Review PHP Benelux 2011

This was the first PHP conference I attended, so I didn't really know what to expect. After two days of interesting talks I can say I liked it a lot and I'm definitely looking forward visiting other conferences like these.

I've made a small overview of some talks I attended (and which I find worth mentioning)

Opening Keynote: 27 Ways To Be A Better Developer

by Ivo Jansch and Lorna Mitchell

Some of these 27 points where very inspiring and made me realize that you should sometimes look at things quite differently. Have a look for yourself by watching the slideshow, which can be found  here.

 

Stress-free deployment

by Rob Allen

In this talk Rob talked about how you can set up an environment for publishing websites to a server and how to maintain them. The difficult part is when you have to publish websites to different kind of servers. He explained how you can use Phing to simplify synchronizing your local branch with your server branch and how to deal with mistakes if encountered (eg. pushing the wrong branch to the server). Although in real life I'm not (yet) confronted with different server set-ups, it was really informative and made me decide having a look at Phing any time soon. A slideshow you can find here.

 

Designing HTTP Interfaces and RESTful Web Services

by David Zülke 

David Zülke is an amazing speaker. This is mostly because of the following reasons: his explanations about complex subjects are very understandable and he combines this with the right amount of (German) humor. Although RESTful services are not completely new to me, it was interesting to learn how you should design them to make them as future proof as possible. Ironically, some examples of how things should not be done, originated from some mayor players on the Internet (eg. Twitter). As I find generality and backwards compatibility very important, I definitely follow Davids approach. Have a look at his presentation here.

 

Charsets & Encoding

by Kore Nordmann

I was looking forward attending this talk, as being confronted with charsets and encoding issues is quite a common thing. Although there were some interesting new things I found out (eg. the iconv() function, difference in meaning of charsets and encoding), I missed some more real life examples. The one thing to remember is to work with UTF-8 as much as you can (if you don't already do so).

In case you are struggling with charsets and encoding, you definitely should take a look at Kore's website. Most common issues are well explained and documented. The slideshow of his presentation can be found here.

 

Zend Framework 2.0

by Rob Allen

 

This was another talk from Rob Allen, who is the author of "Zend Framework in Action" and a contributor to the Zend Framework itself. After a small outline of the Zend Framework history the problems with ZF 1.0 were analyzed. It was nice to see that there were some of them I did encounter myself, so let's hope these problems will no longer exist in ZF 2.0.

Most important were, off course, the key changes of ZF 2.0. ZF 2.0 will use Namespaces (so it requires PHP 5.3), will have a different approach to the View, will do better on Internationalization and will improve its performance.

However, although these new features and changes look very interesting to use, we will have to wait for quite some time. During the presentation it became clear that ZF 2.0 is still in an early stage, so my guess is that we might see a final version at the end of this year, but not any time sooner. The presentation can be found here.

 

Conclusion

 

The organization and talks were great, although it's a pity it isn't possible to attend all talks during the conference. Some talks I liked to attend, but because of the schedule this wasn't possible... 

A big thanks to the crew and sponsors!