print with echo even suggesting to use for instead of foreach. These optimisations help, but you are not going to notice it unless they're in a tight loop with many iterations. It is also a wrong approach for tackling performance issues. Before you can optimise, you need to find out if your codeis actually slow; then you need to *understand* the code; and *then* you need to find out where you can optimise it. This talk introduces tools and concepts to optimise the optimisation of your PHP applications.
You can find Derick's talk slides over on his site [PDF]
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by dpcradio |
| November 21, 2011
Kore Nordmann
CouchDB is a prominent representative of the NoSQL movement. Using its integrated web server and eventual consistent replication you can not only distribute data, but also full application code. This even works for clients which are not always connected to the internet, like e.g. mobile devices. This session gives you an insight Couch apps, their beauty and pitfalls.
You can find Kore's slides over on http://talks.qafoo.com/
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by dpcradio |
| November 10, 2011
Christopher Jones
This session starts with a brief but important overview about the growing Oracle technology eco-system. It shows what Oracle's direction means for PHP application development and deployment.
The majority of the talk then highlights techniques on building high performance PHP applications with the very widely used Oracle Database. Techniques include connection pooling, application monitoring, automatic data privacy for PHP application users, online application upgrades, caching for performance, and how to suspend and resume database transactions to effectively build stateful web applications.
You can find Chris' slides on oracle's technetwork
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by Robert Raszczynski |
| October 31, 2011
Imagine a workshop of a racing team. The very first thing you will notice is that everything has its own place; spanners hanging on walls sorted by size, other tools placed in drawers, divided by their purpose, bolts and nuts placed in separate dividers and once again sorted by size. Everything is labeled, clean and in order. Now imagine how would it be to work in such an environment, where every single item has its specific place. I reckon that after the first few days, you would be able to point to where everything is with your eyes closed! Such a degree of segregation and organisation makes our lives much easier and it's a pleasure to work with.
Architectural and design patterns help software architects to break systems in to smaller, more maintainable sections organised by their functionality and usage. The biggest benefit of patterns is that someone has already solved problems we may face and by utilising patterns such as Transactional Script, Domain Model or Data Mapper in your application it gives us, as developers, some good guidelines on how it should be designed. (more...)
by Marco De Bortoli |
| October 27, 2011
This is the second part of our PHPNW11 conference review. Check out the previous part here.
Tutorial Day
The conference started on Friday with its first ever tutorial day. I attended the "Security" tutorial by Arne Blankerts as it's very relevant for the project I'm working on at the moment. The talk was very enjoyable, especially because for the first time someone put emphasis not only on the software security aspect, but also on the hardware and the physical access control policy. You can put all your efforts and apply all the best practices to make your software secure, but everything can vanish in a moment if anyone can access your data centre without restrictions. My colleague Marco Lopes has reviewed this tutorial in more detail in his PHPNW11 report.
The second tutorial I attended was "Maintainable Applications in PHP Using Components" by Stuart Herbert. It was his first time delivering this content and I have to say he did it in an awesome way. Despite the network connection problems we had (which delayed the tutorial a bit), we got along very well by the time everyone had their environment setup. Stuart's tutorial was full of hands-on code. This course was not only a lot of fun and laughs, but interesting content too. I'm looking forward to using Phix to create my components repository, maybe pairing its workflow with the chef-based one we are already adopting at Ibuildings. Definitely a thumbs up for Stuart's project.
Main Conference
(more...)
by Marco Lopes |
| October 20, 2011
Earlier this month, 27 members of the Ibuildings team attended the PHPNW11 conference in Manchester. We will publish two personal reviews of the event by two of our software engineers - here's the first one.
Security Tutorial
Beware of the dark side, Luke!
For the morning of the tutorial day at PHPNW11, I decided to attend "Beware of the dark side, Luke!", a security tutorial by Arne Blankerts. While web developers tend to give more emphasis to the security issues directly related with their application (such as XSS, CSRF, SQL injection or Session security), Arne's tutorial was very interesting because it focused also on direct machine access, remote OS access, installed software exploiting, and hardware exploits.
(more...)
by dpcradio |
| October 5, 2011
Paul Matthews
With Google constantly pushing the customer expectations of searching, is it time to move away from our database full-text search in pursuit of a more targeted platform? Can implementing Solr offer more than an answer to a search? Implementing a search platform isn’t always suitable for all applications, but in this talk we’ll look at identifying the right search solution, choosing the best way to integrate it into our application and exploring all the benefits a search server can offer.
Edit: Paul's slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/paulmatthews86/search-with-solr
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by dpcradio |
| September 21, 2011
Today's episode comes from one of our own Ibuildings employees, covering Zend Framework.
Martin de Keijzer
Many people use Zend Framework for it's MVC implementation, but it has a lot of hidden gems. Internationalization (i18n) is one of them. We will look how you can create an application that will have the right languages, currencies, dates and times all based on the location of the visiting user. This session will take away a lot of headaches in international projects and will improve the quality in overall.
Edit: You can find Martin's slides on slideshare
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by dpcradio |
| September 13, 2011
This year's DPCRadio returns with one of the keynotes from this year's event as our first episode.
Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
APIs are commonly an afterthought, like a hot tub awkwardly attached to a house — a shoehorned approach that produces a suboptimal app with scarce support that lacks documentation. In effect, APIs are the ugly stepchild of the Web.
This is a sad reality that we are faced with, because many companies make their living consuming third-party APIs and mixing in their own data to create amazing and interesting mashups. In the initial phases of development, there is rarely enough money to develop the app and its API. By the time there’s both demand and money, it can be hard to fit an API on top of the architecture in such a way that the whole thing won’t fall over. APIs should be first class citizens of the Web. Inconceivable? Possimpible? Not at all!
In this talk we will dive deeper into why APIs are an afterthought, how we can change that. We will also touch on how that can benefit your product down the line in terms of resource savings and infrastructure efficiency, as well as the impact it will have on your infrastructure.
This talk is inspired by my phpadvent article.
(You can find Helgi's slides over on Slideshare)
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