PHP West Web Services Conference

On Friday I went with a coworker to the PHP West Web Services conference being held at the Planetarium here in Vancouver. This conference had some very notable speakers from the PHP community such as Rasmus Lerdorf (Inventor of PHP). It is often hard to determine the usefulness of conferences, as they are often colossal wastes of time and money. However this conference was very practical and the speakers all had very informative talks.

To open PHP West was Rasmus Lerdorf with a talk titled Pragmatic PHP. While the talk itself had little to do with web services I thought it was probably the best of the day. It was refreshing to have someone give very practical ideas and solutions to very common problems as well as to promote the idea of simplicity. Rasmus stressed many times during his talk that you should not try to over think problems and that you should search for the easiest solution when possible. It was also fun to see him optimize a script as best as possible.

After Rasmus was Terry Chay talking about design patterns in PHP. Terry was full of energy and very enthusiastic as well as being quite practical. Reading out definitions like “Blah blah blah blah” and then putting it into relatable terms, “What that really means is … and can be applied by …”. It also looked like Terry put some major work into his presentation, which I must say, was totally kick ass.

After lunch was John Coggeshall and the first actual presentation on web services. He went through both consuming and creating web services. Maybe the reasoning behind having so little speakers on web services at a web services conference was the simplicity of using web services in PHP. John did a great job in showing how easy it is to consume a web service and even easier to setup a web service. One funny thing I noticed when John was talking was that he obviously had an American accent, which I must say made it quite funny when he would say ‘get variable’ as ‘giit variable’. J

Next up was Cal Henderson from Ludicorp the makers of the very popular (and local to Vancouver) Flickr. Cal’s talk was more on the development of Flickr and the role web services were given. It was interesting to hear some practical uses of web services. Cal pushed the message that by using web services you can give other people the ability to create new products for you that you otherwise might not have the time or resources to do. Cal presentation was pretty funny and he was very quotable. I think what made his presentation so damn funny (besides the British accent) was that he didn’t crack a smile once, even when he was making some very funny jokes. Anyway a good fun presentation from a local company in town!

Last presentation of the day was from Ilia Alshanetsky on XML in PHP. This presentation was probably the most technical of all of them, and very informative. However I think PHP West timed this presentation wrong, as having it at the end of the day was a bit much with all the information Ilia was presenting. Regardless I enjoyed the talk and thought it was pretty good overview on the different ways to handle XML in PHP.

To finish the conference off they brought on stage some blond promotions girl from Techvibes to give away free books and stuff from the promoters of the conference. I thought it was pretty funny how a person whose daily job is to promote things can barely read a persons name from a namecard. It was painful and a bit too much for us so we decided to leave (after getting our free books of course!).

All in all I was impressed by the conference and of PHP West for pulling this together. I now look forward to their next conference to come in June regarding PHP security.