This year at the Dutch PHP Conference, we managed to capture some of our speakers on camera, and asked them about their talks and about the event itself. Read on for the video interview we did with Thijs Feryn - you can also get the audio from his talk PHP Through the Eyes of a Hoster which was published here on techPortal recently.
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Speaker:Thijs Feryn
Most PHP talks are given from the point of view of people who work on a project internally. These people are mostly developers, designers, project managers, QA's and there's even an occasional business man who shares his opinion on PHP. I would like to talk about PHP through the eyes of a hoster. Eventually a project is going to get hosted on the internet and in a lot of cases an external webhosting company will take care of that. As the support manager and open source evangelist of a large hosting company, I will bring you a story about how a hoster experiences the wonderful world of PHP, about what can go wrong for customers and about how a webhoster can solve these issues.
This tale describes everyday situations in 45 minutes where PHP is a blessing as well as a burden. This includes:
If you wish, you can also download the slides from this session
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (91.7MB)
Speaker:Melanie Rhianna Lewis
A web service is an API provided by a site that allows a remote application to access data and use functionality without having to 'act like a web browser'. Consumer devices, such as a smart phone, set top box or games console, often do not have a form factor that allows the easy use of an interactive web site but do allow the download of custom applications which use web services provided by such sites.
The talk will describe how a web service targeted at consumer devices can be implemented. It will look at the different methods of calling remote functionality such as SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON and restful services. It will also consider the limitations of consumer devices, memory restrictions, communications bandwidth restrictions, and so on that have to be considered when designing a web service aimed at consumer devices. Finally it will have a brief look at how to make a service secure.
Slides: http://www.cyberspice.org.uk/downloads/%20WebServicesForConsumerDevices-20100612.pdf
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (63.7MB)
Speaker: Derick Rethans
This session explain a certain set of design issues for library code that either is often extended, or created with extending and inheritance in mind. There are many ways how a library can be designed to make it both easier to test, as well as for external developers to consume and use. This presentation provides techniques for doing so.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (84.7MB)
Speaker: Elizabeth Naramore
Technical debt is something that most project teams or independent developers have to deal with - we take shortcuts to push out releases, we don't focus on quality, deadlines need to be met, quick fixes slowly become the standard. Whatever the reason, if we don't manage our technical debt (not unlike financial debt), before too long our applications are technically bankrupt, and we are forced to completely refactor and start anew.
In this talk, we will discuss what technical debt is, when it is acceptable and when it isn't, and strategies for effectively managing it, both on an independent and team level. We'll talk about how it affects the entire team and how to work through minimizing it, as well as working effectively as a team to address it.
(see also the slides from this talk: http://naramore.net/slides/DPC10-techdebt.pdf)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (65.3MB)
Speaker: Ilia Alshanetsky
APC and Memcache both provide effective mechanism for caching data within PHP applications to improve performance and latency. This talk will cover when to use both of these tools to get the most of your apps and which workflows better suit each tool.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (105.8MB)
Speaker: Eli White
Programmers seem to have a fairly good grasp on 'how to write code', but not always what to do with it once it's been written. This talk with delve into details about how to manage your codebase, and how to manage releases (often intertwined). It will cover topics of coding standards and focus heavily on how you choose to use versioning tools to handle your development and release processes. It will have a distinct Subversion(SVN) flavor to the talk, but the concepts will not be specific to SVN.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (122.4MB)
Speaker: Paul Reinheimer
This talk will examine the two greatest problems in Ajax development (except for that pesky browser issue): Exactly what that “Asynchronous” word means, what problems it creates, and how they can be effectively managed, next the YUI Browser History object will be examined, finally handing control of Ajax applications back to the user via their familiar back button.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (40.8MB)
Speaker: Juliette Reinders Folmer
With PHP6 in the works and said to be fully UTF-8 compliant, the interest in the community in using UTF-8 has grown. On top of that, with PHP entering the – often multilingual – enterprise web playing field, the benefits UTF-8 can bring are getting more attention.
Unfortunately most developers at one point or another run into problems implementing UTF-8.
In this talk I will cover UTF-8 from the basic linguistics, through client-side aspects to all the steps you need to take to tackle the most common (and some more obscure) issues when using UTF-8 in a database driven PHP application.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (44.8MB)
Thorsten Rinne
Every PHP developer knows about Scrum, eXtreme Programming and Crystal Clear. But do you know how these methods fit in agile software development to release the software on time? The certified scrum master Thorsten Rinne will present a customer project where all these methods were used in the hard daily work. He will present short indtroductions for each method and will talk about pitfalls to the audience.
You can find Thorsten's slides here on slideshare
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (89.5MB)
Speaker: Dustin Whittle
Join us for a case study on using open source tools to build a platform for enterprise web applications. Find out what worked and what didn't when building scalable web applications with open source tools (apache, php/apc, mysql, memcache, symfony, yui). Learn how you can tools Yahoo! offers for developers and how your team can leverage Yahoo's Open Stack for your next web project. We will examine the components that make up Yahoo!'s open stack: developer tools (YUI), data APIs (YQL), and the application platform (YAP).
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (49.1MB)
Speaker: Andrei Zmievski
Quick, what do memcache, MogileFS, and Gearman have in common? They are scalable, distributed technologies, and they can also interface with PHP, your ubiquitous Web development language. Digg uses all 3 (and a few more) in its quest for social news domination, and this session will share much of what we’ve learned about them and how they are best utilized with PHP.
Slides for this talk can be found here.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (105.7MB)
Speaker: Boy Baukema
Like PHP, JavaScript is easy to learn but hard to master.
In this talk these and more comparisons will be drawn between the two languages. The main weaknesses and strengths of JavaScript will be discussed and compared to PHP.
Examples will be given of closures and lambda functions in JavaScript and they will be compared to the implementation of these same features in the upcoming PHP 5.3. And through comparison the speaker will demonstrate that the two languages are quite similar.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (81.6MB)
Speaker: Eli White
A constant pariah on web applications is scaling once you become popular. It's not always an easy task (ok, never). This talk will go into depth on a few of the most common techniques for making your website scalable. So that you can leave with enough knowledge to apply this, if needed. Or just to plan ahead so that your future projects don't preclude taking these steps when needed.
Presentation Slides: Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (127.9MB)
Speaker: Peter C. Verhage
NU.nl is a well known news website in its homeland, The Netherlands, and is actively expanding into other countries. On an average day NU.nl will serve up 7 million page views; peak traffic days are more than triple that number. In short, it is one of the top 10 Dutch web sites in terms of traffic. Previously, on our corporate blog, Erik Snoeijs discussed the technologies deployed while building out the back-end of NU.nl in is article “NU.nl; the back end”. In this article we want to look at the front end that we architected for NU.nl, and how we designed the system to handle both regular traffic and peaks.
Peter also wrote about this project in this article on techportal.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (120.3MB)
Speaker: Sebastian Bergmann
In this presentation we introduce a new language construct to demonstrate how one might go about modifying the PHP interpreter. The internals of which follow a pattern common to many language implementations, with lexical analysis, parsing, code generation, and execution phases.
By the end of the presentation, it is hoped the audience will see that contributing to the PHP language core is not necessarily as difficult as it might seem.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (54.6MB)
Speaker: Michael Wittke
Michael Wittke received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering and the M.Sc. degree in computer science from the Technical University of Brunswick, Brunswick, Germany, in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Institute of Systems Engineering at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany. While studying computer science, he spent a semester at the Polytecnica de Valencia, Spain, where he specialized in computer architecture. His research interests lie in mobile Internet devices with built-in CMOS sensors that are able to form ad-hoc smart camera networks.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (93.4MB)
Speaker: Rob Allen
More, now than ever, websites need fast response times and be able to cope under load. As web pages contain more and more dynamically generated content, the challenge is on for PHP developers to develop efficient caching solutions. This presentation will focus on using caching techniques that can be used in a PHP project to increase the performance of a web site. We will look at a variety of caching techniques, showing practical implementations and before and after statistics. We will also cover the cache storage options available and when you might use one over another. We will also address how to get browsers to cache content for us using HTTP headers.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (117.8MB)
Speaker: Jan Lehnardt
Learn how to use CouchDB replication for load-balancing, fault tolerance, offline work and backup. We are showing how to set up each and what you need to look out for.
Finally, this talk is sprinkled with neat tricks and best practices for deploying CouchDB. Which load balancers are people using, how to make the best use of caching, etc.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (60.8MB)
Speaker: Maarten Balliauw & Kevin Dockx
This session covers the basics of Microsoft Silverlight and demonstrates how PHP developers can benefit from developing rich client-side components that run in the web browser using Silverlight and PHP.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (115.2MB)
Speaker: Jonathan Lawrence
In today's dynamic Web environment, developers want to build Web applications quickly, re-use and combine them simply, and adopt an agile approach to development.
IBM's WebSphere sMash (aka Project Zero) is a complete platform for developing, assembling and executing agile Web 2.0 applications. In this talk I'll demonstrate how PHP developers can use WebSphere sMash, with its focus on speed, simplicity and agility, to develop and deploy leading edge Web 2.0 applications.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (87.3MB)
Speaker: David Soria Parra
DTrace is the Swiss army knife to analyze the behavior of applications and enabling you to gather detailed information from the bottom of your application stack up to the top. DTrace is used by system administrators and developers, on Solaris, Mac OSX and FreeBSD, to do in-depth analysis of an application, to find and reduce performance bottlenecks and problems in productive system.
The talk will give an introduction how to use DTrace's capabilities in web development, reflect the current state of DTrace support in PHP and show examples how to trace PHP script in production.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (68.5MB)
Speaker: Derick Rethans
The D-BUS Inter Process Communication mechanism is the basis for many system-related functionality on Linux-based systems. Both GNOME, KDE, as well as the Open Moko Linux computing platform use it extensively for everything related to talking to services and hardware. Skype, as well as other applications, provide D-BUS APIs as well.
In this presentation I will be presenting a PHP/D-BUS integration to allow PHP to talk to D-BUS aware applications. I will demonstrate controlling Skype from PHP, as well as the implementation of PHP-GTK based applications on the OpenMoko to talk to, and use the different hardware services it offers, such as GSM and GPS.
This talk should show a few things that people don't really associate PHP with, and thus provide some insight that PHP's strength is not only on the Web.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (88.0MB)
Speaker: Christian Wenz
Making a web site accessible may require extra effort, but also increases the target audience. The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative released their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 specification in May 1999, and version 2.0 followed almost ten years later. This session will give you a good overview of the concepts, principles and guidelines of the specifications and provides you with a basic understanding of how to create accessible web content.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (82.5MB)
Speaker: Stefan Esser
The idea of that talk is to go through the classes of vulnerabilities or security problems that you usually need to take care of yourself and look at the Zend Framework to check what internal protection ZF offers and how they are used and what problems you still need to solve on your own.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (82.6MB)
