Forum PHP 2012

As a silver sponsor, we attended Forum PHP on June 5th and 6th. There is a lot to tell about it but for now here’s a quick review of the conferences we went to.

On Tuesday:

• Rasmus Lerdorf brought back the history of PHP and covered all the brand new features of PHP 5.4
• Rafael Dohms explained what annotations are
• Benjamin Clay and Damien Alexandre, aka the “Rainbros”, spoke about LAMP alternatives
• Kenny DITS shared the results of their experiments with application monitoring using Statsd and Graphite
• Julien PAULI dived into core anatomy of PHP: how it works
• Jean-Marc Fontaine listed all methods, including Composer, to implement external libraries in a PHP project
• Besides, lightning talks were introduced for the very first time at a Forum PHP event, carried along by following participants:
  Guillaume Plessis (Hip Hop)
  Patrick Allaert (error handling with APM extension for PHP)
  Christophe Villeneuve (password management)
  Fabrice Bernhard (Relaunch of applications written in PHP with Theodo Evolution)
  Sébastien Lucas (entrepreneurship in a PHP world)
• Gerald CROES introduced Phing, the PHP version of Ant

On Wednesday:

• Jérôme Renard explained how to use varnish with PHP application
• Patrick Allaert spoke about PHP native data types, and more specifically arrays and their alternatives
• Bastien Jaillot and Simon Perdrisat introduced us Drupal and third software use in Drupal
• Enrico Zimuel present a build of simple web application with Zend Framework 2
• Amaury Bouchard plunged us into the daemons, starting from initd to the viability of using PHP
• Jérôme Vieilledent talked about concurrency and scalability in PHP applications and provided us with personal insights
• Another new idea was “the CTO roundtable” during which they talked about the general use of PHP within large companies

In a nutshell, the first class conferences we had the privilege to attend led us to believe we’ll surely renew the experience next year.