php[tek] 2015
18 - 22 May 2015 at Sheraton Gateway Suites O’Hare

A humorous and well-delivered talk. Mr. Harvey is a bona fide PHP expert, and a core contributor, so he speaks with authority. He set many peoples' minds at ease with the news that most applications will "just work" in PHP7. As with any major revision, there will be corner-cases and "gotchas", but he named each case specifically and discussed the appropriate change to be made.

Based on the information that was presented, the transition should be a relative breeze for developers who can move from PHP5 to PHP7 overnight. Even for those who must support both versions for some period of time, there is plenty of light at the end of the rather short tunnel.

Articulate, entertaining, and insightful. It's no wonder that Mr. Willroth has established himself as one of the least forgettable members of the PHP community. The wisdom that he shares is timeless and inspiring. The advice is practical and pragmatic, and every developer would do well to heed the lessons that are abundant among the teachings. Great slide-deck, too.

A quick disclaimer: I'm speaking from memory, so please refer to the speaker's slide-deck or website for exact specifications.

This was an interesting and worthwhile talk. For those reading in posterity, Mr. Godden's organization (cu.be) has developed a module for NGINX that performs content caching at the web-server layer, with content retrieval performed using NGINX's sub-request mechanism. For request-specific markup that must be generated dynamically, such as user-specific content, this approach can deliver significant performance gains. Employing this module in favor of a language-specific solution should, in theory, carry far less computing time and resource overhead.

In my opinion, the most noteworthy aspects of this module's approach are: there are plans to make it caching-engine agnostic (i.e., it will work with memcached, redis, beanstalkd, and others -- and perhaps a heterogeneous mix of the aforementioned); and, it operates independently of the server-side language in use (i.e., it will work with PHP, Java, ASP.net, etc.).

The considerable performance gains do come at a cost, however: there's a new templating language to learn (although, it is built upon the ESI standard [which should reduce the learning-curve and ensure documentation availability], with some additional features layered on top); and, it is necessary to write request-specific data to the caching engine whenever it must be updated (as this is where NGINX will look for the most up-to-date version of the data).

This module is not for every project, but it does look attractive for certain applications, and especially for a new project, in which case there is no need to rewrite existing templates. Of course, the data structures that are specific to the application must be considered, as not every project will lend itself well to the "push-notification" approach that is required to populate the cache with the most up-to-date information that should be available to the application.

Mr. Godden stated that a beta version of the module will be available within 2-3 weeks of when the talk was given. I will definitely be keeping an eye on the cu.be website in the coming weeks.

MajiD presented a well-designed and carefully-considered slide-deck that was both interesting and informative. It is clear that a well-armed developer must understand the various types of databases that are at his disposal in order to build a well-scaling and adaptable application. The introduction to MongoDB was very useful and something that I will consider in future application designs. The ability to store native JSON data is becoming ever more important and will make MongoDB a much more common consideration. The practical application of both MySQL and MongoDB in the context of a massive online gaming network made the talk all the more interesting. Well done.

One of the best talks that I attended during the conference; thanks for sharing your invaluable insights and intimate knowledge of PHP with us, Ilia. Your slides constitute one of the most concise and comprehensive security guides to PHP development. Employing the best-practices that you shared puts an application squarely on the path to secure development. Ilia speaks with authority and experience and I will definitely attend his future talks.

This talk was a good reminder in focusing on the task at hand, giving it the attention it deserves, instead of jumping back and forth between a lot of different distractions.

This talk was a great introduction/reminder of OOP concepts. I would have liked to see some more complex examples that tied together the examples you did give.

Great keynote from Jordi, and an excellent closing talk to tek! Helping us recognize that project maintainers/creators are people as well.

Great talk! Dealing with rather large amounts of data and the thinking going on behind getting that data into a reasonable form. My only wish was that the talk was much longer so that more detail could be spared for the various steps as this is a weighty subject.

Great talk (I'd seen earlier incarnations of a similar talk by Ben) that explores options for creating and consuming APIs.