In this year's conference, we learned about the current state of PHP itself. Scott MacVicar, one of the core developers, explained how they are currently working towards a new version of PHP and since it hasn't been decided whether that will be PHP 5.4 or PHP 6, they have labeled it PHP 5.3.99 for now until a version is decided on. In any case most of the books that are currently already available for PHP 6 can be tossed away; PHP 6 will be entirely different from what it was going to look like when it was first planned.

In last year's conference, there was a talk on CouchDB, introducing a 'NoSQL' database as a response to relational databases often being a hassle when web data needs to be stored and manipulated. This year, we could see that NoSQL is catching on and becoming more mainstream. Matthew Weier O'Phinney, project manager of the Zend Framework, discussed NoSQL in detail, and MongoDB (Another NoSQL database) was mentioned in a couple of talks. NoSQL is definitely something to have a look at, and it might be useful even in existing projects. More info can be found on the Wikipedia page.

There were a couple of talks on web services, and services have become more or less a standard element of the PHP developer's toolkit. If you're still writing monolithic tightly coupled applications, then I can only recommend to start looking at services at your earliest opportunity (our white paper on Service APIs is a good start). Services help you create applications that are easier to maintain (because they are less tightly coupled), and they make it easier to reuse functionality across multiple channels (for example by exposing your functionality to an iPhone or Android application).

Every DPC has talks that are related to best practices for PHP development teams. Usually these are related to the actual coding tasks in a project. It was nice to see that this year there was more focus on deployment (with Harrie Verveer covering database patches/migrations and Rob Allen talking about 'stress free deployment') and architecture (Dependency Injection, data modeling). It is a testament to the increasing maturity of PHP development projects: it's no longer about code, there's a whole process surrounding the development of a PHP application, and in every area there are important lessons to be learned.

My final observation is that security is still something that every PHP development team should stay focused on. Chris Shiflett demonstrated how phishing attacks get more and more sophisticated. As PHP developers learn to fight the most common security risks, malicious hackers find more subtle ways to do things they're not supposed to. It's recommended that PHP development teams appoint a 'security champion' in their midst to keep an eye on developments in the field of security and to make sure that security checks are an integral part of your testing strategy.

It was great fun organising another DPC conference and I'd like to thank everybody who attended, gave presentations or helped make the event go as smooth as it did. If you were at DPC, I hope to see you again next year, and if you weren't, you have missed a great set of sessions and I can only recommend you come to next year's event! If any of the sessions sound interesting to you, stay tuned to techPortal, where we release all DPC talks as podcasts throughout the year.