Come one come all to the first phpMelb in a year or so. We’re kindly hosted by Inspire9, our lovely venue sponsors, so join us at about 6.30pm at Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

Understanding PHP; a Guide to Security by Ben Dechrai

“The good thing about PHP, is it’s really easy to learn. The bad thing about PHP, is it’s really easy to learn” — me, all the time.

PHP has a mixed reputation. On the one hand, some people swear never to use it citing numerous security concerns. On the other, some people love it because it’s one of the more flexible and arguably easier to learn languages for web development out there. It should come as no surprise that this latter statement is, at least in part, the cause of the aforementioned concerns.

So why is it, despite these issues, that PHP is still one of the most supported hosting platforms and the underlying language that powers enterprise applications built on platforms such as Drupal and Symfony?

This talk is aimed at those who are relatively new to PHP and want to understand more about the issues that can cause them to come unstuck.

Ben will discuss the wider topic of HTTP requests and web servers in order to give a thorough understanding of the process by which a web request results in an HTML web page being returned to the web browser.

He will then go on to discuss the PHP interpreter’s modus operandi and configuration options, something that will help with anticipating security weaknesses in applications and attack vectors used by those trying to break the system.

Examples will generally be based on a typical Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack but will apply to most environments.

Automated testing with PHP: Why and how? by Michael Gall

The talk will start off with a discussion of why testing helps and why you should be doing it. It will then break down the few different types or styles of test and possibly (if it’s to a showable state) present a new library that helps doing tests that interact with a database.

Michael has been a freelancer-come-developer for about 2.5 years and before that as a worker bee with PHP for about 6 years. He’s really interested in solving real world business problems with (web) technology, and finds learning about different businesses and how they tick fascinating.

Question Time

After our two talks, we have some question time for anyone to talk about whatever they want to (group related) and then head off to a nearby venue for food (if still being served) and drink.