In case you weren't able to make it (or missed the live stream) Rasmus Lerdorf gave a presentation last night at Etsy as a part of their "Code as Craft" series. They recorded the session and you can watch it here.

He talks about a few things:

• the history of the PHP language
• the state of PHP currently
• what's coming up in 2012
• and touches some on the upcoming PHP 5.4 features.

You can find more about their "Code as Craft" series (and other videos) on the Etsy page.

Sebastian Bergmann has shared a presentation he originally gave at an Etsy event covering some of the history behind the popular PHPUnit tool and the development it's been through.

When Noah Sussman asked me to give a Code as Craft Technology Talk last week when I was consulting for Etsy I immediately said yes. [...] Just like with a talk that I gave last year, I suddenly had a chain of associations in my head that I just had to follow. And down the rabbit hole I went once more ...

He talks about the origins of PHPUnit (and mentions a few other tools), the move from PHP4 to PHP5, a change in version control from SVN to Git and features of the tool including mock objects and data providers. He also notes that not all tests are "good tests" and how, sometimes, backwards compatibility breaks are a good thing.

Fabien Potencier of the Symfony project (framework) recently made a presentation at the Symfony Day conference and answered the question "what is Symfony2?"

When I ask people what Symfony2 is for them, most of them say something along the lines of: Symfony2 is a full-stack web framework written in PHP. Some also add that this is an MVC framework. And some others add that this is a decoupled framework. This is all fine and correct. But my definition is a bit different. Let me tell you what it is and why I think it matters. Symfony2 is really about two different things.

His "two things" are simple - first that Symfony2 is a "reusable set of standalone, decoupled, and cohesive PHP components that solve common web development problems" and second that the framework is, based on these components, a full-stack framework. He also answers a common question about the framework - is is really MVC? He explains that the framework is less about adhering to a design pattern and more about being useful as a HTTP framework (request and response). He finishes off the post with some thoughts on the framework's place in "the enterprise", innovation, reusing standard, well-tested tools and some reasons why to choose Symfony for your next project.

In the "DevOps" section of DZone.com today Mitchell Pronschinske has posted the slides for a presentation he gave at the WebTech 2011 conference titled "DevOps for Developers". It gives a good perspective for those used to the coding side of things on what's out there for the server an beyond.

A presentation entitled "DevOps for Developers" was given at the WebTech 2011 conference and now the slides are up online for all to see. I'll summarize the show and let you know where the better slides are so you don't have to flip through the whole thing. It starts out on an introductory level, but then it gets into some tools and techniques that are talked about less often.

Technologies mentioned in the presentation include more familiar development tools like PHP, Apache, HipApache, Gearman, NoSQL and Memcached. There's also some examples of more "devops" things like Vagrant, Puppet and WetWare.

On DZone.com today there's a new post from Krzysztof Kotowicz sharing a presentation of his about protecting your application from SQL injection.

The materials teach how to use prepared statements, how to escape and write secure stored procedures. Many PHP projects are covered - PDO, Propel, Doctrine, Zend Framework and MDB2. Multiple gotchas and caveats are included. I discuss why escaping is usually the wrong choice, which practices to avoid or follow and how stored procedures sometimes offer no protection at all.

The presentation (as posted to Slideshare) starts with some of the basics - what SQL injection is and an example of how it could be used to bypass security. He covers how to use prepared statements in each of the technologies (with code snippets), methods for escaping data and how to create stored procedures that are protected from the same threats.

Bastien Labelle has posted a new (tongue-in-cheek) post to his blog today about a presentation he and a friend of his recently gave at a conference - Why PHP is so Much Better than Ruby.

Of course, saying that PHP is so much better than Ruby is pure bullshit, and this talk is, as I hope you guessed, a big big sarcasm. Trolling apart, I think this talk is also quite interesting, since somehow it shows some of the weaknesses of Ruby and its ecosystem.

Included in the post are their slides and a brief transcript of the main points they mentioned. Also interesting are some of the comments mentioning the typing issues the talk discussed and the fact that popularity isn't the same as quality.

As mentioned in this new post to his blog Jeremy Brown has put together a presentation he calls "A Conversation about REST", a discussion that centers less around the implementation of REST and more about the concepts needed to fully understand it.

REST is a set of principles and not a specification, so as such you have freedom in how to develop your API. This freedom can lead to confusion though, as it's hard to find concrete examples of its implementation. This presentation explained what REST is and also presented a variety of topics and questions you will certainly come across while implementing your API.

You can watch a video of this great presentation (as taken at a Club Ajax meeting in Dallas) here and can follow along with his slides off of SlideShare. He also links to a great image that gives a flow overview of the possible paths a REST request could take.

In this recent post to his blog John Congdon looks at some of his local user groups - Orlando and Daytona Beach in Florida - and how they handle their meetings and groups differently.

I am a member of two PHP user groups. Each one runs a little bit differently. I am looking for feedback from other people in other PHP user groups to find ways we may be able to make these better. he East Central Florida PHP User Group (Daytona Beach area) is new/restarting. [...] They seem to be more geared towards teaching new PHP developers. [...] The Orlando PHP User Group is quite different. They lean towards more presentation style meetings. Someone proposes a topic, and then someone volunteers to be the presenter.

He asks for comments from the community as a whole, wondering what he can do and what other groups in similar situations have done to help grow and improve their group. Comments on the post include suggestions of a more traditional approach over the mentoring aspect, a possible mixing of the styles and using tools likee Google Moderator to pick out the topics people are most interested in.

In a new post to his blog Josh Holmes has written up a summary of a talk he and Mark Brown (also of Microsoft) gave about running PHP on IIS and how good the performance is. The summary is a result of their session at this year's Zend/PHP Conference.

Mark Brown and I did a talk at ZendCon last week on how well PHP runs in IIS and more specifically, some things that you should do in order to make it run really well on IIS.

They looked back at the history between IIS and PHP - a bit rocky at times - and how, with IIS7 and improvements to FastCGI, this relations has changed for the better. He mentions WinCache, URL Rewrite, the PHP Manager for IIS and the PHP Interoperability effort Microsoft has started.

Happen to need both ASP.NET and PHP running on the same IIS server? Josh Holmes (and Mark Brown) have you covered with this new presentation posted to Josh's blog.

I got a question the other day about running both ASP.NET and PHP on the same server and whether or not it works. The short answer I gave is "Yes". The longer answer, I'm going to give here. In point of fact, both ASP.NET and PHP work really well on the instance of IIS. They can't share session state but otherwise it's a very peaceful existence.

The slides from the presentation are included in the post. There's also a full tutorial on how to get things set up correctly so that PHP and ASP.NET can play nicely on the same machine.