Among the presentations I attended on the first day were:

Kevlin Henney’s keynote presentation, titled 97 Things every programmer should know. I suppose every attendant will have recognised some of the things he addressed, like “Do lots of deliberate practice” or “Hard work does not pay off”.

Design for Reusability. In this presentation Derick Rethans showed a number of concepts that can help in making code more reusable. Topics included Dependency Injection Containers, the fact that private methods can never be tested and Tie-Ins. Interesting was that Derick stated that reflection is slow whereas on day 2, in the Doctrine 2 uncon talk reflection was said to be be reasonably fast (in php 5.3 that is).

Database version control by Harrie Verveer was a very interesting talk, if only for the fact that it is a topic I’m confronted with at my day job. He showed tools like DbDeploy (and Phing), Liquibase, Doctrine Migrations and Akrabat DB Schema Manager. Especially ineresting was how branching can trouble database versioning.

Stephan Hockdoerfer’s presentation Testing untestable code showed some very unorthodox examples of how to test code that seems untestable, like replacing function names, manipulating the include path or mocking the filesystem. Interesting and besides that it’s great stuff to scare co-workers with (”look what trick I’ve learned!”).

Due to an unlucky combination of a tiresome week, a busy schedule ahead, a lot of time to kill until 20:30, and possibly age, I missed the social, so I was not devastated when day 2 started.

First presentation of day 2 was titled Security Centered Design: Exploring the Impact of Human Behaviour by Chris Shiflet. Emphasis was not on the technical aspects but on the people using an application. The presentation contained a very effective demonstration of ‘change blindness’. Quote of the presentation, and as far as I’m concerned whole DPC10: ” If you focus on the technical problem you’re missing the actual problem”

Following the keynote talk, Rob Allen covered the topic of Stress-free deployment. There was some overlap with the database versioning talk of the previous day but still a lot to learn. Especial interesting I found the part about branching, where Rob showed how branching features as well as releases can be a good solution for some pitfals concerned with release management. Not entirely in line with the branching ‘problems’ mentioned in the database versioning talk so it’s definitely a subject I’ll look into further.

After the lunch I visited the Unconference room which I didn’t regret. Jeroen Keppens opened with a short presentation on a topic we need to look into at my job in the near future: Integrating Zend_Acl and the domain layer. Short but very insightful. After two presentations about development for mobile devices (PhoneGap looks very interesting) and Cairo I decided to stay in the uncon room some more (thereby skipping the Domain NoSQL talk) as next on were two ORM-centered presentations: First Juozas Kaziukenas explained the principles of an ORM, followed by Benjamin Eberlei giving insight on Doctrine2. That looked promising yet also, after viewing the generated SQL of some of the more complex examples, spawned a very interesting discussion I had with my co-worker who visited Sebastian Bergmann’s presentation The Cake is A Lie: What problems can arise from generated code that isn’t tested and nobody is responsible for?

Concluding: Similar to past years this was a refreshing event that fuels the urge to improve by adopting new techniques and better methodologies. Besides that I really liked the Unconference initiative. Till next year!

• DPC 2010 slides (joind.in)
• Twitter: #dpc10 and #dpc_uncon

Slides of the presentation (if online) are listed at the Fronteers site and at the end of this post (same content, read along). I’ll briefly recap some of the (for me that is) most interesting parts.

Thursday

After a pre-conference meeting tuesday at Mirabeau (Where Chris Heilmann and Peter Paul Koch hinted at what was to come) Thursday started with two talks concentrating on the mobile web. Summarized: Webkit is not webkit (and webkit is just one of the mobile browsers) and mobile devices are more different from each-other than desktop PC’s. So, developing for the mobile web (and not just the iPhone) is challenging.

Next on was the presentation with the most hilarious title of all (and arguably content also) by Chris Heilman: Of Hamsters, Feature Creatures and Missed Opportunities. Some highlights: Be passionate about what you do as a developer or leave that aspect for someone who is. Don’t reinvent the wheel just because you like to apply a (your favorite) technique. The web is information, not sites. The feature creature (just check the slides) and YQL, which basically is querying the web and looks really great (kinda missed out on that one having done a lot of back-end development lately).

After the lunch-break Stephen Hay covered three drafts that exist for CSS layouts that will take away the limitations that exist today: CSS3-Grid (Microsoft), CSS3-Flexbox (Mozilla) and CSS3-Layout (W3C). Very interesting as it makes very clear that, although a vast improvement over tables, today’s CSS capabilities with respect to layout (and thereby the way we work) are far from perfect.
Following Stephen, John Resig went in-depth on javascript testing techniques covering unit testing as well as functional testing. Furthermore an interesting testing concept that can be used for testing JS frameworks was introduced: TestSwarm. Steve Souders, fully aware of being the last barrier between the crowd and the after-party, concluded the day with some interesting techniques that can help speed up websites.

Friday

Douglas Crockford kicked of day 2 with a presentation about javascript security. He explained Object Capapability Design, a security model in which objects can only access objects they have a reference too. I liked the part about using ‘facet objects’ to control whether or not references are maintained or broken. After that Pete LePage showed some HTML5 stuff that’s found it’s way into IE8. The presentation had a (not the only one) funny moment where in Expression Web’s IE6 emulation it showed the fronteers website with the ‘your (IE6) browser is obsolete’ warning. Jonathan Snook then extensively covered the topic of getting fonts on the web. It was very interesting that he addressed the licensing issues involved with using tools like sIFR. Something I think is often overlooked.

After the lunch Robbert Broersma lifted the hood (just slightly) of the engine powering the Xopus editor. He showed some tips with regard to improving and maintaining performance, most notably Google for ‘leak free closures’. Thomas Fuchs took over and explained some of the animation scripting going on in scripty2 and showcased his lightweight animation library emile.js.

Next presentation was by Nicolle Sullivan and the title ‘Object Oriented CSS’ made me quite curious. Rightly so cause I really enjoyed this presentation. OOP concepts like code reuse, encapsulation, singletons and inheritance were put into the perspective of organizing CSS. Quite a different approach really but it addresses problems I think a lot off css-coders can relate to. I found it interesting to realize that OOP thinking, which for me is day-to-day practice when working with PHP, somehow hadn’t made it to my CSS approach. At least not to the extent as shown in this presentation.

The day concluded with Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith talking about ‘The Future of Web Applications’. Very entertaining presentation covering new technologies like Google Closure Tools (Quoting: ‘If you want to write code that looks like java then it’s a great tool for you’), canvas, web workers and webGL.

Conclusion: Very nice conference with indeed a stellar line-up. As always the hallway sessions are not to be underestimated as I usually (unless I’m tired or need to get things done) find it interesting to talk to other people and pick up some new ideas or approaches. To conclude with the closing presentation’s very fitting last commandments (yes, I wrote those down):

• Thou shalt make thine interfaces responsive
• Thou shalt keep the data of thy users holy

• Twitter: #fronteers09
• Flickr: fronteers09

Presentations

Just to show that YQL literally is ‘querying the web’: The YQL below extracts from the Fronteers 2009 presentations page those elements in the list that have a link. And… it always returns valid xml which makes it ideal for parsing the HTML cruft generated by some applications.

SELECT * FROM html 
WHERE url="http://fronteers.nl/blog/2009/11/presentations-fronteers-2009" 
AND xpath="//ol/li/p/a/ancestor::li"

Two talks were scheduled and Stefan Koopmanschap kicked off the meeting with a presentation titled “Integrating Symfony and Zend Framework” (slides). After a short introduction pointing out the benefits of using any framework at all, Stefan showed how both Symfony’s and Zend Framework’s autoloaders can be initialized in the application’s bootstrap code. After that using ZF components in symfony was showcased by using Zend_Service_Twitter inside a Symfony project. Being quite familiar with Zend Framework that was not really surprising (to me) but the part following was: Integrating Symfony into a Zend Framework project. First of all it was new to me that there are “Symfony Components“. Apparently Symfony is not an all-or-nothing affair anymore. Most of the components were briefly covered of which I especially found the Event Dispatcher highly interesting.

After a brief pause, Juliette Reinders Folmer hosted the big “Why Equal Doesn’t Equal Quiz”. 65 Questings testing the knowledge of the attendees about the type conversions going on when writing code like:

$a = null;
if (empty($a)) echo 'empty';
 
foreach(array('test','0','etc...') as $val) {
    if ($val) echo 'has value';
}

Questions like the ones above where the easy ones… Especially interesting where the ctype family of functions. They are especially usefull for checking database result or GPC data. Although I had seen the ctype functions before I kind of forgot about them so especially there I had wrong answers. Score: 45 out of 65.

The evening concluded with some informal chatting and some beers generously provided by Freshheads. As usual I went home with some new things on my ‘got to check that out’ list…

Michael Wittke then showed how how PHP can be compiled and run on ARM chipset based devices like the Nokia 810. A bit academic but it’s great to see the unorthodox things that can be done with PHP.

After that the guys from IBM demonstrated a new platform Websphere sMash. Take a look at the site for what it’s about. I was expecting it to be more enterprise oriented and there were some powerful examples but I for myself don’t (yet) see the real advantage. Especially as using sMash-specific functions ties a developed app to the (non-free) sMash platform. On the other hand, the possibilities offered by the good integration with Java libraries like Lucene and POI looked very interesting.

Next was a talk from Stefan Esser looking security topics like SQL injection, XSS and CSRF from a Zend Framework perspective. Important topic but I must admit I didn’t get much new information out of it although preventing CSRF by subclassing Zend_Form to add a hash element was a nice example.

Last talk of the day was about how the dutch news site nu.nl is built and how it handles peak traffic. Content was the same as covered in the techportal article but it was nice to get a peek at how the CMS looks like.

The rest of the evening can be summarised with: Strand Zuid, sun, drinks, not so much food, social event, inspiring (at least for me) chats with some of the speakers, Nieuwmarkt, Leidseplein.

Day 2

The alarm clock won the battle and I was just in time for Eli White’s presentation about scalable applications. Really great talk covering a lot of techniques for building application in such a way that database capacity can be expanded. I’m definitely going to give the presentation slides another look.

Next on schedule was Paul Reinheimer. Colleagues of mine were enthousiast about his talk of the first day and he certainly is a great speaker. Content was interesting too, touching usability aspects (I like) and addressing some pitfalls with respect to asynchronous requests and the browser’s ‘back button’.

After that Eli had another great talk, this time about release management. He covered SVN branching and tagging strategies, release scripts and it definitely made some of the puzzle pieces ‘fit’.

The last break-out session I attended was about DTrace, a kernel module to analyse the load of the C system calls PHP executes. Good to know about the possibilities but I don’t think I’ll be going that road in the near future. Xdebug is a bit ‘closer’.

The event was concluded with the Cal & Ivo show where Cal & Ivo interviewed some of the speakers and some (twitter-) questions from the audience were answered. The tweets and images running in the background grabbed the atmosphere well and formed a nice way of closing the event.

So. A very nice event it was. Just like last year I got home full of new ideas. It’s very inspiring to meet new people that are equally enthusiast about their profession. Next year, count me in.

• #dpc tweets
• Google ‘dpc09′ search
• Flickr ‘dpc09′ search

Switching between current and previous directory:

cd -

Going home can be done without the ~:

cd

How ‘grep’ can beat your IDE. I’ve been playing around a bit and this is really a quick way of finding all classes within a directory that implement an interface (and it’s fast!):

grep -i -r 'class ' . | grep implements

And there’s ’screen’. Very useful for handling multiple terminal sessions without the risk of losing them all due to a connection hick-up. Lorna has some config examples on her site.

So not all was new but there were definitely some nice starting points to investigate further.

jQuery

Until now I have mainly used the Prototype framework for Javascript projects. As the prototype library, escpecially when bundled with scriptaculous, is quite ‘big’ I was interested in hearing some more about the ‘lean and mean’ jQuery. In a short (but focussed) presentation of Edwin Martin some of the key aspects of jQuery were illustrated, most notably: Method chaining, Plugins (nice for keeping things organised) and Live events (curious about performance). The jQuery motto ‘do more, write less’ definitely stands although the functionality seems really focused on selecting, modifying and event-binding. I was missing Prototype’s class inheritance but as I read from the Fronteers meeting report that’s being worked in in the form of Classy Query.

Suave

Next was a presentation, delivered by Marcel Beumer and Vincent Hillenbrink, about Suave, a stand-alone front-end. It’s a MVC based framework that allows front-end developers to communicate with a ‘back-end’ that exists solely in the viewer’s browser. This way front-end developers can start creating templates and interaction and show working versions, without being dependent on properly functioning back-end software. In the background there is some XSLT databound templating going on thereby allowing for easy integration with back-end software once it’s ready. Suave isn’t finished yet so no online information is available. They aim at releasing a first version in about half a year, bundled with examples demonstrating it’s potential.

Of course there was plenty of time after the presentations to meet some people and chat with co-front-end-developers. Nice meeting!

• Microsoft – User Experience on the web
• Adobe – Flex/AIR
• Javascript – 8 Reasons every PHP developer should love it
• The frontend is your friend

Microsoft – User Experience on the web

First speaker was Bram Veenhof, of whom I allready attended a presentation two months ago. Here the available time was more limited so less subjects were covered. He started with some coverage on the forthcoming Windows 7. Interesting features were addressed like: Dockable windows, swappable taskbar buttons and functionallity in preview windows. Next on was Silverlight and most specifically the video and deepzoom capabilities.

Two parts that were both interesting in their own right but not really connected to each other. In my opinion he had better addressed the XAML, Javascript integration some more. I think that is one of the strong points of Silverlight when it comes to smooth integration in a PHP driven application.

Adobe – Flex/AIR

Next on was Mihai Corlan, Adobe Platform Evangelist as he described himself. First part of his presentation was about Flex. For me it’s been a while since I’ve done Flash Development so I was curious about what’s happening on the Adobe front. Mihai summarized Flex as ‘Just another way to create a Flash app’. The Flex platform consists of:

• 2 Languages: MXML and Actionscript 3
• Compilers
• Rich Component Library
• Debuggers
• Flex SDK (Open Source)
• Flex Builder IDE (Eclipse so it runs nice alongside Zend Studio)

As for the benefit of RIA’s he showed a little demo of a very graphical intuitive interface allowing users to report details about car damage.

After the topic was Adobe Air. Adobe Air allows web developers to develop beyond the browser. Api’s like file access, drag & drop, allow for desktop apps to be developed using techniques familiar to Flash/Flex developers. Very interesting and probably much easier than starting to learn writing apps in Objective C or Java.

The link to PHP was addressed by the way Flex and Air applications communicate with online back-end software: REST, Web Services and RPC. Areas where PHP is at it’s best, especially with the arrival of Zend Framework’s AMF component. The AMF component provides RPC connectivity that is easy to implement and very efficient.

Javascript – 8 Reasons every PHP developer should love it

After a good lunch and a couple of short talks by phpwomen, fronteers and phpGG it was Boy Baukema’s (Ibuildings) turn to (try to) make PHP developers like Javascript. On the technical side he pointed out some similarities like closures and closures. Furthermore he showed statics telling us that less than 1% of today’s user agents don’t support javascript. This includes search engines and paranoids. After his presentation he repeated his question about how many of us like javascript. I couldn’t tell much difference but then again, 40 minutes is very little time to convert server-side freaks. In my opinion liking javascript starts with liking to create a good user experience. If you do, you’ll probably also like Flash and Silverlight. If you don’t, no problem. Leave it to people who do.

The frontend is your friend

The last presentation of the day was given by Robert Jan Verkade (Eend). Interesting and graphically of high quality. Something tells me Robert Jan is a fan of Queen. He focused on the different stakeholders involved in a project and how they interact: The front-end (HTML, CSS, JS), The back-end (PHP), the users and the contractor. He showed some examples of good and bad practice. Most notable advices on of good practice where reducing the number of external css and javascript files and placing javascript at the bottom of the page. Furthermore he had some good tips on how php- and frontend developers can make eachother’s lives a bit easier. (PHP-ers: Don’t mess with the HTML! :)).

He put quite some emphasis on valid HTML so I couldn’t resist asking about wether he meant ‘valid’ or ‘well formed’ and what his opinion was on using non-W3C attributes to drive javascript behaviour (something I’m very pragmatic about). An entirely different discussion that doesn’t need a winner but I was curious if he or someone else would have some interesting (for me new) views on the subject. Somebody in the audience mentioned that custom attributes are part of the HTML5 recommendation. So the topic is definitively ‘out there’.

Conclusion: A nice day. Interesting subject and interesting presentations. And of course it’s nice to meet some new people working in this field. As it pointed out phpGG has just recently become more active again after having been dormant for a long period. So on that part 2009 looks promising.

For the web 2.0 afficionados: Flickr & Twitter

Presentation

In this part different topics were addressed such as Microsoft Software of interest for PHP developers, the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 and (of course) Silverlight.

Expression

Microsoft apparently has a whole new range of development software called ‘Expression ‘. Akin to Vista there are different flavors and akin to Vista that may cause confusion. Most emphasis was on ‘Expression Web’, a WYSIWYG editor replacing Frontpage. It looked quite decent in it’s own right but it is no IDE like Zend Studio. I think in PHP environments it’s most suited towards front-end developers who are mainly focused on templating.

IE 8

It looks like Internet Explorer 8 will have some very welcome features. (In my opinion just the fact that there will be an IE8 is a good thing as that will make IE6 ‘really old’ and hopefully extinct soon. Good news for anyone involved in CSS and JS coding). For developers interesting features will be:

• JS-debugger with breakpoints and all (no more mystery line-numbers)
• By default a web developer toolbar
• Code profiler (think: Yslow)

Promising indeed. Now what remains on my wish-list is an easy way to run IE6 and IE7 alongside IE8…

Silverlight

On to Silverlight. One can’t but have noticed Microsoft is promoting it’s new web technology. And while Microsoft bashers will probably keep seeing it as ‘Just a M$ alternative to Flash’, it has some very nice features. Apparantly Silverlight is very powerful when it comes to handling video. A fine example was given in the form of last year’s Amstel Gold coverage featuring a single stream showing different camera’s. Another nice feature is Deep Zoom of which two interesting examples were shown: Hard Rock Memorabilia and Yosemite park. Not needed in your typical CMS application but very nice nevertheless.

But what I liked most about Silverlight (besides the obvious show-off examples) was the way it integrates into a HTML page: Silverlight events will be processed by the page’s javascript. This means that when developing RIA’s all of the behaviour scripting can be centralised and will cover both HTML and Silverlight parts of the page. Furthermore, Silverlight object elements can be accessed in a way similar to the HTML DOM. I haven’t yet worked with Silverlight but based on this I expect integration to be smooth.

Live Platform

Final part of the day was about Microsoft’s Live Platform. Different features were showcased, like easily publishing video content by using Expression . Neat in it’s own right but the relation to PHP was as thin as any web service. Most interesting I found the existence of Sky Drive. 25Gb of free storage. I’ll keep that in mind if I need to share the occasional file.

Concluding: Espcially the IIS and Silverlight parts were of real interest from a PHP developer’s perspective. Some of the other subjects were ‘nice to know’ and came across as more ‘promotional’ than ‘informative’. That aside, it looks like Microsoft is well aware of the increasing popularity of PHP. I wouldn’t be surprised if Silverlight will make it’s way into quite some PHP applications.

MS Server 2008 & IIS 7

The IIS 7 part was quite interesting, the most important facts mentioned being:

• Modular instead of Monolithic. The extension architecture allows for extra features to be added to IIS 7. Extensions can be ‘official Microsoft extensions’, ‘unofficial’ (third party, no MS support) or self-developed.
• FastCGI PHP. One of those extensions is FastCGI. Apparently FastCGI re-uses a proces as opposed to classic CGI. For PHP on IIS this means a great performance boost.
• Multiple PHP versions. Per folder, or even per specific script, the PHP executable can be specified so it is easy to run different PHP versions on one server or to test applications on updated PHP versions.
• Delegating access to configuration settings. It looked like it was possible to delegate configuration settings at a very detailed level. Delegation is helped by the introduction of ‘IIS users’. The configuration console can be remotely connected to using the IIS user credentials.
• Bit rate throttling. Very useful if you are hosting large media files.
• Url Rewrite Module. The most notable feature to me was that it allows you to import apache mod_rewrite settings. Very nice.
• Alternate configuration options. For those suffering from RSI (or just not liking icons) there are several other ways of accessing IIS settings: AppCMD, Powershell, .NET namespaces or the XML configuration files.

IIS 7 made a good impression. It looks like some features very important for PHP development are in there. I think for sysadmins it’s very nice that all of the configuration can be done from the CLI as that is better suited for repetitive tasks, tooling and documenting.

SQL server 2008

The SQL server part covered the connecting proces from PHP and the features SQL Server 2008 offers.

For the PHP examples the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP was used. This driver makes available a set of sqlsrv_ functions. In-depth coverage on that subject can be read here. The driver is only available on windows but luckily there are other options: MSSQL extension, ODBC extension, PDO_DBLIB and PDO_ODBC.

Next on was coverage on the Server product itself. The part on reports wasn’t that interesting although the reports created looked very polished. And of course there’s a certain demand for that. :). Furthermore, I think displaying the reports using an iFrame isn’t the type of ‘integration’ PHP developers will get very excited about.

Working mainly with CLI or Php(My/Post)Admin I could see the benefits tools like SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Profiler can offer. I think they can be of great help optimising queries.

Of further interest to me were the geography and geometry functions. It was nice to see how easy it is to combine, say, travel distance and other attributes in a single query. I’ve never had to work with geographic data yet but, as co-attendees mentioned a lot of other databases have similar features. For example PostgreSQL has the PostGIS extension and there is some spatial functionality in MySQL too.

SQl Server is probably a very good product but I doubt if it will be used much in ‘blank sheet’ PHP projects. For companies having a MS infrastructure and wanting to jump on the PHP bandwagon options are plenty…

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