NIX Solutions Held ThinkPHP Conference #11

ThinkPHP always means hot topics, interesting speakers, plush ElePHPants, and sweet coffee breaks. All of these and even more took place at the 11th ThinkPHP conference on April 17 at the conference hall of “Metallist” SC.

After a long break, Kharkiv PHP developers came together again to discuss some tricks of testing PHP- projects, RESTful API development secrets, and specifics of Hack’s production usage.

Taras Omelyanenko led off ThinkPHP #11 with the report titled “Symfony2: Developing RESTful API”. Taras told the audience about how API is designed. After that, about what bundles are used to speed up the development. Taras also described typically and recommended internal structures of the application, explored models’ validation and serialization. Moreover, the API testing was discussed.

The traditional coffee break. After that, our PHP party went on with Mikhail Bodnarchuk’s speech “Test an elephant! (peculiarities of testing PHP projects).” Mikhail, above all, explained why developers need to test and why tests can be not only modular. He also listed approaches to building test infrastructure and revealed the meaning of menacing words such as TDD/BDD/mocks/stubs. Mikhail briefly described existing test frameworks PHPUnit, PHPSpec, Codeception, Behat and analyzed Codeception in detail. He was also explaining why it is suited for testing PHP projects better than any other framework.

At the second coffee break, conference attendees had time to refresh themselves, drink another cup of coffee for an energy boost and discuss previous reports. The third speaker, Alexander Ganja, suggested the trending topic “Building better PHP – HACK (HHVM)”. In addition, Alexander spoke about workarounds in PHP, PHP 7, and what is wrong with the existing RFC. Then about type checking within HACK and strict mode, static types’ analyzer in Hack and asynchronous PHP – AsyncMySQL, AsyncCurl, and named his own “pros” and “cons” of using Hack in production. In conclusion, the last report has caused the most heated discussion, because although being exhausted after a busy evening, guests took an active part in debates and were in no haste to leave.

Thanks to all the ThinkPHP participants for an enjoyable evening among PHP like-minded people!