Barcelona PHP Conference Day 2 #phpbcn2009

Even shorter summary of the second day of the Barcelona PHP conference. (see here for day 1)

Zend_Cache... by Enrico Zimuel

This was a introduction to the cache component of the Zend framework. It pretty much does what you expect: it wraps the common types of caching ( file, apc, memcached, ...) into a common API to make them easy to swap and use. It also has helper objects to support caching of PHP output with output buffering.

The State of Quality Assurance Tools for PHP by Sebastian Bergmann

Mr. PHPUnit gave a short introduction to testing and the PHPUnit framework. He then introduced some of the other tools that can help you with quality metrics of your software, these were:

• phploc - counting lines and more
  
• phpcpd - finding duplicate code
• pdepend / phpmd - static code analysis
• phpcs - code style and static code analysis
• bytkit-clu - more analysis

He then continued to show how you would automate running these and include them in a continuous integration tool like CruiseControl with phpUnderControl or Hudson.

It was a good talk and gave an introduction to the whole process of quality assurance for projects.

Slides

Continuous Integration by Davide Mendola

Another talk about CI, which gave a bit more insight into the tools but because of the previous talk a lot of stuff was repeated and not a lot new information introduced.

One thing was obvious though: nobody is completely happy with the current tools, because they are all Java based and don't fit 100%. There seems to be a market now for new PHP CI tools and I am sure we will see some showing up in the near future. I would also see some of these using a MVC framework instead of being developed from scratch.

And for the hecklers in the back shouting "Xinc" : no release or commit since one year ? Maybe someone should pick that up again. :-)

Symfony 2.0 a sneak peak by Fabien Potencier

Fabien gave a very fast run through some of the new components and designs for Symfony 2.0. A lot of things will change and it will be difficult to port older projects, especially if you have business logic outside your models.

He spent a lot of time explaining the dependency container component and how and why it will be used in Symfony 2.0. I am a bit afraid that this will make things more complicated and difficult to debug or work with in an IDE. I usually don't like to see logic into configuration files, but now I at least understand why he is doing it and what advantages it will have in Symfony 2.0. I just hope I won't see these in every object and sometimes just simple injection is used.

I am looking forward to Symfony 2.0 though, I just got one suggestion to reduce Fabiens work a bit: throw away the Lime testing framework and use PHPUnit. Lime will never match the PHPUnit features and everything you need which isn't provided by PHPUnit yet is probably easy to integrate.

Open Classifieds by Chema Garrido

This was a refreshing different talk by the lone developer of Open Classifieds, which is an open-source classified web application. He developed it from scratch without using any framework (Rasmus would love this), it is very much in the spirit of the KISS talks of this weekend.

If I find time I will certainly have a look at it. And before the security concious object orientated dependency injecting agile caching crowd complains: give the guy a hand with a bit of code review if you find the time.

Open Classifieds Website