[Phpwm] Short Review of PHPCon UK 2006

[Rob Allen]

Iain asked, so here it is! It was a one day event for £50 on the early
bird thing and £75 if you ordered later. I stayed at a hotel around the
corner for £35 inc breakfast. I drove down and parked at Perivale tube
station and used the Underground from there. Total cost for the entire
trip was about £130 including petrol, travelcards, and beer bought
during the social the night before!


The pre-conference social was held at the pub that the PHP London group
use for their monthly meets. I can see why they use it as it has a
basement room that seats 30 or so. More importantly, it isn't a
"formulaic" pub and it served lager from the brewery! Only £1.97 a pint
too. Around 20 people turned up for the social I suppose and I quite
enjoyed it, even though we had the obligatory argument about templating
systems. (That reminds me I must look up the memory usage stats of Smarty.)


The conference itself consisted of 5 talks:
* ezComponents by Derick Rethans
* Pico/Dependency Injection by Pawel Kozlowski
* The Template Path by Matt Zandstra
* PHP Hardening and Security by Christopher Kunz
* AJAX at localhost by Harry Fuecks

One thing that all the talks had in common was that they all overran!
Every speaker seemed very optimistic on what they could cover in the
time available.


ezComponents by Dereck Rethans
------------------------------
Derick gave an overview of the ez Components. These are a set of
components that do useful stuff like DB access, email, caching etc. They
are not a framework. ez are creating these components as a set of
foundations for their next major ezPublish version. They are PHP 5.1+
compatible because its faster than 5.0.x and PDO is better in it. He
also indicated that they are aiming for 2 year API stability. All
components are unit tested and BSD licensed.

He then went through each component showing how it's used. This was
where the timing went out the window and to be honest was probably not
needed. Concentrating on two or three components and going into more
detail might have been more useful. Highlights for me were the console
classes for helping to write command line scripts and the mail class.
There was also some database classes, but I need to look at them myself
to be able to form an opinion. The persistant object class required a
configuration file, so definitely need to see that before commenting on
how useful the ezcDB classes are.


Pico/Dependency Injection by Pawel Kozlowski
--------------------------------------------
Dependency Injection is software pattern intended to lower the coupling
between classes. Pico is a small library to make doing it easier. It was
originally written in Java, but has been officially ported to many
different languages. Pavel wrote the PHP port of Pico and certainly knew
what he was talking about. Unfortunately, there were microphone problems
during his talk and I'm not sure how many people actually heard him! I
found it fascinating, especially as it is conceptually very simple and
should make class testing and reuse easier. I'm not enough of an "object
bigot" yet to know exactly why DI is much better than other options, so
will need to play with some code to work it out.


The Template Path by Matt Zandstra
----------------------------------
For me, Matt's talk was the most disjointed and also the most
unexpected. He was talking about how to pick the correct template to
display for a given page based on a variety of parameters like brand,
language or site section. Essentially, Yahoo! have built a system that
allows their designers to take a base set of templates and "override"
the generic set of templates for the specific brand or page. Although he
didn't say so, the advantage to his approach was that it was an
implementation of the "Don't Repeat Yourself" principle for templating.

This is an area that my company struggles with. The actual PHP code is
getting better and better in terms of avoidance of "copy/paste-itis",
but we haven't got a clue for templates yet. I didn't see any specific
use for Matt's actual implementation as it was very specific to the
Yahoo's development methods and situation. The ideas however could be
translated though and I can see that over the next year I might
implement something that achieves the same ends.


PHP Hardening and Security by Christopher Kunz
----------------------------------------------
Chris started his talk by going over the main security issues that
affected the core PHP code and PEAR last year. This was interesting as
it highlighted to me how obvious security bugs are when you have the
benefit of hindsight! He then moved on to talk about the Hardening Patch
for PHP from the Hardened-PHP project. This is an interesting patch as
it prevents some classes of security bugs at the PHP level. Chris did
point out that not all the features are appropriate for every
installation of PHP which is why it couldn't be in the mainline PHP
code. There is also a performance hit...

This talk was a mixed bag for me personally, in that I found the
discussion of the security issues in PHP much more interesting than the
parts about the Hardening patch.


AJAX at localhost by Harry Fuecks
------------------------------
Harry's talk was about the issues in AJAX related to the network, that
no one talks about. I don't know a lot about AJAX other than what I've
seen on websites like Flickr. He talked mainly about latency and sync
issues and gave to great demos. Harry posted links to the demos on his
blog at http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/02/10/ajaxlocalhost/. He
also talked about error checking with the JS XMLHttpRequest object.
Basically you have to do all your own error stuff that you can take for
granted with standard http requests.

I can see a lot of benefit with AJAX, but when (if?!) I ever get around
to using it, I'll be much more clued up for the problems that might
occur and will certainly be providing non-AJAX alternatives to get the
same job done!


That sums up my experience of the conference. I haven't talked about the
conversations I had during the breaks, but they were equally useful and
I met some very nice and knowledgeable people and learnt stuff that I
never expected.

-- 
Rob...