Introducing Django - Calling all Web Developers with Deadlines

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Django is a mature, Python-based web framework designed for non-trivial data driven applications. Described as the "web framework for perfectionists with deadlines", Django is designed to help you build high-quality web applications in record time.

With a unique architecture enabling serious code reuse, combined with a thorough templating toolkit purpose-built for web development, and an automatic administration site that actually works, Django is an extremely suitable framework for a wide variety of projects. After nearly five years of development, Django also has a fantastic community and greater depth of available resources than most PHP frameworks.

While getting started with Django is relatively straightforward, it can be quite a jump from other web development technologies. In this talk, I'll explain the fundamentals of Django, and demonstrate some of the features that make it a convincing solution for web development, despite being a world apart from existing approaches. I'll also include a brief demonstration of building a typical web application.

State of Play: PHP in 2009

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PHP has come a long way in its fifteen year history. From templating on steroids, to simple CMSs, forum and blog engines and now enterprise scale Java-style applications, PHP - both as a language and as an ecosystem - has been constantly evolving. So where do we stand today? In this presentation, The architecture, design decisions, and code of various open source PHP applications, as well as proprietary solutions will be demonstrated.

With the release of PHP 5.3, the PHP platform now includes an extremely feature-rich language capable of rivalling many enterprise solutions. With every new language release, approaches to PHP - both architectural and development - are constantly evolving and can potentially alienate PHP veterans.

Today, typical PHP applications make use of namespaces (or pseudo-namespaces via static), dependency injection, extensive database abstraction layers (especially using the data gateway pattern), plugin hook systems, and autoload-powered folder structures, to name a few. Every new PHP application has access to the cutting edge, but with this level of evolution, it's easy to lose track of what exactly the cutting edge is.

In this talk, I'll explore the current state of play for PHP web development, demonstrating samples from current open source codebases, as well as proprietary applications. I'll demonstrate some of the design decisions made, coding styles employed and development approaches evident.