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.

While not specifically about deploying PHP applications, Ian Barber's talk at the recent ThinkVitamin Code Management and Deployment Conference is packed full of good tips you can use in your web application deployment. He talks about everything from version control strategies, continuous integration, remote releases, package management, hotfixes and one of the most difficult things to do - rollback.

Still deploying sites and updates manually via FTP? This session will cover a number of automated deployment methods, best practice workflow for updating sites and fixing bugs, along with how to use staging servers, deploying to multiple machines, zips tars & scripts, packaged releases hotfixes, database changes, rollbacks and more.

There's tons of technologies mentioned, so you'd be better off going through his slides and taking your own notes. Unfortunately, a recording of the session isn't currently publicly available, but the slides are an excellent resource for those currently looking to better their overall deployment process.

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.

Lorna Mitchell has new post today pointing out the release of both the slides and the audio from a presentation she gave at the PHP UK conference (back in February of this year) about some of the best practices in API design and development.

I really enjoyed giving this talk, since I work so much with APIs and enjoy sharing my ideas. The audio is now online so if you missed the talk, feel free to have a listen. You can also see the slides (on slideshare) and also read the series of blog posts I wrote on this topic which originally inspired the talk.

Lorna has also posted slides for several other of her web services talks including Working with Web Services, PHP and Web Services and Archtecting Web Service Applications.

Ruslan Yakushev has posted some of the slides and the questions from their "PHP Performance on Windows" webcast the other day (a part of the TEKX webcast series). He co-presented with Mark Brown.

There were a number of question at the end of the webcast that we did not get to answer due to lack of time. This blog post provides answers to those questions.

Questions were asked about php_mssql.dll removal, .htaccess on IIS, adding wincache support for Zend_Cache, a Microsoft-developed toolkit for PHP and quite a few more. If you missed the presentation, you can see the slides here and keep checking back on the TEKX webcast page for the video/audio download.

Whether you were at this year's Dutch PHP Conference or not, you might want to know more about the great talks given there. The techPortal has made it even simpler by linking all of the presentations in one place for you.

The Dutch PHP Conference 2009 is in the history books now but the spirit of sharing that went on there continues. [...] We will link to the slides as we are made aware of them by the speakers. Not all speakers will release slides or audio and that is fine with us. (it is, after all, their content and we respect that) However, for those speakers who do release them, this list will serve as the official repository.

So, check out the listing of the slides as they're added and, of you attended the conference, don't forget to give feedback for the presenters by clicking on those orange "thumbs up" bubbles following each talk.

If you've been enjoying the pre-php|tek 2009 webcase series but have been wondering where the video and slides for the presentations were, BlueParabola has what you need!

After long wait, we've finally gotten things together and have slides and some of the video available for the php|tek webcast series.

Presentations posted so far include Keith Casey's look at project management, Matthew Turland's web scraping talk and, most recently, Tony Bibbs' look at using Propel.

You can find out more about the webcasts (and sign up for upcoming ones) on this page from the php|tek website. There's still time to register for today's event - the second part of the "PHP and Flash" series from Lee Brimelow.

The PHP Quebec 2009 conference has just wrapped up and some of the community have already posted the slides from their presentations. Here's a list so far:

• Chris Hartjes - Deployment is not a 4 Letter Word
• Fabien Potencier - Symfony 2
• Ilia Alshanetsky - Common optimization Mistakes
• Marcus Borger - Objects for the Masses, PHP Extension Writing, Worst PHP Practices
• Stefan Priebsch - Managing the Software Life Cycle of PHP Applications
• Chris Shiflett - Security Centered Design
• Sebastian Bergmann/Stefan Priebsch - PHP Code Review

And some wrpaups...

• Marcus Borger

Keep an eye on this post for more slides and summaries as they're posted.

The PHP UK conference happened this past weekend and already the summaries and blogs pointing to slides have started coming in. Here's the posts so far:

Summaries/Wrap-ups

• Stefan Koopmanschap
• Federico Cargnelutti
• Rob Allen
• Leonid Mamchenkov
• Marc Gear
• Lorna Mitchell

Slides Posts

• Stefan Koopmanschap - Myphp-busters: symfony framework

Keep checking back for more details from the community as they're posted.

In a recent post Ant Phillips looks at another bridge that's offered to combine PHP with another language (besides the Java one) - a link over to Groovy.

Up until recently the PHP runtime was treating Groovy code just the same as Java. Anyone could compile a Groovy class to Java class files using the Groovy compiler. Those class files could then be dropped into a Zero application and used in PHP through the PHP/Java Bridge. The problem is that Groovy isn't the same as Java.

He compares the way its works when its Java-esque and how it should work as combined with the Groovy bridge. The code is much cleaner and, by making it more readable, makes it easier to maintain in the future. You can see some slides from a presentation hes given on the subject here.