Dutch PhP

 Conference 10 - 12 June 2010 Amsterdam

I won a ticket to the Dutch PhP conference from the PhP Women forum. This was my first time at a coding language conference. I've been to a few linux and open source conferences, as well as meteorological conferences (when I was working).  My first impression of the PhP talks is that they had a lot of text. It's the first conference where I ever saw code up on a screen.

I attended 10 out of 30 talks, plus the two keynotes. Some presented text with nice photograph backgrounds.  Those with diagrams included Geographical PhP, Cairo and web services for mobile devices (a device which measured temperature and was able to upload the results to the web).

Speakers interacted very well with the audiences. Almost all used audience answers in their discussion. 

Talks which I attended, along with my scribbled notes which consisted mostly of words and acronyms that I needed to look up and web sites to visit:

• Derick Rethans talk, reusable software: singleton, multiple inheritance, traits, refactoring, Active Record, joelonsoftware.
• Rob Allen Zend Forms: akrabat.com
• Michael MacLean: Cairo. Demonstrations of code output, not cheesy at all. very instructive and clear about what is being done. Look up what PECL means.
• Harrie Verveer: Database version control, "Never modify patch files once  under version control", sql,phing,dbdeploy.com, liquibase (java), xml(good documentation), zend akrabat.,github.com,doctrine, layer between app and db, yaml,update-to_version
• Melanie R. Lewis: STBs, midp,gprs,3g, xml parsers, binary data MIME/ASCII, Servers: XML-RPC, SOAP,JSON-RPC,RESI (mechanism not protocol?), iOS, Android, Restful services, ping API, security, does not use session, challenge response, temperature data uploaded to web server, binary data.
• Thorsten Rinne, Agile PhP Software development.Concept of paired programmers. I am myself a solitary programmer and would find it odd to have someone next to me checking my work and vice versa.
• Sebastion Schuermann: Web services, php and nodes.js.
• Marcus Deglos: PhP and Geolocation. Nice talk,lots of illustrative pictures. Coming from satellite data analysis background, I was familiar with the topic.
• Ian Barber: Site Searching, Swish-e, Apache Lucene, Solr, Xapian.
• Sebastion Bergmann, reviewing PhP code. Interesting debugging techniques by studying text statistics of code. Over the shoulder code checking. 

Introduction

I have begun studying PhP programming many times. My first attempt ended because PhP is a server side program, which means one needs to upload the code to a server in order to visualize it in a browser. My server at the time was way to slow to use for testing. So, I decided to install Apache on my linux box.  I have installed and uninstalled Apache many times, even on Windows XP.  But it eventually worked and I was even able to display some PhP, something akin to calling the operator for date and time.


date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Amsterdam');
echo '

Today is ',date('l'),', The current time is ',date('H

:i ') ;
'.
' ;
?>

Which produces: Today is Tuesday, The current time is 15:21

A lot of the references about php are associated with the  mysql database. PhPmyAdmin is the most common, and involves a lot of security features which I found very annoying because I did not understand them. But this all had to do with the database and not php.

Anyway, I plan to pursue my php learning a bit more vigorously since I just returned from the Dutch PhP Conference last weekend. I put my observations and notes in a separate entry.