@TheKeyboard Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

I’m sitting in the airport in Orlando, waiting for my flight to Charlotte (which is delayed about 40 minutes as this point) so I thought I’d talk about what I saw on the second day of CakeFest.

PhpNut’s keynote was, well, PhpNut was having problems with his presentation (his notes for the slides weren’t showing up for him) but he did a good job of talking about where he started out with CakePHP and his thoughts on where it’s going. Specifically he mentioned how Cake 2.0 was going to be PHP 5 only, and more likely 5.3 specific as they planned on leveraging the upcoming support (or is it in there already?) for namespaces in PHP. Sure, you can use it on older versions of PHP 5 that don’t support it, but you won’t be able to benefit from the namespaces.

Then we broke down into two “tracks”, API and GUI. After the keynote I sat in on Nate’s talk about building REST services with CakePHP 1.2, which was very informative and showed me just how hard Nate had been working to make those changes possible. However, the end of the talk featured some fireworks as one of the crowd members took exception to Nate characterizing SOAP as being (and I’m paraphrasing here) stupid and useless. During the lunch break afterwards, the discussion about SOAP vs. REST continued at the table I was sitting it, with the same person claiming that once Web 2.0 got “serious” that it would absolutely require SOAP.

Well, I dunno about you but I’m of the opinion that just because something is using SOAP doesn’t make it serious. REST is great for lots of different applications, and to say that REST has no place in any sort of “serious” web application is just, I dunno, elitist and pig-headed. Look, the truth of the matter is this: if you want to talk to other applications in different programming languages and web environments, well, you have to use whatever API’s the *creator* of that application has chosen. If it’s REST, don’t start bitching to me about how you want SOAP. If I don’t want to create a SOAP interface to my app, you are shit out of luck. This idea that there is somehow a split between “serious” and “non-serious” web applications is just snobbery in another form.

So, after lunch I watched Felix’s talk on CakePHP + jQuery and World Domination. One of the things I like about going to these conferences is that I am always impressed by the level of skill of the people I meet. I feel like I’m constantly the stupidest person there (which may be true) and their youth and energy and out-and-out mad skillz make me appreciative of all the tools they create so lazy bastards like me can build things for money. My hats off to those guys.

For the rest of the time I spent it trying to fixed a messed-up git conflict (I have no idea what I did but I’ll be more careful next time) and tweaking on some new features for the baseball web site, mainly consisting of refactoring some code to do the standings and learning to exploit the power of Set::extract (don’t worry Felix, you’re gonna get that email like I promised.

But of course, the best part of the conference is the people I got to meet and hang out with. I appologize to anyone I miss here, but I want to thank the following:

• Sonicbaker - easiest roomate ever, except for the fact you snored like a chainsaw

Felix, Tim and Timo - always good to hang out with the Germans and practice all those language skills I learned as a kid

• Travis Cline, Ryan Peterson, Neal the English Guy (or is it Neil?), Forrest - conversation was good and I’m glad I entertain you guys with my blog postings and flame-bait postings on the mailing list
• Mariano - your rousing stories of kidnappings and being shot at by 10 year olds in Argentina make me want to rush right down there!
• Jeff “Don’t call me phishy!” - despite all my efforts to have you do an edition of The Show at CakeFest, I left before it could happen…
• PhpNut - always good to talk to you even if the professional relationship didn’t work out we can still be nice to each other in social situations
• Nate - big shock to find you on the same flight to Orlando from Charlotte, and I always enjoy our conversations no matter what medium…and don’t take offense at you making fun of me because I’m from Kanuckistan
• and finally Garrett - thanks for inviting me to speak, thanks for taking care of me during a time when money is supertight, and I look forward to the next CakeFest in the US

Day 1 of CakeFest is winding down, so I thought I’d talk about today’s talks

First, Garrett “gwoo” Woodworth was they keynote, talking about where CakePHP came from and how he got involved with it both on a coding level and as project manager. He included a nice little shout-out to my posting about how “the devil’s in the details”.

Next up was Tim Koschuetzki’s talk about unit testing in CakePHP. I’m a lapsed believer in unit tests (as in, I believe in them but still find a way to not do them) and he did a great job of showing how to do them, with some neat points about how he extended some functionality in SimpleTest to help test web pages. As an aside, I also met Felix and while I’m a big guy, Tim and Felix are even bigger than I am. They grow them big in Deutschland these days.

After lunch Joel Moss gave his talk on implementing database migrations in PHP. I have experience with migrations from my Rails days, so I might investigate this for use with the IBL web site.

Then I gave my talk on using the Cake console. It was a little shorter than I liked, and I forgot to talk about how the baked views have pagination links in them as well, but it was pretty well received. All the pictures of my kids (who featured prominently in the slides) generated lots of laughs.

After me was a talk by Frederic Bollon about a CakePHP-specific deployment system he called Fredistrano. Interesting talk, and PhpNut talked about how he thinks it might a viable solution to the problem he faces in updating all the Cake-related sites.

Tomorrow has two tracks: API and GUI. Should be good…

I made it down to Orlando for CakeFest, and are sitting in my hotel room having had some beer and some food (bacon double cheeseburger at Denny’s) before crashing for the night. However, on the way up I did the stupidest thing EVER. The wife and I have two cars. For a variety of reasons, mostly owing to laziness on my part, I only have one set of keys for my car. Which is in the driveway. My wife’s car, is in the garage. I took my keys with me to Orlando. Dumb, dumb, dumb. So, I have to send my keys by courier first thing in the morning so my wife can actually, you know, drive around and do stuff while I’m gone. *sigh*. Like I said, dumb-dumb-dumb.

So, on Wednesday I’m giving my talk “Fake It Before You Make It” where I show people how easy it actually is to use the console to “bake” your application. I also thought I’d take the time to highlight some of the talks I’m interested in hearing:

• RESTful interfaces by Nate Abele
• Adding Common and Kung Fu UI Components to your CakePHP Applications by Marc Grabanski
• With CakePHP & jQuery to World Domination by Felix Geisendorfer

Of course I’ll be in other talks as well but those are the 3 I’m really looking forward to seeing.