PHP and Continuous Data Processing

Michael Peacock

At Smith Electric Vehicles we process on average 1 billion pieces of information in our PHP based telemetry application. This is the largest vehicle telematics project in the world with the exception of Formula 1. With this information we need to be able to display live vehicle metrics to customers, plot vehicles on maps, trigger alerts when diagnostic flags are raised, process the data to generate reports, and export large volumes of this data for various stake holders, all without losing a single piece of data.

This talk will discuss some of the technologies and concepts we employed to ensure the system is reliable, fast, and can be maintained without losing data. In particular how we keep the web application running quickly with all of the data behind, how we sustain the huge number of inserts into our database, how we can analyse the data and how we export the data needed for monthly reports.

Why you should be using & contributing to OpenStreetMap & not GoogleMaps

Derick Rethans

In this talk I will be explaining the strong points of OpenStreetMap and why using GoogleMaps for your websites is generally a bad idea. Contrary to popular belief, GoogleMaps isn't as amazing as it looks and they are a lot more evil than they look. OpenStreetMap's data is also easily accessible for use in PHP applications and the generated tiles can easily be embedded into a Web 2.0 application. Its open nature is a welcome and powerful geo database that can be added to and used in whatever way imaginary.

Developers! Y U NO open source your code?

Craig Marvelley

It's undeniable that the PHP microcosm has benefitted from ubiquitous open sourced libraries and frameworks such as PHPUnit, Zend Framework and Doctrine, to name just a few. Developers, and their employers, regularly build upon these resources to speed up application development, as they avoid 'reinventing the wheel' while benefitting from high quality, well tested software.

Unfortunately the reverse is not so common; too few companies make contributions of their code to the community, perhaps due to a fear that their competitors will benefit from their efforts, or a concern that their code will be laughed at, so harming their image. While these concerns are understandable, they are ultimately negative and shortsighted, as we discovered.

At Box UK we recently decided to begin releasing some of our libraries under a permissive open source license in the hope that other developers would find them useful. Inspired by those free tools that we now consider irreplacable, we had a desire to share some of our code in a similar spirit. Since then the PHP libraries we've released include a dependency injection container, an image thumbnailing library, a routing library, and a file metadata tool, all of which are used in our own products.

In this talk I will share our experiences from this process, explaining the positive effects that we've observed: better, more tested, more reliable code; increased visibility for the company; and, crucially, happier developers. Hopefully by illustrating how liberating the process can be, we can help propagate the trend of new, modern, open source PHP libraries that make all our lives easier.

Introducing Pyri the new aggregator for Pear

Jeremy Coates

PEAR is a great tool set for PHP, providing lots of packages to help us standardise elements and to prevent us all re-inventing the same components. That all sounds great, however there is a problem: the PEAR channels are served by lots of servers worldwide and there's no centralised list anywhere, therefore requiring prior knowledge of their existence or lots of searching or blog reading to discover the hidden gems.

'Pyri' is a system for searching PEAR channels and packages and includes a website, (soon to be published) API and command-line tool. It provides us with one central source to enable the discovery of channels and packages, Pyri is the missing piece of the PEAR jigsaw. The Pyri website will be launched at PHPNW11 so this will be the first time you'll be able to see and use it!

This lightning talk will cover the website, including searching for package data, how to add your own (or other peoples') PEAR channels to the queue for spidering and finally we'll look at the roadmap ahead, including API release and the upcoming command-line tool.

Introducing Quality Management - A practical approach

Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems

What is Quality Management and why should you start doing it today? Quality Management is really important in any business and this talk will focus on putting it into action based on hands-on experience. How do you start improving the quality of your software and your development process? You need a plan, obviously. We'll discuss the methods to approach this and how to convince your boss and fellow developers to start today!

Making your views stupid

Matt Button

When it comes to Models and Controllers, the general consensus is to make your Models fat and keep your Controllers skinny. However, when it comes to fit your views into this philosophy you usually end up moving presentation logic into your Models, or adding lots of inline code to your Views.

Most template languages try to “solve” this by creating an alternate php-esque syntax which attempts to keep logic out of views at the expense of fattening your controller.

This talk uses Mustache to introduce the concept of View-classes, as a way to separate business and presentation logic, without sacrificing your controllers.

Template-Based DOCX, DOC & PDF Generation with the Zend Framework

Jonathan Maron

Using current PDF generation libraries in PHP, it is time consuming to get the formatting of a document exactly right. You need to choose between either the HTML-to-PDF approach, or the programmatic approach, in which you define the x and y co-ordinates of each and every element on a page.

In this lightening talk, I would like to present an alternative approach to generating not only PDF files with PHP but, amongst others, also DOCX and DOC, and even TIFF and BMP. It utilizes templates, created in a word processing package, for example Microsoft Word, and the Zend Framework.

The approach supports PHP on Linux, Windows and Mac OS.

Join In With Joind.In

Lorna Mitchell

If you think open source is fine in principle but inaccessible in practice, then come and find out about the open source tool you're using to give speakers feedback on their talks. Joind.In is open source and if you see anything you'd like to fix or change - then you can! This session will suggest lots of different ways that you can get involved, depending on what you want to get out of it, and the general "how to begin" ethos is applicable to open source projects everywhere. If you're curious, this is a great place to come and get some practical advice (and possibly some war stories!)

PHPWomen Birds of a Feather

Elizabeth Naramore

Group discussion about the PHPWomen group, its aims and activities. Open to everyone, it won't be much of a debate if only the women are there! Discussion to include: why do we need a women's group anyway? Why do we allow men as members of the group? What does the group do and does it make much difference?

Dealing with Difficult People

Elizabeth Naramore

Just like we have bugs in our code, we have bugs in our communities sometimes. We call these community bugs "difficult people" -- bullies, trolls, Debbie Downers, whiners, drama queens. We all know them. It's easy to let these toxic personalities cripple your community and cause dysfunction. In this talk, we'll talk about the negative effects these behaviors can have, how to get to the root of the problem, and how to deal with these personalities in a constructive, effective way.

Lessons learnt from UI FALE!

Jon Gibbins

We all make mistakes, but let's face it, we all like to laugh at a good FALE! Let's see what we can learn from a look at some user interface failures.

PHP and Twilio

Michael Peacock

Twilio is a cloud based infrastructure API which allows developers to create voice and text messaging applications which leverage the phone network, from their application. We will take a fast-paced look at developing voice based services using Twilio and PHP. Rapidly exploring the service and the API we will use it to build a simple inbound phone number to our web application. This can be used to allow customers to phone up and query their account automatically, check the status of outstanding orders, or receive a call as their account or order progresses.

At Smith Electric Vehicles we used this to rapidly put together a proof-of-concept to allow customers to phone up and geo-locate their trucks, query metrics of the vehicle such as the state of charge, and receive an automated call when the truck left its geo-fenced area.

University Education: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Ben Nuttall

Being a recent graduate with mixed views of my experience at university, I would like to share my thoughts on how modern courses (such as web development) are being taught and how I feel they should be taught. I explore the varying quality of different courses at different institutions, the affect of the attitude of the teacher and the attitude of the student, as well as my feelings about how graduates are being prepared for life in industry.

I compare a typical graduate developer with a self-taught developer, their qualities and usefulness over each other and take a look at the ultimate question - is it worth it? I demonstrate the sorts of things taught on degree courses and their usefulness to the employer. I also address the questions employers have regarding taking on graduates or placement students.

Conference Speaking 101

Stefan Koopmanschap

At PHPNW and other (PHP) conferences, there's always a full schedule of speakers. Some are from the area, others are international speakers. But how did these speakers come to be speaking at a conference? And why? If you are interested in becoming a speaker and sharing your knowledge, and you want to know how to get there or what to expect, this is your talk! In 15 minutes I'll tell you my personal story on how I became an international conference speaker and how I've experienced this.

Contributing to Open Source

Stefan Koopmanschap

Many PHP developers work with Open Source. Whether it is Drupal, Joomla, Zend Framework, symfony or something else completely, Open Source makes the life of a lot of us easier. But sometimes, you are left with this nagging feeling that perhaps you should do something to help out a project. In this talk, I'll show some ways you can contribute to Open Source, and not even necessarily by writing and contributing code.

Playing nicely with Project Managers

Wes Thompson

Who are project managers? What do they even do? What do they want from me??

In this talk, I start by introducing the PRINCE2 project manager and the role they play within the scope of a project, who they speak to and what they talk about. I then go on to discuss the lingo, and what they mean in real terms when they say things like "Work Package" and "PPD".

With the basics out of the way I go on to briefly discuss what they do that developers don't care about, and then in more detail what developers really need to know when dealing with their project managers. This covers providing estimates, (see Rowan Merewood's talk - Saturday 15:00 Track 1), it also covers the importance of meeting their expectations with regards to reports and dealing with issues. It finally tackles the subject of change and what that actually means within a project.

Although you may not deal directly with a project manager, it's really useful to know what everyone is expecting from each other in the chain from the Interns and junior developers all the way up to corporate.

The Cloud has gone hybrid

Thijs Feryn

Most developers choose a single cloud solution when choosing a production platform. Nowadays The Hybrid Cloud is the best way to go: combining a stable hosting solution with distributed and burstable unmanaged Cloud platforms. This talk will combine standard server hosting with cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS and Akamai to build and deploy a flexible PHP application from start to end. Besides the technical aspect, there will be a strong focus on best practices from an infrastructure point of view.

Getting involved in developing PHP.

Melanie Rhianna Lewis

You're a PHP programmer. Its a great language which does want you want it to do. But its not perfect. There may be functionality that is missing. There may be bugs. There may be documentation that could be improved. This talk will look at how a PHP user can become more involved in helping progress the language. This may be by fixing bugs in the core language, writing extensions, or helping with the documentation effort. It will describe how you can get involved, where to look for help and what extra skills you may need.

Criticising Drupal for bad code? You're wrong.

Marcus Deglos

Hey you! Yes, you, up in that ivory tower! Come down here, I want a word. Right, what's this I hear about you criticising Drupal? Moaning that it's not object orientated? That it's crappy code, buggy, not a proper framework? You're wrong. No, don't argue, you're wrong. Come along and I'll explain why. No, leave the rotten fruit behind, you won't need it. See you in Manchester.

Doctrine 1.2 Tips and Tricks - Or what not to do

Kathryn Reeve

Quick session on the lessons learned whilst using Doctrine 1.2 heavily in a project.

Will cover tips on where things can be improved and what to completely avoid.

Mockery

Marcello Duarte

An introduction to Mockery Mocking Framework and an overview of its features. With illustrated examples of using Mockery with PHPSpec.

PHP Going Forward

Marcello Duarte

Here are some of my ideas on the features discussed over the internals mailing list. I will be going over some of the features that might be coming into the language, or is already coming in PHP 5.4. I will go over the existing RFCs and analyse them in comparison with other dynamic scripting languages.

Moodle Bootstrap

Daren Chandisingh

Moodle is a widely used, free, open source PHP-based virtual learning environment. It enables the creation and delivery of Internet-based education and training. This talk will be a lightning tour through some of Moodle’s features, what it can do for you, how to install and run it, where to get help using it, and how to get involved in the Moodle project.

Wordpress Plugins

Melanie Rhianna Lewis

Ever thought "Wordpress would be great if only there was a plugin for X!"? How about writing your own plugin? This talk will give a brief introduction to Wordpress Plugins and how to develop them. It will look at the basic form that a Wordpress Plugin should follow. It will work through a simple example plugin. It will talk about a few of the API that are needed from the start. Finally it will describe the facilities that Wordpress provides for publishing extensions and where to go for further information.

Making The Drupal Pill Easier To Swallow

Philip Norton

Drupal has a notorious learning curve, which can cause most developers major mental health issues. I'll talk through some hints and tips about getting to grips with Drupal, finding out what is going on, and where to go when you get inevitably stuck.

Wordpress: A Starting Point.

Jenny Wong

This is an "Jenny" guide to Wordpress. It will be a starting point for anyone who has very little knowledge of Wordpress developing.

Disclaimer: Anyone who already tinkers with Wordpress will know the majority of what I will talk about, but are most welcome to come along and chip in.