Stuart Herbert On PHP

Last year, I ran a series of polls via Twitter to try and learn a bit more about your plans to move to PHP 5.3, and whether or not you actually followed through. A huge thank you to everyone who voted!

I’m not talking at any conferences this year, so I’ve published the planned PHP 5.3 adoption talk online for anyone who’s interested in what the PHP user community told us via these polls. As well as the raw data, I’ve included an analysis of what the data might mean, and some talking points about what the PHP Group might want to do differently when PHP 6 (or PHP 5.4 if there is one) is released.

You can find the talk online at Slideshare, along with all of my older talks. I hope you find it useful and informative.

October in Manchester is home to the PHPNW09 conference. Last year’s conference was a great event, and this year’s promises to be even better. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a conference sponsor this year, honest

Immediately before the conference, I’m running a two day tutorial in the fundamentals of setting up and running a team of PHP developers, covering:

• Keep your promises to your customers using written specifications
• Organise your team using Subversion and Trac
• Control quality using code reviews
• Deliver to your customers using release management and follow-up support arrangements
• Where to go after the course for additional learning

Places are limited to just 25 people, and there is an early-bird discount for anyone who signs up before 21st September. You can find out more on the course website, and sign-up online.

Thank you to everyone who came to my talk about Gradwell’s experience of Living With Frameworks at the PHP UK conference last Friday. It was very humbling to have such a large audience, especially as I was one of the least-known folks on such a strong list of speakers, and I really enjoyed meeting everyone who came up to me afterwards to share their own experiences.

If you were one of the 40 or so folks who had to be turned away from the talk, the slides are now available, and I’m sure the video of the talk will be online soon. We’re also trying to sort something out so that I can come and present a shorter version of the talk at one of the monthly PHP London meetings later in the year.

A big thank you to everyone involved in organising and sponsoring such a great conference. I’ve run a couple of small conferences in the past, so I know what it’s like and just how stressful it can be. I thought you did a great job, and I’m already looking forward to an even better conference in 2010

Oh, and if you ever get the chance to see Aral Balkan talk, do so. His opening keynote at the conference was hugely entertaining and (imho) spot on too, and he gave everyone such a lift for the rest of the day.

The PHP UK conference is tomorrow at the Olympia Conference Centre in London – and there are still a few tickets left. Why not come along tomorrow and join us for what will be a great and informative schedule of talks?

Zoe invited me to go down to IBM Hursley yesterday to deliver my talk about building Twittex from PHPNW and to also meet the Project Zero team. I had a great time, and the folks from IBM made for a very engaging and collaborative audience. It was particularly nice to meet Ant in person; he’s currently one of the better bloggers about PHP imho and as a community we sure could use more folks writing to his standard

If you haven’t heard of it before, Project Zero is a new implementation of PHP running on top of J2SE. It gives you the ability to run PHP in an environment that eventually should out-perform the Zend Engine (which will be very welcome here), plus the ability to pull in and make use of many excellent Java libraries that have no equivalent in the PHP world (like, for example, a SOAP client that isn’t a toy …)

Higher performance is important to ISVs in particular, because as you get away from non-trivial apps and get your caching strategy mature, the bottleneck moves from the database back into the amount of CPU available for the web server. Over here in the UK, servers are expensive, and hosting them even more so. There is real money to be saved by not requiring extra servers.

But my personal interest with Project Zero is evaluating it as a platform for API integration and development. Many of the products I need to integrate with are .NET based, and their APIs make a fairly rich use of SOAP. So the first thing I’m going to try with Project Zero is a little app to merge data between our ERP platform and our project management platform – two platforms that PHP’s SOAP client struggles with at best. I’ll let you know how I get on