International PHP Conference Amsterdam: PowerWorkshops

Welcome again! This year’s PHP Conference Spring Edition provides you with a bunch of first-class talks from the PHP experts.

The first day of this three-day event starts with some PowerWorkshops. I’m currently sitting in the „XML & WebServices with PHP5 and PEAR“ workshop hosted by Tobias Schlitt and Stephan Schmidt, both very active members of the PEAR developer community. After solving some technical issues with the screen size and the beamer, Tobias started the workshop with an overview about the workshop day. The first chapter was about introducing every attendee of the workshop himself, telling about his experiences with XML and WebServices and what he expects from this workshop.

After the introduction Tobias continued with a „buzzword parade“, displaying acronyms and words like XSLT, XPath, DTD, ReST, UDDI and others. Following a short introduction of how XML documents are written and what „well-formed“ means, they continued to provide an overview about the old-fashioned SAX parser and how you could parse those documents. „XSLT sucks“ was a message that Tobias transported very well. I share this opinion and would encourage you to take a look at PEAR::XML_Transformer.

For the coffee break, I left the workshop, doing some hacking. I will join the workshop again when the topic SOAP will come up – I have lot to say about how PHP5’s SOAP extension works and how you have to deal with it in order to get it work right with .NET and Java based SOAP clients (using SoapVar(), using PHP classes for each complex type, doing explicit typecasting etc.).