PHP Quebec - Day 2

It’s now Saturday and the conference is a nice memory for all but the hotel staff and those who over did it at the party last night. Let’s take a last glance over our shoulder before we pack it up and head to the next one.

Day two’s sessions were very good. I attended Mike Potter’s “Rich Internet application development with Flex”. It was a coin-toss because I also really wanted to see Joe Stagner’s “Beyond PHP”. In the end, it was the fact that I’m playing with Flex 2 right now that pushed me into his session. Mike did a great job but in the time-honored tradition of you can’t please everyone, I was disappointed that he did not concentrate on Flex like the session title indicated. Apparently he had received comments about this presentation in the past indicating that it was too Adobe specific so he broadened the scope. I however, was really looking forward to learning more about Flex and how I can use it with PHP.

The next session I was able to atted was Zend’s own John Coggeshall presenting “John’s Top PECL Picks”. I was really surprised by this session. I don’t use PECL much and honestly, I just thought I’d park in the session and read email. John however, did a great job of showcasing his favorite PECL extensions. He explained how to install PECL extensions for those of us who don’t do that very often and even gave a brief history of PECL.

The thing that caught my eye and the extension he spent the longest talking about was Phar extension. The PHP manual described Phar like this.

PHP Archive files (Phars) are special collections of files that can be transparently run right out of the file, similar to Java’s jar archive files. Using a phar archive, it is possible to distribute a complete PHP application in a single file that will run out of the file without modification or extraction. Phar archives can also be used to store files for extraction similar to tar or zip archive files. Phars support compression using gzip if the zlib extension is present, and using bzip2 if the bz2 extension is present. In addition, iteration and other features are available if the SPL extension is available. Phar signature verification using md5 or sha1 is natively supported to ensure archive integrity.

Seeing this extension was one of those “I’ve gotta get me some of that.” moments. All in all it was a great session and my only complaint was I didn’t get to any of my email.

For those of you who do not know John, he is in charge of Zend’s Professional Services for North America and the author of one of the definitive guides to PHP 5, PHP Unleashed.

The final session of the day was Graham Charters’ “Service Component Architecture”. Graham works at IBM and did a great job of presenting this technology. If you are interested in building web services, you need to take a look at the SCA extension.

Officially, that was it. There were closing remarks, handshakes, slaps on the back and the eventual goodbyes. If you are interested in the after-conference activities, keep an eye on Flickr. As you can see from the photo here, there were some good times mixed in with all the learning. (In the photo, taken by Marcus Boerger, Conference front-man Yann Larrivee, speaker Louis-Philippe Huberdeau and MySQL’s Morgan Tocker belt out a tune.)

As I don my roving reporter fedora and head back into the States, I’d like to commend the organizers of this conference. It’s rare that conference attendees get content this good and a five star hotel for such a price. You guys and gals did a great job. (Just get the Wi-Fi working next time) :)

=C=