PHP and Oracle: Christopher Jones

The great thing about staying in the conference hotel is that you can roll out of bed at 5:30am body-clock time and still make it to the first session 30 minutes later with time to grab a complimentary pastry.  Paul Reinheimer gave an overview of AJAX, discussing issues like REST vs SOAP vs JSON, latency and unpredicability of request ordering, caching of lookup data, and touching on security issues.  He introduced the Yahoo UI library and demonstrated the popular Firebug in Firefox to debug Javascript, and how an HTTP inspector, like the one in Komodo, lets you intercept and change incoming and outgoing HTTP packets or add delays to simulate latency and load.  All in all, a great overview session and he hardly pushed his new book.

If I can get approval from our Legal folk, I want to have a YUI example in the PHP Lab at Oracle Open World in November just to prove that var_dump() is not the only way to get data out of a PHP application.

After the session I took a few moments to verify my notebook drives the projector - all fine once the projector picked up my screen resolution. Hopefully they won't change the projection system between tutorial and session days, an event that caused me some problems at PHP Quebec when the second day's cabling turned out to be faulty.

There was a good buffet lunch and chat wih some PHP programmers about the general issues of development: how to maintain spaghetti and lasagna code (that's the one that has layers), the pressures of having to add features to be competitive, and the issues of dealing with UI designers and marketing people trying to drive the look and feel of a site.

Then I bumped into Maggie Nelson who has a couple of sessions here You Don't Need a DBA and How to Optimize a Database Query.  These are sessions I will be attending.  She's been using PDO on a big project for a high profile customer and I'm looking forward to her first-hand experience.

Now I'm back in my room, trying to polish up my second talk - the new one - so that I can spend the evenings talking properly with PHP users and developers.

BTW, there's a Facebook event for php|works.