Hard to believe. Last Tuesday we held the 30th meeting! of our PHPUG. It is nice to see that a small core group of really competent developers from the surrounding area has emerged, and that the whole evening takes place in a relaxed and fun atmosphere. The great thing about these evenings is that friendships are slowly forming, and there is always something to laugh about. This evening also had its share of amusing moments. Anyone with a sense of humor who is interested in PHP and/or related web topics (we have even had Ruby developers...) is warmly invited to our meetings.
As has become customary at recent meetings, we organized the evening around a motto or overarching theme. This time the topic was "NoSQL".
My colleague Achim Liese opened the evening with the theoretical foundations of "NoSQL". Buzzwords such as NoSQL, BigData, MapReduce, ... were explained and demystified with solid technical expertise. Practical examples clearly illustrated why traditional databases are no longer suitable for some use cases, or simply fail. But we also took a closer look at NoSQL's weaknesses and the history of some systems, and why the trend is moving back toward SQL after all.
After the basics came my contribution to the evening, which also featured PHP code. Using MongoDB, I was able to show that PHP is at home in the NoSQL world too. Overall, my impression is that the programming language matters less and less. Complex end-to-end solutions today consist of many technologies and a mix of languages anyway.
I have made my slides available on my blog.
What I found exciting was watching replication being set up live with four mongod instances, populated with data by a PHP script. Using the Mongo shell, we then successively had other servers in the mini-cluster elected as master. The PHP script kept running the entire time and waited until a new master had been negotiated. Even "killing" a master with a kill signal could not stop our script.
My code examples are available on GitHub at the following URL:
https://github.com/cmuench/mongophp-presentation/tree/master/Examples
At the next meeting, we want to get back to hardware (Raspberry Pi, Arduino) for the first time in a while.