The PHP London user group put on an amazing day conference on Friday. It was fantastically well run, had a great set of talks and was only £50. Most people I know would laugh at a conference that cheap and would say it wouldn’t be worth attending. Well the organisers proved them totally wrong, I would have paid the £50 purely to hear Rasmus Lerdorf speak about the current status of PHP - he’s the guy credited with inventing the language and responsible for it’s future direction. What could be more valuable than hearing on it’s progress straight from the horses mouth? Not only did we have Rasmus (and the free lunch) but 4 other exciting talks. For those who php doesn’t mean anything too - well it’s the langauge that we (and major companies like Yahoo) use to create rich, involving dynamic web sites.
The day was run at the Keyworth Center which is part of the South Bank University which provided just enough space in the lecture room for the fully packed conference - about 260 delegates.
Cal Evans - My First Mash Up
First up was Cal Evans with a simple overview of how to create a mash-up - in this case combining a feed from UPS and a feed from Google maps into a web site where users can track the location and the path their parcel has taken to get to them. Pretty simple stuff, and it was great to be given a few pointers on how to make it even simpler, from an expert such as Cal. We do something similar for New Wine, but Cal showed us a few modules from Zend which would make the process even less painful.
Simon Laws: Web services - drop it into Apache and away you go!
Simon showed us he highlights of an excellent new initiative from IBM and others which allows companies to split their complex systems into their components and then access them as stand-alone systems. This is surely the future of web development - you can use this system to create feeds with API’s similar to the Google mapping feed, or the Flickr photo feed. Imagine how flexible your systems would be if your organisation could take it’s Contact’s information from it’s database and package that as one stand-alone system, which could then be hooked into any other diverse internal systems (say email) or external systems such as Google Maps (or Google Search). This was of thinking is just starting to make it through to the main stream and I’m sure that it’s another concept (like web communities) which after mentioning to our customers, and allowing them some time to consider it will come back to us and say, about that .. feed, can we have one please. The SCA system discussed by Simon will allow us to do just that, although from the post talk discussions it seems that it’s not quite ready yet - it will be soon, and I think it’s the future of web development, at least for Big and Medium size organisations.
Kevlin Henney - Objects of Desire
Even with the traditional post-lunch sleep slot, Kelvin managed to enthuse and excite us all about Object Oriented Programming techniques. His interesting lecture style and dynamic personality meant few of us could fail to pick up on his evangelism of OO programming styles. I loved his closing notes about test-based design principals - he managed to explain very visually the fact that you don’t want to have your bugs and errors caught when you system is live and viewable to the public - his examples were photo’s from airports and train stations of notice boards with error messages. I think the collective favourite was taken in Paddington when a screen showed a train from Aachen labelled “error: not a train”. Interesting his take on PHP 5’s handling of OO was that it had “interesting attributes”. I tried not to take this as an excuse not to use OO.
Rasmus Lerdorf - Fast and Rich Web Applications with PHP 5
I was really intrigued to know what Rasmus would be like and what he would talk about and after he managed to break his computer (reonfiguring the kernel of his Mac) and take too long to set everything up I thought he was going to be an uber-geek. But he wasn’t, and he explained his ethos for creating php: he hated programming and it just got in the way of creating things - I think this summarises php in a nutshell - it’s used to get the job done in the simplest, most efficient and effective manner. It does this perfectly. I may be at odds with the php purists of PHP London but those facets are what drew me to PHP in the first place and why we can use it so effectively in our business. If you can think of it then you can probably do it in PHP. The set of his slides are available on the php site.
Once he got his computer going he went on to tell us simply and practically how to make PHP faster, more scalable, more secure and simpler. It was perfect, just what the audience needed to hear to ensure that we call become better more effective deliverers of the code that he invented.
Bill Gaver - Designing for the Curious Home
I don’t think anyone knew what to expect in the final Friday afternoon slot - but what a treat from Bill. His thesis was that technological development should be so much more than just creating pink ipods (or I guess yet another community web site) but to really push the boundaries of what we do and how we interact with technology. I think we were the perfect audience to be encouraged to think out of the box, and his creations, although pretty worthless commercially managed to inspire and if nothing else make us all chuckle.
My favourite was the Drift Table, Goldsmith’s delivered it to a volunteer, didn’t explain how it worked or what it was and said.. enjoy… And then after a few months they sent an independent documentary team to interview the guy and see what he’d done with it. The lucky recipient called it his hot air ballon. The table had a little glass window in the center which showed aerial imagery of the UK. He found that if we put weights on the corners it made the images move (drift) in that direction. It was also oriented using diigital compasses to the orientation of his house. To start with he loved his hot air balloon table, and used to enjoy floating around his neughbourhood looking at things from a new perspective. Then he got frustrated that he couldn’t really control the drifting and wanted to use it like a playstation and then after he relaxed about it (and got better at controlling the rate of drift with strategically placed rocks). He started going on tours of the country with his A-Z, going to look at places he knew were desirable to live in, or phoning up his friends and telling them about some local knowledge he’d aquired about their neighbourhood. He even got to the point of inviting his friends round and taking them on tours of the coutryside and decided it was so much more interesting than TV! I think this was the most successful of their experiments and also the one closest to my mapping heart.
Overall an “out of the box” ending to a great conference.