July 20–24, 2015
Portland, OR

Introduction to modern PHP

Josh Lockhart (New Media Campaigns)
9:00am–12:30pm Monday, 07/20/2015
Foundations F150
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 2 ratings)

Prerequisite Knowledge

You should have basic knowledge of the PHP language (e.g., variables, arrays, and classes), but that is all you need. We will use this knowledge as a springboard into modern PHP practices and techniques.

Materials or downloads needed in advance

You can come just to watch and listen. You can take notes with pen and paper. Or you can bring a laptop to actively participate with code in parallel with the tutorial.

Please visit and follow the instructions on GitHub labeled, “Before OSCON”.

Specifically, please install VirtualBox, Vagrant, and download a Vagrant box.

Description

This will be an intimate round-table discussion about modern PHP practices and techniques. It is aimed at PHP beginners (students or new developers), but it is also practical for PHP veterans migrating from PHP 4.×.

I will begin with a conceptual introduction to modern PHP, and how the ecosystem is evolving from one of monolithic frameworks toward a distributed ecosystem of modular components. I will talk about community organizations and standards bodies (the PHP-FIG and PSRs) that are steering PHP development.

I will also use my new book, Modern PHP (O’Reilly) as a guideline to demonstrate how to use modern PHP features like namespaces, traits, and generators. I will explore how to find, use, build, and share components via Composer and Packagist. I will touch on the important of testing, and how you can structure your code to facilitate testing with PHPUnit.

If time allows, I want to explore local development environments, specifically how to ensure your local environments closely match your production environments, and how to standardize your toolsets across your entire team with Vagrant.

Finally, I will quickly introduce Hack and HHVM and show why you would use them as opposed to PHP and PHP-FPM. I don’t intend to dive into any detail on these, but I do want to expose PHP developers to these wonderful alternatives and explain how and where to learn more information.

At the end of the day, attendees should feel comfortable and excited about implementing modern PHP practices into their next projects.

Photo of Josh Lockhart

Josh Lockhart

New Media Campaigns

Josh Lockhart created the Slim Framework, a popular PHP micro framework that enables rapid web application and API development. Josh also started and currently curates PHP the Right Way, a popular initiative in the PHP community that encourages good practices and disseminates quality information for PHP developers around the world. Josh is a developer at New Media Campaigns – a full service web design, development, and marketing agency in Carrboro, North Carolina – where he enjoys building custom applications with HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, Bash, and various content management frameworks. Josh graduated from the Information and Library Science program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008. He currently resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wonderful wife and their two dogs. You can follow Josh on Twitter, read his blog, and track his open source projects on GitHub.