Today’s 4Developers conference in Kraków is being organised for the first time. The organizers plan to make it the biggest event for software developers in Poland. Therefore, we had to attend this conference.

The event is well organised and there are quite a lot of visitors. More importantly, up till now all the presentations have been really interesting. A little drawback for the international guests is the fact that most of the presentations are in Polish.

We are half way through the conference and I am happy to conclude that we seem to be on the right track with GOYELLO. We are already using or close to finishing the implementation of the advised software development best practices.

It was nice to meet some Dutch “colleagues” as well. Ivo Jansch and Stefan Koopmanschap of ibuildings presented their opinions about enterprise-proof software development. Ivo showed the audience that scripting languages like PHP are ready to be used for enterprise solutions. It seems rather strange that most leading internet portals are based on PHP, but that it is still not considered to be a sufficient language for enterprise (web) application development. I think we can conclude that we both agree about the fact that PHP is fully capable of serving enterprise applications when you are using the proper development practices.

Stefan’s presentation, about The power of Refactoring, showed the main difference between rewriting and refactoring of the code. On a very abstract level the difference is that refactoring improves the readability, performance and maintainability of the code without changing the behaviour. Rewriting means changing the functionality of the code, which needs special attention related to changing test cases, documentation etc.

We are curious what the afternoon session is going to add.