PHP talks, BOF at Apachecon

I just wanted to drop a note to let people know about the PHP talks and the BOF ("birds of a feather") session scheduled at Apachecon in Orlando next week. I'm not sure if any of the presenters plan on putting their slides online, but I would certainly encourage them to do so and drop a note to the list when they have. (Concurrently, Rasmus is speaking at a conference in Singapore, if you happen in that neighborhood.) The BOF: Friday, March 10, 1:00pm: World domination heroes series: PHP A secret meeting of the PHP revolutionaries. Get a jump on the competition by sharing secret handshakes and solutions with other PHP developers. The talks: Wednesday, March 8, 11:00am: Design Patters in Web Programming, Nathan Wallace The concept of Design Patterns is based on the idea that there are only so many design problems in computer programming. In this session we will examine the design pattern concept as applied to Web programming, determining the patterns that exist and presenting model solutions in PHP. You will learn how to recognize these common design patterns in your sites allowing you to easily apply the well known "best" solution. Thursday, March 9, 2:00pm: Migration from ASP to PHP, Craig Kohtz Tired of rebooting your Windows NT Web server? You have always written everything in VBScript for ASP so does it make sense to change platforms? Apache on a UNIX or Linux system can be much more stable. Writing code in PHP is much more portable. In this presentation, attendees will learn the major differences between ASP and PHP. Online demonstrations of important features such as database connectivity and session variables will be presented; as well as the differences in syntax and functionality. Friday, March 10, 9:00am: PHP: Hackers Paradise, Nathan Wallace Rise from PHP: Honest Programming to PHP: Hackers Paradise in this fast-paced session. We'll look at when you should (and how you can) optimize your PHP code. Some of the more powerful and complex areas of PHP (e.g., quoted strings and data types) will be explained with examples of how they can be used to your advantage. Every language has "gotchas" and common mistakes to avoid, learn about PHP's subtle traps. Finally, we'll develop a number of functions and classes to speed up development and assist in the debugging process. Friday, March 10, 2:00pm: Commercial use of PHP with SQL backends, Jeffrey Buchbinder Many current commercial systems in specialized business sectors make use of the old terminal-based philosophy, but times are changing, and PHP with an SQL backend can be an attractive option to those who would consider other alternatives when replacing their legacy systems. Friday, March 10, 3:45pm: Advanced PHP Web Applications - Sessions and Authentication, Tobias Ratschiller As Web sites and intranets get larger and more complex, static HTML files hit their limits. They are hard to maintain and cannot be used for advanced Web-based applications like e-commerce systems or XML data processing. PHP is the right tool for anyone wanting to create highly sophisticated Web applications. This server-side scripting language is fast, free, easy to use for novice users and powerful enough for professional Web developers. To understand the implications of Web application concepts, you need to differentiate between applications and single scripts. A script is a utility and as such doesn't have any context, it doesn't know about other scripts in your system. An application, however, is designed to perform more advanced tasks. An application needs to maintain state and execute transactions. This presentation will show you how to use PHP's native session management functions and third-party code to authenticate users to create a complete community Web site. According to the Zend.com site, Zeev will also be giving a talk on Thursday, March 9 at 4:30pm on the Zend optimizer, but its not listed on the Apachecon site, so I don't have any more details than that or an abstract. I assume this will be happening at the Zend booth on the expo floor. Hope to see you there! Jim