My 7 Favorite Sessions from php|tek
by ejk
In May, I was lucky enough to attend the php|tek conference in Chicago. I met some really cool people, took a crash course on Zend Certification, and learned a lot about security, optimization, and new technologies. Here's a list of my five six SEVEN favorite sessions that I attended during the week (I had to add a couple from my original plan):
7. Opening Keynote : Rasmus Lerdorf "PHP on Hormones"
The conference was started off with a bang as the "father" of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, gave the opening keynote. Rasmus gave some of the history of PHP, which started as a pet project. He talked about how to get people to contribute to open source projects, how to tweak performance, security issues and APIs. He even used drupal as his example for testing performance (hint: turn on drupal caching!). Great talk and a great way to get the Oxytocin flowing!
6. Microsoft Tools and Platforms for PHP : Joe Stagner
Joe is a pretty cool guy and I thought he was brave just to stand up in front of the entire conference and represent Microsoft. He's on a couple of their development teams and made some points about how Windows is relevant in the PHP world, as a development platform (even if not as the server). He also talked quite a bit about Silverlight, Microsoft's new browser plug-in that promises cross-platform Media and Rich Internet Application delivery. You may even be able to write client-side Silverlight code in PHP someday.
5. PHP Data Objects (PDO) : Wez Furlong
Wez wrote the PDO library. I hadn't heard of it before the conference, but every PHP developer should know about it. It's an improved data access library that is faster, and more secure than the regular DB functions in PHP. It's so good that it's included in the standard install of PHP as of PHP 5.1. There's a ton of stuff that it can do, but rather than list them all here, I'll let you read about it in the official docs. The short answer is: use PDO for your database access.
4. The Truth About Sessions : Chris Shiflett
I was already familiar with Chris's work before the conference, having found his blog as a great resource for PHP security issues. It was great to see him in person, I attended both of his talks. This one gave a great overview and security details about Sessions-- why thy exist, what they do, how to use them and how to avoid session security problems. Being sloppy in your PHP not only can compromise your site's security, it can compromise the security of your users on other sites, as well.
3. Top 15 Ways to Kill MySQL Performance : Jay Pipes
Jay is a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable presence. He had tons of cool things to share about how MySQL works, and shared some tips that can make a huge difference in the performance of your PHP app. He talked about the difference between Heavy-read vs. Heavy-write environments, choosing the right data types for indexing, persistent connections (and why NOT to use them), writing SQL to optimize the query cache... and more. Making a 1 MS optimization in your PHP algorithm doesn't help when your DB is thrashing through bad queries at 5 seconds apiece.
2. Dude, Where's My Used Car? : Adam Trachtenberg
Did you know that over 50% of the listings on Ebay are generated through their API, no the standard web interface? Adam's title is "eBay Platform Evangelist." He showed off his mashup that allows you to find Ebay's used car listings in your area that meet your criteria. He talked about AJAX, the Dojo toolkit, and SOAP. Ebay has a very rich API that exposes a lot of functionality and this mashup is an inspiration to create similar projects.
1. PHP Features You Didn't Know Existed : Eli White III
Eli's presentation was the most fun of the whole conference. Eli is the "PHP Hacker" at digg, and he showed us some really fun functions hidden in the PHP libraries, such as pspell functions, levenshtein(), similar_text(), metaphone(), and soundex().
He also gave insights as to how script execution can be tweaked and handled outside of standard behavior. Eli really knows his stuff, and it was a pleasure to hear his picks.
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