Linde002::PHP

The “High performance PHP & MySQL scaling techniques” was given by Eli White and he showed a couple of need tricks to help you scale your website.

The simplest solution is adding a loadbalancer and a couple of PHP server for the frontend and a MySQL master with a couple of slaves for the backend. Remember, hardware is cheap! Another easy solution is installing APC (alternative PHP cache) because by default, PHP recompiles every request and by caching the compiled code you can save up to 50% in time. Interestingly enough APC will ship by default in future versions of PHP. The drawback is that in rare cases, APC can get confused by nested dynamical includes but as Eli said, if you do that you need to rewrite your code anyways.

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This talk was given by Elizabeth Smith (aurorarose) at the unConference. It was mainly a PHP-GTK2 tutorial that built a GTK twitter app but an interesting point she made were that, unlike what most people say, the desktop won’t fade out into a void. People will always need desktop applications because a: not everybody has access to the internet all the time, b: some apps are too bandwith consuming and c: you don’t want to send sensitive data over the web if you don’t have to.

Another cool thing was that she’d be looking into adding the GTK threading libs to PHP-GTK so we might get threading in future versions, no more Gtk::main_iteration_do(true);  Well less anyway.

Terry Chay’s talk at the unConference was about ways to make frameworks suck less, this was an interesting topic because alot of Zendcon’s sessions are centered around their opensource flagship Zend Framework. The key point he made was that using a framework has consequences. If you decide to use a framework you’re stuck with all the decisions the creators of that framework made.

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I was wandering around the exhibit hall and started talking with one of the reps from appcelerator and he explained to me what it did. Well, in short… It kicks ass.

The long version though, is that it changes the developmentparadigm from functional programming to declarative programming, a short example is creating a calendar with HTML. We normall create a html table  or a div structure and if we want to make it interactive we add a lot of javascript. What Appcelerator does is  that is uses it’s own XML namespace and allows you to ‘declare’ a calendar widget like
<app:calendar opt1='apple' opt2='pear'/>
which is pretty cool.

Another cool feature is that they’ve created a client side messaging bus that interacts with their custom event model. This might work out to something like this:
<a on="click then activatedSignal"/>
And every widget that has subscribed to the ‘activatedSignal’ event can respond. This looks something like this:
<app:calendar on="activatedSignal then display:hidden"/>

It does alot more cool things and it’s free! so go check it out.

After flunking my Zend Framework Certification exam (d’oh!) I moved on to Stefan Essers’ talk about the lesser known security problems in PHP applications. There were a lot of problems that I’d never even heard about and that result from the way PHP works internally.

One of these was the fact that PHP_SELF is not url-encoded and the encoding of REQUEST_URI depends on the client. If your application depends on one of these variables you could be exposed to cross site scripting attacks. Another cool thing I didn’t know was that firefox 2 allowed the setting of cookies that were valid for entire TLD’s. So for example you could set a cookie with logged_in=true for *.nl and every site that would check authorization this way (which they shouldn’t) and had a .nl domain would be vulnerable.

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The opening keynote today was given by the guys from Varien which is to Magento what Zend is to PHP. Even though it was quite a commercial talk there were a couple of intersting highlights.

Firstly, the fact that they’d built their entire eCommerce framework with Zend Framework and built it fast. We’re talking about a huge codebase that can do almost anything you’d ever want your eCommerce site to do, and some things you don’t want. And they did it in 9 months.

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The welcoming party was last night in the exhibit hall and as is the norm for these parties there are a lot of goodies to be found, and I do not mean the free beer or food (which was good). I had some nice talks with some of the exhibitors, got asked to come work in the US at least three times and filled my booty with goodies. The best goodie was the remote controlled minicar from Sybase who happen to have an interesting product as well.

They released version 11 of their database and this version has syncing possibilities with MySQL. This combined with the ability to run the sybase database on your blackberry with a footprint of only 700kb makes for some interesting possibilities.

Chatski foto’s later

Day 1 is almost coming to an end.

I started the day with Jay Pipes who told us the legend of the drunken query master, an excellent talk. The guy works at MySQL and it shows. I also did the Top Zend Studio Secrets talk in the afternoon. Did not get that much out of it unfortunately, the only cool ding they showed was the cmd+shift+L (or ctrl+shift+L if you’re on windows) shortcut that shows a nice list with all the other shortcuts.

I was pretty nervous for my presentation but I think I managed okay, I got some good laughs from the crowd and a couple of people came up to me after the presentation so I’m happy. I just hate it when I mess up my timing. I finished in 40 minutes so that’s 20 minutes early. At least it isn’t that bad as the practice run I did a couple of weeks ago, that one lasted all of 15 minutes. Another cool thing that really freaked me out was that they put me in the Big Room and it was filled up nicely

I put my slides up on slideshare for people wanting to reread them.

The PDF export of my slides is here.

Edit: Apparently the .ppt version did not come out right. I’ll post the original keynote version later.

So day 0 has finally come to end. It was great to see so much enthousiastic and smart PHP developers in one room. The sessions were interesting and everything was organized perfectly.

I’m off to freshen myself up a bit and then it’s time for the Zend Speakers / ZCE / VIP poolside party, they promised me pizza’s so it’s important to be there!

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting my “PHP & The secure development lifecycle” talk at 2:45PM in the big room downstairs. Let’s hope everything will go ok.

Sebastian Bergmann is giving his tutorial about Quality Assurance in PHP projects. He’s made an interesting point when he said that the focus of PHP developers went from “make it work” to “make it good”. The community has grown to a point where we can make fast, scalable & secure applications work so the next step would be make it qualitatively good. This is especially true when you look at enterprise projects.

As is to be expected with Sebastian he’s focusing quite a lot on PHPUnit and explaining how to write and use unit tests. And, as is to be expected, every time I vow to myself that I’ve got to start writing unit tests. It’s an awesome piece of technology.

I was really excited by the selenium bit, I’d heard the name mentioned a couple of times during the last few months but the live demo grabbed me.  I’ve got to try it out sometime soon.