Once again this year, the PHP community gathered at Disneyland Paris in the New York Hotel for the PHP 2024 Forum.
A number of new features have been incorporated into this year’s event, with the first conferences starting later than usual to facilitate access by public transport. Following feedback from previous editions, a new room has been opened with more technical conferences and a 2-hour workshop slot.
From my point of view, there was a good balance between technical / learning / general culture conferences (not necessarily useful in everyday life but there are always things to learn). Even on subjects I already knew, it allowed me to expand my knowledge.
Label LEAD
The AFUP and Disneyland Paris have joined forces to monitor best practice in relation to LEAD certification. This is based on 3 ambitions:
- Zero waste
- Low carbon
- Positive social impact
https://www.green-evenements.com/label-lead
Conferences
As far as conferences are concerned, here’s a short summary of the ones I attended and which deserve a mention.
What’s new in PHP 8.4
I couldn’t begin these 2 days without talking about PHP and what’s new in its next version. Among the ones that stood out for me were :
Asymetric Visibility (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/asymmetric-visibility)
Property hooks (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/property-hooks)
New features on the #[\Deprecated] attribute (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecated_attribute)
Derick RETHANS finished by talking about the new release cycle. From now on, each version will have security fixes for 2 years (previously 1 year).
PHP/Parallel: Significantly speeding up execution times
Thierry KAUFFMANN based his talk on feedback on an orchestrator (https://github.com/arawa/divims) for Big Blue Button (https://bigbluebutton.org), a virtual class software. The requirement was to be able to manage peak workloads (such as a large number of morning meetings and to switch servers on and off according to demand).
There was a strong demand for asynchronous management of calls from PHP to the servers. For example, they went from 100 SSH connections in 2s to 3 min. All based on the PHP Parallel extension (https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.parallel.php).
PMU: a composer plugin for managing Mono Repository in PHP
At the start of the afternoon, we were talking about monorepository. And more specifically, a composer plugin (https://github.com/soyuka/pmu) that automates their management.
Lightning talk and A little closer to the stars
The first day ended with a series of 5 lightning talks, including one on a library that lets you make calls to Redis using the same syntax as Doctrine (https://github.com/clementtalleu/php-redis-om).
As usual, the last talk of the day was an ‘alien’ one: Albane VEYRON told us about her childhood dream of becoming an astronomer and invited us to follow our dreams.
The adventure of an HTTP request – or the devs’ way of life
Day 2 kicks off with a talk by Pascal MARTIN on the ecosystem surrounding an HTTP request.
Welcome to the Age of Static Analysis and Automated Refactoring
Matthias NOBACK talked about static analysis tools such as PHPStan and code refactoring tools such as Rector. These tools can be used to improve code quality.
Can we imagine a future without AI? (Innovation put to the test by Frank Herbert’s Dune)
For this final conference and 2nd ‘alien’ Vincent BONTEMS returns to the universe of Dune, which is devoid of AI, and draws a parallel with the rise of AI in our time.
Conclusion
This wasn’t my first PHP Forum, and year after year, this is an event that knows how to renew itself and listen to feedback. The room dedicated to technical conferences is a welcome innovation.
The 2 days ended with the announcement of the AFUP Day: This year there will be 3 simultaneous cities, Lille, Lyon and Poitiers. See you on 16 May 2025!
