Last week I attended this year's fall edition of the
International PHP Conference in Mainz, Germany. Aside from speaking there, I attended quite a few sessions, and met up with a lot of people from the community. I had a great time, and definitely learned quite some interesting stuff.
I made a schedule up-front and even though usually I hardly follow such a schedule, at this conference I actually did for the most part. The reason I usually don't follow the schedule is because I want to meet people and tight conference schedule's make that impossible. The International PHP Conference luckily offers enough and long enough breaks to meet up with people and talk to them.
The location was excellent, as were the food and drinks. Wireless Internet was flaky at times but still quite good. The overall atmosphere with all the people there was very good. And one of the best things was the
Mayflower stand, who were serving very decent coffee and espresso!
Out of all the sessions I attended I want to highlight a few that were excellent and gave some interesting information:
PHP Design Patterns Part 2: Enterprise Patterns
Stefan Priebsch (who was also a speaker at Ibuildings' Dutch PHP Conference this year) did a two-part series on Design Patterns in PHP. The first part went into the basic design patterns, but the second part went into the more Enterprise-level patterns. Stefan not just covered patterns like MVC, FrontController and RequestHelper, but also went into specific implementations in the currently popular enterprise PHP frameworks.
PHP QA: PHP Test Coverage
Zoe Slattery gave an interesting presentation on the writing of tests for PHP itself. She not just went into how to write the tests, but also why, and why people should contribute to PHP by writing tests. Her point came across very clearly in the audience when she said:
"You require a code coverage of 65% in your project, but you're happy to use PHP which only has 60% test coverage?"
Even though code coverage for PHP is still low, I am happy we contributed to it with the
PHP TestFest event, and we will surely join the TestFest initiative again next year.
Document based databases: CouchDB
The presentation of Kore Nordmann and Jan Lehnardt was very early in the morning on thursday, nevertheless the topic seemed to appeal to a group of about 40-50 people. And surely, it was worth getting up early. Jan and Kore gave a very energetic and interesting presentation about
CouchDB, a database that does things differently. Instead of being a relational database with a lot of tables, it saves full documents instead. It exposes its functionality in a very SOA-compatible way using a REST interface.
All in all, the International PHP Conference was a great event, where aside from the session it was also great to meet a lot of people from the community.
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