It’s been a while since I got back from the PHPDay ( ~1 month ) and the experience definitely deserves a post.
Where, when, how..
This year’s PHPDay has been held in Verona, the wonderful place where Romeo and Juliet had their drama.
The location was the same of the 2009 edition ( which, BTW, was the first conference as a speaker, for me ) with the addition of the third day, just like the last year.
The conference had a first day of workshops and the last 2 days of tutorials and talks: 25 minutes for the former, 45 for the latter.
Day 1: the german track
Very curious, the workshop day had an entire track with german speakers: Sebastian Bergmann gave a nice overview of PHPUnit 3.5 with the addition of a live example testing legacy code.
The guys from Quafoo presented the document component from the Apache Zeta Components: seems pretty awesome, given that document conversion is something everyone of us faces during his career and everyone of us blamed TCPDF at least once.
Quafoo again showed us their application installer, which is an high-level library able to let developers code their own installer according to common needs ( database setup, filesystem configuration and so on ).
Day 2: tremendous keynote
My second day started with a topic we’re facing in our company: the hard combination between agile development and user-centered design.
Jacopo Romei had an embarassing ( with a positive meaning ) keynote about collaboration and communities: one of the coolest I ever heard, given that I often find keynotes boring.
In the first session of the afternoon I presented the HTTP cache inside Symfony2, pretty satisfied about the people listening and their feedbacks.
Then I listened about 2 build systems, Phing and Ant: an insteresting italian talk, given that I didn’t know that a few code metrics tools are well-integrated with this kind of systems.
Day 3: leaving Verona with style
My attention was firstly captured by the real-world report about calciomercato.com ( that can be translated in soccertrades.com ), a site, built with symfony 1.4, which scored 4 milions visits in August 2010: definitely impressive.
The talks wasn’t obviously focused on the software architecture but on the system architecture behind the website: a cool thing was that they prefered to build 2 separate machine templates ( you usually have 1 VM template, that you scale horizontally ), one used to serve the website and the other for the static assets, some kind of a little CDN.
Giorgio Sironi had an interesting talk about DDD in PHP: it was a real pity that there were a few guys listening him, because DDD is – obviously – coupled with doing OO right, and PHPers often forget about them both.
During the afternoon I had the great occasion to present, with David, an overview about the problems relational DBMS have with fuzzy-model softwares, like CMSes: it has been an opportunity to show off that DNSEE guys are working hard to develop a CMF based on Symfony2 and a NoSQL graph database, OrientDB.
So what?
Once again, the best conference I ever attended, did not betrayed my expectations.
If you want to view the slides of the talks, have a look at the Joind.in page.