PHPBenelux Conference January 2010

This conference ends with the talk ‘Open Teams’ (http://joind.in/1251) by Cal Evans (@CalEvans). In this presentation he talks about how the different teams of open source developers are being motivated and how useful it is for us to have this motivation as a developer for a private company. His talk was very amusing and in my feeling made everybody go to the open bar (sponsored by ibuildings) with a big smile.

So this is it… And I’m sure I’m not the only one saying that this was a great conference. I am glad that I was being able to do this live reporting and hopefully gave some good information to the people who weren’t able to make it to the conference . Now up to the open bar!

Unfortunately Eric Ritchie wasn’t able to make it to the conference because of the bad wheaterconditions but we were able to set up a connection so he was able to do his presentation anyway. His talk ‘Generating dynamic PDFs using Zend Framework and JavaBridge’ shows how Zend can help you generating a PDF in an easy way. It was quite technical so it is best that you look up his slides on Slideshare when they are available. Next up is the closing keynote on ‘Open Teams’ (http://joind.in/1251) by Cal Evans (@CalEvans).

After some more advanced technical talks it is time for some thinking about the team behind all those developments. In ‘Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World’ (http://joind.in/1249) Lorna Jane (@lornajane) eplains the 12 questions asked in the Joel Test and how we can interpret them in the PHP-environment. I’ve already seen the other talk by Ivo Jansch (@ijansch) about ‘PHP in the cloud’ on a previous meeting of PHPBenelux so I can say that in that talk he gives a great explenation about what the cloud actually is without all those fancy words. Be shure to also check his slides on Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/ijansch/php-and-the-cloud)

The next presentation I’m following is about ’Just another WordPress weblog, but more cloudy’ (http://joind.in/1247) by Maarten Balliauw (@maartenballieuw). In his talk he explains what Windows Azure actualy is and what you can do with it. Windows Azure is mostly used for .NET-language but Maarten gives some nice examples about using Windows Azure for your PHP applications hosted in the cloud.  The great thing about his presentation is that he shows how he could easy transform typical PHP & MySQL applications like WordPress to the Windows Azure platform and AzureSQL.  The presentation about ‘PHPillow & CouchDB & PHP’ (http://joind.in/1248) wich apparently had a complete full room.

As we all know monitoring is very important. The first part the presenation “PHP applications/environments monitoring: APM & Pinba” by Patrick Allaert and Davide Mendolia was about monitoring errors, long loading pages, … using APM (Alternative PHP Monitoring). The most important question asked here was about what the big difference was between  APM and standard error logging in PHP. The second part of the presentation was about Pinda, a PHP extension and statistics server for collecting real time performance data. Comments are welcome on joind.in (http://joind.in/1246). Enjoy your lunch everybody!

For the second presentation I choosed for ‘The State of SOAP in PHP’ (http://joind.in/1243) by David Zuelke @dzuelke). Het gave us some background information and some really nice tips and secrets about SOAP. It’s pretty hard to summary everything he said during his talk so take a look at his presenation on Slideshare.
The bad news is that I can’t be at 2 places at the same time so I need choose between 1 of the 2 tracks. So if anyone who followed “Get the most out of Solr search with PHP” by Paul Borgermans wants to contribute something feel free to do so on joind.in (http://joind.in/1244).

Just heard a great presentation by Rowan Merewood (@rowan_m) about legacy code. After this I think there are 2 things we should remember:

• Split it up: don’t try to do in all the same thing. Splitting it up in smaller parts will make you able to set goals and make sure you are not loosing a lot of time.
• Make it better, not the best: in some cases of rewriting legacy code its better to wrap better code around it.

One sidenote: The comics Rowan used in his presentation were really nice. Comic book guy I suppose?

You can post your feedback on this presentation on joind in (http://joind.in/1242)

So, first of all I should send many thanks to Nocus (the company who equiped me for doing this) and also the PHPBenelux team for giving me this chance. I’m really looking forward to doing this all day so (like I already mentioned in my tweet) I’ll be able do to something back to the people who made all this possible.

Ok, we have started the day with Derick’s opening keynote about PHP in the universe (http://joind.in/1240). I must say I was glad to hear about the story behind and around PHP. It was more non-technical wich in my opinion was really great to start the day with.

As last I would to mention that this is the first time I am doing live blogging so tips are always welcome. Now up for the talk about ‘Living with Legacy Code’ by Rowan Merewood.