After a long long time, Bangalore’s PHP community is back in action. Today saw 30+ people attending a PHP meetup at Bangalore Alpha Lab in JP Nagar. It was organized by Chakrapani who also co-organizes the monthly Drupal meetup in Bangalore. It was excellent to see the PHP community back in action – lots of new faces but hopefully, here to stay. There are more photos at the end of this post.
The first session of the day was “PHP Advanced Debugging Tricks and Techniques” by Prasant. The session mentioned classical approaches to debugging (obviously var_dump) and xdebug. Prasant then went on to provide an excellent overview of the debugging stack which is part of Z-Ray (Zend Server). He covered various features of the tool that allow you to inspect the overall request, server state, variables, etc… He also covered a bit of Continuous Integration with Jenkins with multiple servers running on vagrant. Pretty cool session.
This was followed by “REST API in Real time and CodeIgniter way to do it” (sic) by Sachin. Again, a great session. My favourite thing about this was that he covered a lot about best practices for API’s. The actual implementation, which was using CodeIgniter, was very bare. I really like that he stressed more about the best practices of designing an API rather than just building something blindly.
We had a discussion round after this where we took everyone’s questions. Yours truly (that’s me) covered a bit about the new features of PHP 5.5, mostly about generators and co-routines. There were couple of announcements for open positions (we’re hiring) followed by general networking.
It is great to see the PHP community back in action and I was very happy to see a packed room. We are planning to move to a bigger place if the trend keeps up. Please keep your suggestions and ideas coming. Use the comments form below or directly at the meetup page. I am looking forward to sessions and discussions on modern PHP development, specifically the style prevalant in this PSR and composer era. I hope to see you in the next meetup.