On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new episode from their Dutch PHP Conference 2009 recordings series, Rob Allen's talk on caching and performance.

More, now than ever, websites need fast response times and be able to cope under load. As web pages contain more and more dynamically generated content, the challenge is on for PHP developers to develop efficient caching solutions. This presentation will focus on using caching techniques that can be used in a PHP project to increase the performance of a web site

Rob's talk looks at a few different means for caching and gives some "before" and "after" statistics to show how much of a difference each of them makes. You can either listen via the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly.

On the IBuildings techPortal today there's another session from this year's Dutch PHP Conference (2009) - Maarten Balliauw & Kevin Dockx's talk on Silverlight for PHP developers.

This session covers the basics of Microsoft Silverlight and demonstrates how PHP developers can benefit from developing rich client-side components that run in the web browser using Silverlight and PHP.

You can either listen to this latest episode via their in-page player or get the mp3 directly.

On the Ibuildings techPortal website today they've released the latest episode in their series of talks given at this year's Dutch PHP Conference. This episode is a talk from Ben Ramsey about REST architecture.

Forget what you thought you knew about REST. In this talk, Ben Ramsey reintroduces REST, placing it under a microscope, uncovering each constraint that forms REST's crucial principles. Ramsey explains how REST is a style for network-based software applications, emphasizing scalability and efficiency through separation of concerns and taking advantage of the Web as a platform for rich Internet applications.

You can listen via the in-page player (complete with the slides) or you can download the mp3 directly to listen to whenever you'd like.

One the members of the PHP Women group attended this year's Dutch PHP Conference (Kana Yeh) and has written up some impressions she had about the three day conference.

This is the 3rd PHP conference I been to within a year; that is quite a lot for me! First the PHP conference in Apeldoorn by Eduvision, then PHP UK 2009 in London. Thanks to PHPwomen I could attend the most recent one: DPC09 by Ibuildings in Amsterdam. [...] I seem not to be able to get enough of it. But, what to do if there are multiple tracks with interesting talks at the same time?...panic? I didn't know what to do. With agony I had to sacrifice the one for the other. How do you deal with multiple talks at the same time that you both don't want to miss?

She lists some of her favorite sessions and summarizes the content for each:

• An intermediate talk about Caching for Performance (Rob Allen)
• State & Ajax - How to Maintain Browser and Application State in an Asynchronous World (Paul Reinheimer)
• Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications (Eli White)

Stefan Koopmanschap has a quick look at PHP's presence "in the low lands" around the Netherlands.

As my previous post shows, PHP is active in the Netherlands, and our user group is acting on that. However there's more beyond our user group in this little country!

He mentions the pfCongrez (April 15th in Maarssen, online registration required, about 17 Euro) and the Dutch PHP Conference (June 11-13th in Amsterdam, full ticket is 500 Euro) both with excellent sessions by speakers like Derick Rethans, Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Eli White.