Debugging - Rules and Tools

Finding and fixing bugs is a major chunk of any developers time. This talk describes the basic rules for effective debugging in any language, but shows how the tools available in PHP can be used to find and fix even the most elusive error.

Practical Applications of Zend_Acl

Access Control Lists are a tool that allows us to map permissions to objects - within Zend_Acl this maps to a hierarchical arrangement of roles and resources.

This talk will follow through the basic use of Zend_Acl and steadily build a series of practical examples to illustrate the different methods of creating and enforcing an ACL for an application. This will include how to implement some of the more complicated hierarchical relationships and advanced conditions through the use of assertions. We will also cover the design considerations of where to attach the ACL, with the differences between applying it to controllers or models. With a functioning ACL in place, we will examine some of the methods for persisting the list and whether that list should be static or dynamic.

Alongside the straight functionality of our code, we will also examine how to effectively unit test it, improving its performance and analysing the level of security that has been created.

Database version control without pain

We’ve all read the textbooks and are using version control systems for our code, but our databases are left out in the cold. Every team has their own workaround, ranging from patch files to SQL snippets in the bugtracker, but none is really robust.

There isn’t a silver bullet solution, but this talk will show you different approaches and solutions that you can use in different kinds of projects, helping you to handle the changes in your database structure in a more sophisticated way.