This is a quick summary of the PHP Barcelona conference – this is the second year one of us attended, and again it was well organised and had stimulating presentations/talks, such as:
- The Pomodoro Technique for time keeping
- Cloud hosting (managed vs unmanaged with Microsoft’s Azure+ and Orchestra.io as examples). This included live demos and a good coverage of the various options available (and why you might pick (for example) EC2 over Orchestra or vice versa).
- Solr – document indexing (which we are already using, but there was some useful content within the marathon 2 hour talk/workshop)
- Unit testing as an afterthought – Marco Tabini (phparch.com) spoke about his belief that when writing unit tests, code coverage on it’s own is not enough when it comes testing through unit tests – like phpunit – as it’s also necessary to cover how components interact with each other, and therefore effectively do testing of an entire application and not just isolated components (something we’d already discovered).
- Doctrine2 – an overview of why you should be using an ORM and not lower level SQL everywhere – followed by a quick overview of why Doctrine2 is better/faster/superior to Doctrine1.
- PHP on the CLI – a few useful titbits where hidden within this talk covering using PHP for command line scripts (options parsing via the getopt library being the most useful).