PHPBenelux Conference January 2010

Friday January 29th

Pre-conference social

Saturday January 30th

Main conference. Please note that the timings indicated below are not final yet.

The language for the talks is English

Derick Rethans – The PHP Universe

This keynote introduces PHP’s eco-system in an exciting and novel way. By comparing everything in the PHP world to things closer near home, I will explain the ins and outs on how PHP’s development and surrounding support groups work.

Fabien Potencier – Dependency Injection in PHP 5.2 and 5.3

Developers are getting more professional every day by using web design patterns to solve common problems. This session will introduce one of the less-known design patterns in the PHP world, but also one that can greatly improve the decoupling and the testability of your code: Dependency Injection. I will demonstrate how to use Dependency Injection in your projects, and I will take advantage of the PHP 5.3 new features to create a fully-featured DI container live.

Rowan Merewood – Living with Legacy Code

Legacy code is a burden that few developers are lucky enough to avoid in their professional lives. It can take a variety of forms from third-party software from extinct companies, an undocumented core library from an ex-colleague or just code your wrote yourself a year ago trying to meet a deadline at four in the morning. However, like a virus it can infect your current projects turning that pristine design into a mess of hacks and compromises. We’ll take a look at some of the issues that can be introduced and then the strategies that can be used to replace, isolate or integrate the legacy code.

David Zuelke – The State of SOAP in PHP

PHP has been shipping with ext/soap ever since version 5.0, and the extension has come a long way since in terms of features and compatibility. This talk will give a brief introduction to what SOAP is and how it works, and then show how to create SOAP clients and servers in PHP. We’ll also examine some of the lesser known features of the extension such as type maps or SOAP header handling and conclude with a comparison of SOAP to the alternative REST approach which everyone is talking about nowadays.

Paul Borgermans – Get the most out of Solr search with PHP

After a thorough overview of the main features and benefits of Apache Solr (an open source search server), the architecture of Solr and strategies to adopt it for your PHP application and data model will be presented. The main lessons learned around dealing with a mix of structured and non-structured content, multilingual aspects, tuning and the various state-of-the-art features of Solr will be shared as well

Juliette Reinders Folmer – Reg-Ex Fu

Regular expression, you either hate them or you love them, but do you really know how to harness their power ?
Based on the PCRE implementation, this talk will show you how to get the most out of your /^regex(es)?$/, how switches affect your results, how to be less greedy and let’s not forget: when *not* to use regex.

Patrick Allaert/Davide Mendolia – PHP applications/environments monitoring: APM & Pinba

Today, PHP is everywhere in the industry, from small businesses to biggest corporations, the need of monitoring exists at PHP application level as well as on the platform they are built on.
In parallel, the need of scalability and fault tolerance are increasing, especially in cloud computing environments. The monitoring of the entire infrastructure becomes therefore critical. To this end, Free and Open Source Software exist and will be presented during this session.

• Alternative PHP Monitor (APM): Nonintrusive PHP extension enabling the capture of miscellaneous events as errors and slow executions.
• Pinba: PHP extension and statistics server for collecting real time performance data.

Maarten Balliauw – Just another WordPress weblog, but more cloudy

While working together with Microsoft on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, we found that we needed an popular example application hostend on Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Wordpress was an obvious choice, but not an obvious task. Learn more about Windows Azure, the PHP SDK that we developed, SQL Azure and about the problems we faced porting an existing PHP application to Windows Azure.

Kore Nordmann – PHPillow & CouchDB & PHP

Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API, and PHPillow is a wrapper to easily access CouchDB from PHP. This talk will quickly introduce CouchDB and the PHPillow API and then show you how the concepts of CouchDB and PHPillow can contribute to your application design and development.

Lorna Mitchell – Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World

The Joel Test is a series of 12 steps which, according to software guru Joel Spolsky, every team should follow in order to create succcessful code. The steps include things like using source control, having a bug database and using the best tools. This session takes a look at how relevant his steps are to PHP development today, and the tools available to help us achieve his recommendations. We’ll look at the packages available for the steps where software can help and discuss ways to implement process and political changes to facilitate some others – finally we’ll talk about which don’t apply and invent some steps to replace them.

Ivo Jansch – PHP and the Cloud

This session will discuss how PHP applications can benefit from Cloud Computing, and how to write applications in such a way that they are ‘ready for the cloud’. It will demonstrate how to use some of the more popular cloud services, but more importantly, how to create horizontally scalable applications that benefit from running on a Cloud.

Eric Ritchie – Generating dynamic PDFs using Zend Framework and JavaBridge

Existing methods of PDF generation can be cumbersome and/or time consuming. However, this does not need to be the case. With the help of Zend Framework and Zend Java Bridge this presentation will demonstrate how to use simple templating to generate PDF documents as easily as you would produce HTML.

Cal Evans – Open Teams

Pop Quiz: How many of your developers wake up in the morning excited to work on your project? If the answer is not “all of them”, you probably need to look at how open source projects attract developers and motivate them to write code for free. More information on this talk.