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Kristian Koehntopp [mailto:kris_(at)_koehntopp.de] schrieb:
Newsgroups: de.comp.lang.php
Subject: PHP-Congress Cologne
From: kris_(at)_koehntopp.de (Kristian Koehntopp)
X-Alignment: chaotic/neutral
X-Copyright: (C) Copyright 1987-2000 Kristian Koehntopp -- All rights
reserved.
X-Signature: Knooper Weg 46, 24103 Kiel, +49 170 2231 811
I attended PHP Congress Cologne (05-Oct-2000 to 06-Oct-2000)
together with Ulf Wendel and Jan Kneschke. We arrived in Cologne
the evening before without incident, hit our hotel sometime in
the evening and immediately departed for the #php.de (IrcNet)
channel party organized by subj (http://www.subjective.de). As
usual there was no proper beer to be had in Cologne (the local
brew is based on dishwater), but the Apfelpfannkuchen was nice,
and so were the people, most of which I was able to meet to meet
in person for the first time. People, you are as strange in real
life as you are on the channel!
Next morning found us at the Crowne Plaza hotel, where Bjoern
Schotte and the Globalpark people where still fixing problems
with Internet access just before the congress was supposed to
start. This should turn out to be a recurring theme during the
entire congress, and is definitely a point to improve next time.
Ulf's lecture was the first one. He presented his documentation
generator (http://www.phpdoc.de), which is a large PHP script
largely based on concepts borrowed from JavaDoc. phpdoc is able
to generate barebones documentation from many PHP scripts
without any additional information, and can utilize special
comments within the script to generate a full documentation. The
output is template driven HTML, with XML being an interim format.
This allows for automated post-processing and provides unlimited
customization of the documentation.
Because phpdoc is working without any support from the PHP
interpreter in this version, its capabilities are still somewhat
limited, but it still is far better than anything else currently
available. In my opinion phpdoc should become the standard
format for documentation of PEAR and PHPLIB classes, and work
should concentrate to add parser support for documentation
generation and to improve phpdoc. phpdoc is bound to become a
very important tool for large scale PHP projects.
Ulf was followed up by Sebastian Bergmann of the PHP OpenTracker
project. He showed how PHP can be utilized to capture and
visualize clickpath information and how this information can be
useful to optimize your site layout and navigation for
usability.
Alexander Aulbach continued with a report on using MySQL and PHP
to create a fast search engine. Working for a newspaper he was
faced with the challenge to create a searchable fulltext index
for ~170.000 newspaper articles, and found the usual solutions
based on ht://dig and udm-search to limiting for his project.
Using a very unconventional approach to the problem he was able
to create a workable and mostly efficient fulltext search using
pure MySQL and PHP - tools which are generally considered as not
suitable for such tasks. His very interesting solution is up for
sale, or can be recreated from his slides if you can spare a
manmonth or two for development.
My own keynote was supposed to be scheduled for noon, but
because of the technical problems with the internet connection
before it started late. I had to cut down on content in order to
make good for the lost time. Find my slides at
http://www.koehntopp.de/kris/artikel/web-security/, and read
about the topic at DevShed
(http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/Administration/WebSecurityI/
and http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/Administration/WebSecurityII/).
My talk went well (I had my slides available locally, and did
not need a remote connection) and I was able to make a number of
contacts...
Lunch drove the organzation at Crowne Plaza to the limits of
their capacity: Although three different restaurants and
locations within the hotel provided lunch for the 400 people
attending, these people dispersed very unevenly and some had to
wait for more than 30 minutes to get something to eat.
Nonetheless the food and the service were excellent, once you
got them.
Just after lunch, Chris Cartus had a talk about the use of PHP
in startups. His talk centered around properties and
shortcomings of PHP as an implementation language and as a
platform and contained quite a bit of critique. It was received
somewhat controversial, which certainly the intention, but was
in part based on outdated facts - PHP is currently a rapidly
moving target and six months ago Chris would have been right on
all counts.
Basically Chris stated that the main strengths of PHP are its
extremely good rapid prototyping capabilities and its very
smooth learning curve: You can take any useful web designer and
start teaching PHP bit by bit. That designer will be productive
from day one, gradually moving out of the mouse mover camp and
entering the coder league, earning his money at all stages
during this transition - this is very unlike Java, which
generally requires a hard break where one sits down and learns
about programming, design techniques, UML and the like before
being useful at all.
At the other hand, there is little support for high end web
applications and development to be found in PHP - there is no
application server, load balancing is not part of PHP and can
only be obtained using crude external means such as RR DNS and
local redirectors. Also, PHP is lacking in debugging
capabilities and provides little support for large scale
development (options comparable to the "use strict" and "-w"
modes of perl). Its object model is crude and needs more
sophistication and a performance tuneup to be useful on large
scale applications.
To summarize: While PHP provides road that is wide and easily
traveled at the beginning, this road is not as far reaching as
is the Java path. Chris claimed that further extension of PHP is
necessary to cover these areas.
Chris also claimed lacking Java integration in PHP and mentioned
some other areas where PHP is lacking in his opinion. Most of
these areas have been worked on during the last six months, and
the situation is improving rapidly. For example, Johann-Peter
Hartmann demonstrated PHPs Java integration capabilities in his
(later) XSLT comparison and found it to be easily useable, but
still unstable under load.
I missed the next three talks given by Reiner Kukulies
(Communities with PHP), Mario Klaue (Using PHP generated DHTML
to build highly responsive pages) and Matthias Boese (Using PHP
on SAT-1: Die Fahndungsakte - a high traffic website for a TV
series.
Instead I had some very interesting discussions on web security,
and on possible future extensions of PHP outside the lecture
hall. Those small tables just next to the coffee bar turned out
to be very useful, indeed. Thank you Thies, for providing
useful input and insight and thank you Chris Cartus, for your
thought and discussion provoking talk.
The day way almost finished with Sascha "commit" Schumann's
"Extending PHP using C" express presentation ("Hmm, seems that I
really should have some slides. I'll create them while commiting
the latest patches to the session management module here.").
Sascha, you really demonstrated that rapid prototyping can be a
way of life!
Sascha prepared the ground for Jens Ohlig with "C++ integration
and 3 tier development". Jens talk was about using phpswig to
generate glue code to integrate C++ classes as PHP extensions.
For me personally, the talks by Chris Cartus and Jens Ohlig were
two most interesting talks of the day - Chris because of the
interesting ideas and the background he provided, and Jens
because of the extremely useful technology demonstration.
Afterglow, the time between the conference talks and the evening
programme, was filled with discussion about software patents and
Sevenval - from the number and type of questions currently
easily the most hated company within the PHP or even the German
Open Source community.
Even programme was a travel by ship along the River Rhine on
board of the MS Enterprise, a theme ship modelled after a well
known starship of the same name. Buffet on board was excellent,
and so was the company :-) Thies and I had our fun with Sascha,
being half as old as either of us two (but twice as cool). Ah,
and the local brew does not taste much better when you drink it
on board of a ship. Memo to self: When you travel to Cologne,
bring your own beer.
The second day started out slowly, with Hartmut Holzgraefe
demonstrating PDF creation using PDFTeX and PHP. He started out
showing the shortcomings and limitations of PHP's PDF interface,
and presented PDFTeX as an alternative way to create good
looking PDF output. TeX source creation was very painful with
PHP 3, but using PHP 4 and the new output buffering interface
came just in time to be helpful and greatly simplify the
process. Limitations of his technique are the use of an external
process (the PDFTeX processor) not really suited for use in
batch processing, and the load this generates at the server
machine.
Next in line was Andreas Otto, who introduced the PHP4 build
process under Windows. As I don't do Windows, I missed most of
this talk and had a session concerning the past and future of
de.comp.lang.php at the coffee table on the outside. Seems that
a transition of the FAQ to XML format will be well received and
should be done on short notice. Also, Sascha suggested the day
before that an english translation of the FAQ would be useful,
as it is in his opinion far better and more comprehensive that
the english original. Sascha suggested that the english version
of the FAQ should be channeled through the PHP documentation
translation team, producing multinational versions. Both he and
I still see problems resolving the update process, as the FAQ is
produced in german language, and updates and comments may come
in in english as well as in german. We probably need a
collection and integration mechanism for that. TODO: Talk to the
doc team and see what they think.
I rejoined the main lecture hall just in time to see Till Gerken
finish his talk about "Interprocess communication in PHP". Till
presented the mechanisms used to create PHPChat, and showed how
shared memory and semaphores can be used to improve performance
in such applications.
Johann-Peter Hartmann (What a name, what a hairstyle! :-)
followed up with "A comparison of PHP XSLT processors". His talk
was met with great interest, as XSLT seems to be a hot
technology. Johann showed that XSLT still is bleeding edge, and
so is PHP-Java integration. Sablotron came out as an overall
winner in speed and stability with Xalan C++ being a close
second and a somewhat more complete implementation of the
standard. Me, I am using Sablotron - Go, Ginger Alliance, Go!
Tobias Ratschiller gave most of his time to Doron Gerstel (sp?)
of Zend technologies, who was stunned by the support PHP has in
Germany and who presented the future marketing and product
strategy of Zend. Seems that Zend will be rolling out a profiler
and debugger this year, and follow up with the encoder shortly.
Also, a PHP IDE is planned and scheduled for next year.
The presentation was quite interesting, especially in light of
Chris Cartus talk about startup companies and venture
capitalists the day before. It was obvious that Zend, being a
startup on venture capital, needs to show some revenue fast
before entering the next round of funding. Still, Zend seems to
be lacking vision and a roadmap for the future and the
presentation left me a bit disappointed - perhaps it was the
presentation, which was marketing driven and focusing on
benefits instead of technology driven, as almost all other talks
on the Congress were.
I would have expected Zend to have learned from their polls and
their past experience that people tend to use PHP for projects
larger than it was intended to be used and that they provide a
strategic roadmap which shows their intention to meet this
demand with the appropriate moves and improvements (application
server, load balancing, stronger Java integration, revised
object model, optional strong typing, optimized making use of
this typing for faster code). Perhaps CC and Zend talking to
each would be a good match?
Also, while there is a strong community of PHP developers, at
least in Germany, it seems that Zend is only very losely tied
into these channels, at least in Germany. There clearly is an
impedance mismatch between the community and the company, and
currently Zend cannot convice that it fulfills an important role
for the commuinty, at least not in Germany.
This is very dangerous for both parties involved: PHP cannot
survive without a focused and directed development team,
especially not in the upper area of the market and this market
is of very great importance for the acceptance of PHP as a
mainstream web development tool.
Also, Zend cannot survive without being able to communicate
their role to the community, and in Germany that means
presenting - technology driven - a long term strategy,
scalability, flexbility and extensibility of the product at
management level as well as at developer level.
On the other hand Zend must take care not to catapult itself out
of the PHP community, which is very tightly integrated in
Germany, having a few key websites (such as
http://www.php-center.de, http://www.koehntopp.de/php,
http://www.php-homepage.de, http://www.dynamic-webpages.de) and
the high traffic newsgroup news:de.comp.lang.php, soon to be
complemented by a new MySQL newsgroup. While these locations
cover mostly low end PHP usage, these are the pools where PHP
know-how is created and the regulars at these locations are the
key drivers of the German PHP scene. Zend marketing currently
does not tap these reservoirs at all - send them to the clue
train, this is a large scale loss of communication potential.
Tobias followed up with a short note on PHP "world domination",
but time was to short for him to say much.
Next in line was Andre Christ presenting the Abstract
Presentation Layer, a high level C++ extension of PHP, allowing
easy form creation and validation automation. From the questions
after the presentation and the afterglow talk, this was easily
the most heavily underrated presentation on the congress, as
Andre was presenting an unfinished, but very clean library
design, which has a few, but obvious and easily corrected
shortcomings and much potential. The APL is a LGPL library, and
is a project you should watch, unless you decide to get
involved. Also, keep an eye on twisd AG, these people are good.
Unfortunately for Uwe Steinmann, Andre's talk created the need
to talk, again at the coffee tables, and so I missed most of
"PDF as an alternative to HTML" as well as large parts of the
finish - except for Bjoern Schotte's legendary "Bjoern Schotte
World Domination" talk, which transported hints at his site,
http://www.php-center.de/ as well as his QuickCMS product with
the subtle gentleness of a Ferenghi sensing the opportunity to
make some bars of gold pressed Latinum. :-)
All in all two days well spent. The congress served its purpose
very well, being an opportunity bind some faces to recurring
names, to learn about the state of art in the PHP community, and
to find out about the future direction PHP and Zend development
must take.
Thank you, Bjoern, and thank you people at Globalpark, for
organizing the congress and see you next year.
Kristian
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