Zend PHP conference

Filed under: Web Tech
3 Comments

I'm spending much of this week attending the PHP conference in San José this week. (Partly 'cause Zend is releasing a PHP client library for GData, partly just 'cause I'd like to learn more about PHP.)

Went to two tutorial sessions yesterday. I missed the first few minutes of the first one, on PHP "best practices," which may partly explain why my expectations were so out of line with the actual content. It seemed to me to be aimed at a very inexperienced audience--for example, it covered things like the fact that you can automatically generate API documentation based on comments in code, an idea familiar to anyone who knows about tools like Doxygen or Javadoc. And the talk provided detailed recommendations on exactly which modes of communication (email, IM, VOIP, face-to-face discussion) should be used for any given kind of discussion among collaborators. It also included (and answered) the questions "What is source control? What problem does it solve?"

But it did include some material I wasn't already familiar with, such as some info about the PHP 5 unit-testing framework, and a pointer to the PHPUnit Pocket Guide. Which got me thinking about reworking my various PHP projects using PHP 5's object-oriented approach (so I'm reading the Classes and Objects chapter of the PHP docs), and thinking it might finally be time for me to learn to write unit tests.

I should also note that I overheard two people talking about that session over lunch, and they both seemed to have found it very valuable.

The second session I attended was more in line with what I was looking for: a fairly detailed overview of how to handle security issues in PHP, by Chris Shiflett, author of Essential PHP Security. Good stuff.

Note to self: spend some time poking through PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository; it looks like it has a lot of useful packages that may let me avoid reinventing various wheels.

3 Responses to “Zend PHP conference”

  1. Cheryl

    Thanks for the link to the PHP security book. I’ve been looking for something like that for ages.

    reply

  2. Paul Jessup

    Oh! I love PHP. It’s what I use for my dayjob constantly. And of course, the GrendelSong website is completely PHP driven. Good stuff.

    I shall be at the conference next year, but not this one.

    reply

  3. Jed

    For those who don’t know what Paul’s referring to: GrendelSong is a biannual fantasy semiprozine (printed on paper, not online). The premier issue featured work by Samantha Henderson, Forrest Aguirre, E. Sedia, Eugie Foster, Stephanie Burgis, and Jay Lake, among others.

    Note to Paul: I see that the links at the top of the GrendelSong page use code that looks like this (for example):

    href=”#” onClick=”parent.location=’http://pauljessup.kapo.ws’;”

    I recommend changing that to:

    href=”http://pauljessup.kapo.ws”

    (and removing the onClick) — the onMouseOver and onMouseOut will still work, and it’ll result in much cleaner browser behavior.

    reply

Join the Conversation