April 27th, 2010

This April, we're pleased to welcome special guest and Facebook Open Source Advocate Scott MacVicar speak on what could be one of the more significant developments in PHP in recent memory - HipHop for PHP. HipHop is a specialized and highly optimized version of PHP that serves the massive traffic of the very hip Facebook. So yes - hop over to this meeting and stay hip with the latest PHP trends.

HipHop transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then compiles it using g++. It allows developers to continue writing complex logical directly with PHP but leverages the speed benefits of C++. HipHop is more than just a theoretical exercise and currently powers the majority of Facebook servers. This session will cover using HipHop and some of the code changes required to use it.

Scott MacVicar has contributed various extensions and improvements to the PHP core over the past few years. If something is wrong with fileinfo, JSON or SQLite3 it's likely something he did. He is also the current President of the PHP London Usergroup and presents frequently at conferences on databases, caching and scaling.

Scott is also the admin for the Google Summer of Code program and has written numerous PHP articles. When not connected to the internet, Scott runs marathons and cooks!