NZ PHP Conference - Highlights from Dave Clark & Thiago Almeida

Today SilverStripe developer Elliot Sawyer shares his highlights from two NZ PHP Conference speakers - Dave Clark and Thiago Almeida. 

 5 Highlights from Dave Clark on Rapid API development with Apigility 

Based in Sydney, Dave leads the new development team for 4mation Technologies and provides training services for Zend Technologies as a contract instructor. Dave organises the Sydney PHP User Group and founded the Zend Framework Sydney User Group.

1. Easily configurable, Apigility installs very easily: curl -sS https://apigility.org/install | php
2. Support for HAL-JSON
3. Anything beyond the basic setup requires fairly deep knowledge of the Zend framework and its coding conventions. How many developers have said “Very simple way to work, once you get used to it” at some point in their careers?
4. You need to manually map out your Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERD) in Apigility. SilverStripe and most modern frameworks generate the schema for you, and many-many tables specifically can be inferred by the framework’s naming conventions.
5. My takeaway from this is that Apigility is a great tool for existing projects with an immediate API requirement. However, choosing a framework that already has this functionality built in would be better suited. JSON and XML outputs are just the V in MVC.

 5 Highlights from Thiago Almeida on Microsoft Azure

Thiago Almeida works with the latest technology coming from Microsoft, especially supporting companies working with Microsoft Azure. He is also the local leader of the BizSpark Program for software startups and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). He is originally from Brazil, has been living in New Zealand since 2003 and works at Microsoft New Zealand on the Developer Platform Evangelist team.

1. I was expecting to see a demo of tools that ran only on Windows within Microsoft environments. Pleasantly surprised that Microsoft has come a long way and truly embraced open-source tools
2. Microsoft Azure is basically a massive hypervisor, that runs most flavours of Windows and Linux.
3. The data centre is hosted within New Zealand
4. I went into this talk wondering to myself if I could somehow run Silverstripe on the Azure platform. Much to my surprise, Thiago specifically demonstrated Silverstripe running within Azure.
5. Azure tools are all built with node.js, and is installable via composer