Sessions at PHP UK Conference 2012 about PHP on Saturday 25th February

Hugh Williams, the vice president of experience, search and platforms at eBay will us on a tour of key platforms used at eBay. From their Hadoop platform and data stores, to how PHP is used at eBay. Finally giving us some exciting insight to what's coming up that is cool at eBay in 2012.

We all have certainly learned data structures at school: arrays, lists, sets, stacks, queues (LIFO/FIFO), heaps, associative arrays, trees, ... and what do we mostly use in PHP? The "array"! In most cases, we do everything and anything with it but we stumble upon it when profiling code.

During this session, we'll learn again to use the structures appropriately, leaning closer on the way to employ arrays, the SPL and other structures from PHP extensions as well.

PHP 5.4 is about to be unleashed into the world; bringing some of the most exciting changes to the PHP language to date. Learn about traits, array dereferencing, indirect method calls using array callback syntax and improvements to closures and streams.

Additionally, we'll go back over the new bits in PHP 5.3, in case you missed them! Namespaces, closures and PHAR, oh my!

More often than not, web applications start off as a bright idea, which is then brought into realization at a fast and furious pace, with little eye for anything but result. Once all envisioned functionality is incorporated in the design and the project is launched, developers will be assigned to the next project.

Notwithstanding a few bug fixes, the final - yet essential - step of software development is more often than not, omitted: the security audit. Despite the fact that these checks are regarded as tedious and superfluous, practice shows that it is time well spent: numerous, often severe vulnerabilities come to light.

In his presentation, Sijmen Ruwhof will detail how to incorporate security checks into the software development process. He will also step through the implementation, and caveats of a security audit.

WordPress.com is an Alexa Top 20 web website, we get more than 100 million page views per day and 99% of the backend is PHP.

The service has seen tremendous growth in the past couple of years. The presentation will explain how the system and copes with the load. This includes explanation of the software stack, scaling techniques and sharing lots of experience and real-life stats.

Here are some of the topics covered:

• Load balancers
• PHP-FPM
• Page-level caching
• Object caching at the application level
• Fail-safe and inexpensive serving of terabytes of user-uploaded files per day
• Scaling MySQL databases
• Distributing SQL queries between many servers with HyperDB
• Asynchronous jobs system in PHP
• 20 seconds deploy on a thousand servers, tens times per day
• Staging servers for developers