PHPNW10

Last weekend I was in Manchester at PHPNW10, the annual conference for the north-west of England PHP community. It was a fairly last minute decision to attend but looking at the conference programme persuaded me that I'd be rewarded with lots of good material, and I wasn't wrong - it's going to take me a while to process the volume of quality information from the talks I attended.

With that in mind I won't try to do more here than just summarise the sessions I was in on Saturday, kicking off with the keynote talk by Lorna Mitchell on professional development ("Teach a man to fish"). While at first this might have seemed a little out of place amidst all the technical content, it was entirely appropriate given that many people (including me) come to these events to learn. Much of the focus was on benchmarking and improving the skills of your team as a whole (making the point that skills gaps only exist in the context of knowing what skills are actually needed), but emphasis was also placed on individuals taking the responsibility for their own professional development. There was some solid practical advice for making the business case for training to managers, and suggested alternatives to formal training courses (for example, allowing developers "study days" on company time) if you have "a training budget of zero." And if you're working on your own then the suggestion to make your own "team" sounds like a good one to try.

After the keynote the sessions split into three parallel "tracks" for the remainder of the day, and in general I chose to focus on those talks on basic development tools and methodology (with a plan to catch the talks I missed about geolocation, REST interfaces and so on later online).

Things were off to a great start with Robert Mortimer's talk "Let your toolchain set you free", which dealt with choosing and using appropriate tools for setting up your development environment (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP i.e. LAMP), source code control (subversion), performing code validation (PHP_codesniffer), enforcing coding styles (PHP_Beautifier), generating documentation (docblockgen), unit testing, debugging (Xdebug) and developing using an IDE (NetBeans). Accompanied by live demos and full of little tricks to automate things, it was a dizzying talk.

I followed that with Ian Barber's talk "Debugging - Rules and Tools". At the beginning Ian confessed to being something of a debugging nerd and described the satisfaction he felt when tracking down bugs in an application - something I identified with from my former life in software maintenance. His presentation was structured around the nine rules outlined in David J. Agan's book "Debugging", giving practical advice and suggesting useful tools and resources for each rule. As with the earlier talk there was an almost overwhelming number of tips and tricks (a small number of examples: Jmeter for load-testing; Selenium for simulating user interactions; MySQL Proxy to isolate your database; Tamperdata to modify http requests...). I also learned a new word, "heisenbug", to describe an intermittent fault.

After lunch and a chat with some fellow attendees I dropped into Marco Tabini's talk describing the development of the php|architect website ("The curious case of php|architect"). Marco focused on higher-level design decisions - and the reasoning behind them - that had been made at various stages in the site's evolution, and reminding the audience that real-world projects don't always follow a smooth path.

Marco was followed by "Developing Easily Deployable PHP Applications", given by John Mertic of SugarCRM. At the beginning John made the important point that you need to define the "support matrix" (i.e. the set of environments defined by combinations of operating system, web server, database and PHP version) for your application, as knowing this will inform your design and test options. He then went on to describe how this is managed for SugarCRM, raising a number of interesting points - for example, providing hooks and other mechanism to make customising, configuring and extending the application as easy and as maintainable as possible for the end user.

The last real talk was Harrie Verveer's "Database version control without pain", which aimed to address the issues with managing changes to database schema in sync with changes to your application code. The problem is that the mechanism used for patching PHP code as part of an update can't be used to update the database - in this case the patches are in the form of SQL code rather than code differences - and Harrie conceded that (contrary to the title) there isn't a magic bullet for painless database version control. Nevertheless he did a great job of outlining the pro's and con's of the various options, ranging from a simple patching strategy (probably the way to go for me at the moment) through to tools like Phing, Liquibase, Akrabat DB Schema Manager and Doctrine Migrations.

I was feeling a little brain dead by then, and as entertaining as it was much of the substance of the closing "framework shoot-out" was lost on me (particularly as I'm not a framework user). But no matter - because I'd had a great day at a well-run conference, met some great fellow software developers, and been exposed to far more useful information than I could have hoped to find elsewhere on my own. I know it's going to take me some time to follow up on the various tools and techniques - in the meantime thanks to all the organisers and speakers for making my first PHPNW conference such a memorable and enjoyable one.