OSCON Day 1
Free starbucks in the morning, free beer in the evening, what more could I ask for? Oh yes, I suppose there was time to learn as well. I went to 6 sessions today:
The Future of Rich Internet Applications with PHP
Andi Gutmans, Co-Founder and VP of Technology, Zend Technologies, Inc.
This basically ended up being an overview of the Zend Framework, with an emphasis on Ajax. Interesting, but nothing I hadn’t seen before. He did show some interesting mash-ups with Yahoo analyzer and flickr.
PHP Security: Fact and Fiction
Andi Gutmans, Co-Founder and VP of Technology, Zend Technologies, Inc.
While this was in the PHP track, Andi did a broad overview of security. He compared securing a php script to securing a plane trip - it takes a lot of pieces, all which you need to pay attention to. You also need to assume you are going to be hacked at some point, so you should take steps to limit the effects on your system when this happens. He listed a few tools I don’t have any experience with - Nessus, SAINT, PHP-SAT, all of which I will have to check out.
Who Am I? The Age of the Digital Identity
Robert Richards, Development Manager, Local Thunder
This was an overview of OpenID. Once/if it catches on, it will be a nice service.
PHP: Bigger and Faster
Rasmus Lerdorf, Yahoo!
Rasmus’ session was the most interesting. For those who don’t know who he is, he wrote PHP 1.0, and currently works for Yahoo working on improving php performance and security. He demonstrated some excellent tools, most of a few of which I had never seen in action:
Yslow - analyzes webpages, finds ways to speed them up from a front end perspective. Released just a couple days ago.
Seige - allows you to send simultaneous requests to a webpage
Valgrind - linux process profiler. See which layer (apache, php, database, etc is taking the most resources)
Xdebug - php level profiler. Find which parts of the program are taking the most time, which functions have the most calls.
kcachegrind - reads valgrind & xdebug logs, gives visual output
Ending Rails Envy in PHP5
Sam Minnee, Development Director, SilverStripe
Sam went over the use of __call() and how he used it to extend the SilverStripe CRM program.
Improving Performance by Profiling PHP Applications
Patrick Reilly, Senior Developer, OmniTI Computer Consulting
Patrick had a few technical difficulties in his presentation, and he seemed to be missing some of his notes. I don’t think he was as well prepared as the other speakers, or maybe it was just nerves. He covered APD, which is similar to Xdebug. Today I wish I would have asked him what APD does that Xdebug can’t do, alas, I always think of my questions way too late. I think speakers should be available for questions the following day for people like me.
As a side note, I’d say 70% of people here have macbooks. I think the general consensus is linux just doesn’t make a good desktop.