(That’s Tek-Ten, by the way)
A week ago, I was recovering from a weeklong trip to Chicago for php|tek. Here’s a few of the things I heard about:
- Derick Rethans on the DateTime functions added to PHP 5.2. The power of the DateTime class is pretty awesome. The class’s essential beauty is in the fact that it stores a time and a time zone. It can also do accurate math against times and solves the 2038 problem. phpBB will be moving this way for Ascraeus.
- Git is here to stay. Talks from Travis Swicegood, Lorna Jane Mitchell, and Matthew Schmidt all talked about version control systems in some way or another, and a great number of the conference attendees are trying to move their projects to Git. Matthew gave the keynote on Thursday, and included phpBB in his listing of “open source projects driving the move to Git”. Thanks Matt!
- HipHop for PHP, a technology created by Facebook, and open-sourced for anyone to use, essentially compiles PHP into C++ for performance. Scott MacVicar, now at Facebook, formerly of vBulletin had a conversation about the future of bulletin boards – the name of the game is doing it better, not about doing more. I’m looking forward to the day that someone compiles phpBB using HipHop and reports their performance gains.
- JIRA is successfully used in other open-source projects. I spoke with Matthew Weier O’Phinney, project lead of Zend Framework, who says that they’ve been very happy with JIRA. I was surprised that I was able to talk with him on an intelligent level about it, because Zend Framework has used it for years, and phpBB has used it for just a couple of months. Unfortunately at Tek, very few of the “front-end” open source projects were represented. For example, I don’t know of anyone in attendance who had submitted code to Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, MyBB, or Magento. There were, however, numerous framework developers running about.
- Some Things Never Change. As I went around during social periods telling people “Hi, I’m Josh, I work on phpBB”, I got several responses:
- Oh, that software that gets hacked more often than ? (This is the “take another look” argument. I politely informed these people that phpBB3’s security record is greatly improved compared to phpBB2.)
- Its nice to see open-source projects represented at Tek.
- I spent hours trying to integrate that with WordPress and failed. What’s the deal with that?
- How’s the transistion from 2 to 3 going?
- How do you bear to work with that code?
I came away from these conversations with the opinion that phpBB is well known in the community, but not necessarily well-liked. A lot of this is because it can be difficult for these experienced developers to integrate with their products. Some wanted single-sign-on, others found that the layout was hard to customize to match an existing site, and still others wanted to add custom features but weren’t sure where to start.
I told people in person that we want to work on that, and we will, with some improvements slated for Ascraeus.
A large portion of the learning these conferences is not the talks, but the socialization that happens around them. A lot of the un-conference portion of the conference revolved around frameworks. It seems that everyone hates at least one of them, but many of them are looking forward to Symfony 2 and Zend Framework 2, both expected by the end of the year.
This was my first major PHP conference, and it was a good experience. With any luck, I’ll be there again in 2011.
Uhm, I don’t think phpBB _can_ be fully compiled and work seamlessly using HipHop. Last I knew, HipHop does not implement every function that is included in PHP which includes eval(), which is used in the template parsing engine.