Posts by: Cal Evans

• Code and Release Management May 25, 2010

  Speaker: Eli White

  Programmers seem to have a fairly good grasp on 'how to write code', but not always what to do with it once it's been written. This talk with delve into details about how to manage your codebase, and how to manage releases (often intertwined). It will cover topics of coding standards and focus heavily on how you choose to use versioning tools to handle your development and release processes. It will have a distinct Subversion(SVN) flavor to the talk, but the concepts will not be specific to SVN.

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• State & Ajax - How to Maintain Browser and Application State in an Asynchronous World May 11, 2010

  Speaker: Paul Reinheimer
  This talk will examine the two greatest problems in Ajax development (except for that pesky browser issue): Exactly what that “Asynchronous” word means, what problems it creates, and how they can be effectively managed, next the YUI Browser History object will be examined, finally handing control of Ajax applications back to the user via their familiar back button.

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• Everything you always wanted to know about UTF-8 (but never dared to ask) April 27, 2010

  Speaker: Juliette Reinders Folmer

  With PHP6 in the works and said to be fully UTF-8 compliant, the interest in the community in using UTF-8 has grown. On top of that, with PHP entering the – often multilingual – enterprise web playing field, the benefits UTF-8 can bring are getting more attention.

  Unfortunately most developers at one point or another run into problems implementing UTF-8.

  In this talk I will cover UTF-8 from the basic linguistics, through client-side aspects to all the steps you need to take to tackle the most common (and some more obscure) issues when using UTF-8 in a database driven PHP application.

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• Building a platform from open source at Yahoo! April 13, 2010

  Speaker: Dustin Whittle

  Join us for a case study on using open source tools to build a platform for enterprise web applications. Find out what worked and what didn't when building scalable web applications with open source tools (apache, php/apc, mysql, memcache, symfony, yui). Learn how you can tools Yahoo! offers for developers and how your team can leverage Yahoo's Open Stack for your next web project. We will examine the components that make up Yahoo!'s open stack: developer tools (YUI), data APIs (YQL), and the application platform (YAP).

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• All the Little Pieces: Distributed systems with PHP March 30, 2010

  Speaker: Andrei Zmievski

  Quick, what do memcache, MogileFS, and Gearman have in common? They are scalable, distributed technologies, and they can also interface with PHP, your ubiquitous Web development language. Digg uses all 3 (and a few more) in its quest for social news domination, and this session will share much of what we’ve learned about them and how they are best utilized with PHP.

  Slides for this talk can be found here.

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• 8 Reasons Every PHP Developer Should Love JavaScript March 12, 2010

  Speaker: Boy Baukema

  Like PHP, JavaScript is easy to learn but hard to master.

  In this talk these and more comparisons will be drawn between the two languages. The main weaknesses and strengths of JavaScript will be discussed and compared to PHP.

  Examples will be given of closures and lambda functions in JavaScript and they will be compared to the implementation of these same features in the upcoming PHP 5.3. And through comparison the speaker will demonstrate that the two languages are quite similar.

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• Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications March 2, 2010

  Speaker: Eli White

  A constant pariah on web applications is scaling once you become popular. It's not always an easy task (ok, never). This talk will go into depth on a few of the most common techniques for making your website scalable. So that you can leave with enough knowledge to apply this, if needed. Or just to plan ahead so that your future projects don't preclude taking these steps when needed.

  Presentation Slides: Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications

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• Surviving a Plane Crash February 16, 2010

  Speaker: Peter C. Verhage

  NU.nl is a well known news website in its homeland, The Netherlands, and is actively expanding into other countries. On an average day NU.nl will serve up 7 million page views; peak traffic days are more than triple that number. In short, it is one of the top 10 Dutch web sites in terms of traffic. Previously, on our corporate blog, Erik Snoeijs discussed the technologies deployed while building out the back-end of NU.nl in is article “NU.nl; the back end”. In this article we want to look at the front end that we architected for NU.nl, and how we designed the system to handle both regular traffic and peaks.

  Peter also wrote about this project in this article on techportal.

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• PHP Compiler Internals February 2, 2010

  Speaker: Sebastian Bergmann

  In this presentation we introduce a new language construct to demonstrate how one might go about modifying the PHP interpreter. The internals of which follow a pattern common to many language implementations, with lexical analysis, parsing, code generation, and execution phases.

  By the end of the presentation, it is hoped the audience will see that contributing to the PHP language core is not necessarily as difficult as it might seem.

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• Running PHP on Embedded Devices February 2, 2010

  Speaker: Michael Wittke

  Michael Wittke received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering and the M.Sc. degree in computer science from the Technical University of Brunswick, Brunswick, Germany, in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Institute of Systems Engineering at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany. While studying computer science, he spent a semester at the Polytecnica de Valencia, Spain, where he specialized in computer architecture. His research interests lie in mobile Internet devices with built-in CMOS sensors that are able to form ad-hoc smart camera networks.

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• Caching for performance January 20, 2010

  Speaker: Rob Allen

  More, now than ever, websites need fast response times and be able to cope under load. As web pages contain more and more dynamically generated content, the challenge is on for PHP developers to develop efficient caching solutions. This presentation will focus on using caching techniques that can be used in a PHP project to increase the performance of a web site. We will look at a variety of caching techniques, showing practical implementations and before and after statistics. We will also cover the cache storage options available and when you might use one over another. We will also address how to get browsers to cache content for us using HTTP headers.

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• Advanced CouchDB January 5, 2010

  Speaker: Jan Lehnardt
  Learn how to use CouchDB replication for load-balancing, fault tolerance, offline work and backup. We are showing how to set up each and what you need to look out for.

  Finally, this talk is sprinkled with neat tricks and best practices for deploying CouchDB. Which load balancers are people using, how to make the best use of caching, etc.

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• Introduction to Silverlight for PHP developers December 21, 2009

  Speaker: Maarten Balliauw & Kevin Dockx

  This session covers the basics of Microsoft Silverlight and demonstrates how PHP developers can benefit from developing rich client-side components that run in the web browser using Silverlight and PHP.

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• An Introduction to IBM WebSphere sMash for PHP Programmers December 9, 2009

  Speaker: Jonathan Lawrence

  In today's dynamic Web environment, developers want to build Web applications quickly, re-use and combine them simply, and adopt an agile approach to development.

  IBM's WebSphere sMash (aka Project Zero) is a complete platform for developing, assembling and executing agile Web 2.0 applications. In this talk I'll demonstrate how PHP developers can use WebSphere sMash, with its focus on speed, simplicity and agility, to develop and deploy leading edge Web 2.0 applications.

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• Analysing PHP web applications with dtrace November 24, 2009

  Speaker: David Soria Parra

  DTrace is the Swiss army knife to analyze the behavior of applications and enabling you to gather detailed information from the bottom of your application stack up to the top. DTrace is used by system administrators and developers, on Solaris, Mac OSX and FreeBSD, to do in-depth analysis of an application, to find and reduce performance bottlenecks and problems in productive system.

  The talk will give an introduction how to use DTrace's capabilities in web development, reflect the current state of DTrace support in PHP and show examples how to trace PHP script in production.

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• PHP on the D-BUS November 10, 2009

  Speaker: Derick Rethans

  The D-BUS Inter Process Communication mechanism is the basis for many system-related functionality on Linux-based systems. Both GNOME, KDE, as well as the Open Moko Linux computing platform use it extensively for everything related to talking to services and hardware. Skype, as well as other applications, provide D-BUS APIs as well.

  In this presentation I will be presenting a PHP/D-BUS integration to allow PHP to talk to D-BUS aware applications. I will demonstrate controlling Skype from PHP, as well as the implementation of PHP-GTK based applications on the OpenMoko to talk to, and use the different hardware services it offers, such as GSM and GPS.

  This talk should show a few things that people don't really associate PHP with, and thus provide some insight that PHP's strength is not only on the Web.

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• Web Accessibility - A Primer October 27, 2009

  Speaker: Christian Wenz

  Making a web site accessible may require extra effort, but also increases the target audience. The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative released their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 specification in May 1999, and version 2.0 followed almost ten years later. This session will give you a good overview of the concepts, principles and guidelines of the specifications and provides you with a basic understanding of how to create accessible web content.

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• Secure Programming with the Zend Framework October 13, 2009

  Speaker: Stefan Esser

  The idea of that talk is to go through the classes of vulnerabilities or security problems that you usually need to take care of yourself and look at the Zend Framework to check what internal protection ZF offers and how they are used and what problems you still need to solve on your own.

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• Contribute! September 29, 2009

  Speaker: Matthew Weier O'Phinney

  Working in isolation is easy. Most developers have long lists of tasks that never get shorter, and it's trivially easy to put on blinders as you slog through the list.

  Good developers realize that the only way to get through the list is to start using the work of others: PEAR, Zend Framework, ezComponents, phpClasses.org. Once you do, though, the responsible thing to do is contribute back. This can take the form of documentation, patches, feature implementation, and more.

  In this session, we'll look at the various ways you can contribute to open source projects, and some common tools you can use to do so.

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• Grokking the REST Architecture September 15, 2009

  Speaker: Ben Ramsey

  REST has become the hip, new buzzword of Web 2.0. But what makes an application RESTful? Pretty URLs? XML over HTTP? Any service that's not SOAP? In all the hype, the definition of REST has become clouded and diluted.

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• The Easy Problems Are The Hard Problems September 1, 2009

  Speaker: Paul Reinheimer

  Consider "Easy" problems in web applications, like login forms. On the surface, terribly simple, slap some escaping functions on a query and you're done! Well, not quite, what about brute force login attempts? Locking accounts? Captachas!

  This talk will examine a few of those easy problems, how hard they really are, and present specific solutions and methodologies.

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• DPC Radio is now live! (come hear what you missed) August 21, 2009

  PHP now has another podcast to help developers new and old stay on top of their game, DPC Radio. Starting with the opening keynote from DPC09, "PHP: People, Code, Ideas" presented by Andrei Zmievski, we will release one episode every other week.

  Several people have asked me, aren't you devaluing your conference by releasing the sessions in this way? To each of them I've explained that I don't think we are. The sessions are the meat of any conference and we've got some good ones to share with you. However, sitting in a room watching slides drift by is not the true value in a conference. The real value in attending a conference is the people you talk to. Whether it's a core developer or just someone who you spoke to in the hall that is facing a similar problem as you. These conversations lead to solutions, friendships and life long networks.

  So I encourage you to visit the DPC Radio page here on techPortal. Subscribe to the feed in your favorite feed reader. Download each episode to your MP3 player and listen to it. Squeeze it for every drop of knowledge you can get out of it then go to work and apply this new found knowledge. Know in the back of your head though, that there is so much more that you are missing each time you pass on attending the Dutch PHP Conference. There is a world of knowledge just waiting for you to become a part of it. Enjoy the podcast, but join us next year at DPC10. You won't be sorry you did.

  =C=

  p.s. For more information on how to get the most out of a conference, check out these two blog posts:

  5 Ways to Make Friends at a Technical Conference
  The Secret to Getting the Most out of Any Conference is in the Hallway

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• PHP: People, Code, Ideas August 17, 2009

  Speaker: Andrei Zmievski

  This is the opening keynote for the Dutch PHP Conference, 2009.

  PHP has grown beyond the point of having to prove itself to the world at large. How has it gotten here, where does it stand, and what is in its future? We'll talk about PHP 6 with its Unicode and i18n support, some exciting innovations in the language, what will carry PHP past 2.0 bubble, and the people behind PHP.

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• Migrating to PHP 5.3 June 30, 2009

  As PHP developers download and start testing the biggest change to the language in 7 years, many are wondering not about Santa’s bag full of new toys for them to use in building tomorrow’s applications but about the changes in the language that will affect yesterday’s applications.

  The good news is that if you’ve been keeping your applications current with the language and best practices, there are very few things that could affect you. The bad news is that the farther away from the current version of the language you get, the harder it is going to be to port your code. For developers coding against the 5.2 branch, there are a few edge case situations of which, you need to be aware.

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• DPC09 Wrap Up June 16, 2009

  It is one of the perks of my job that I get to attend several PHP conferences every year. None of them are more fun - and exhausting - for me than the Dutch PHP Conference. This year’s DPC can be summed up in the most used word in the twitter feed last week, “awesome”. From the beginning of the tutorials on Thursday to the final good byes on Saturday, you could feel the excitement in the air as developers from across Europe and around the world gathered to share ideas at the fastest growing PHP conference in the world.

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