Harold Goldberg, the CEO of Zend Technologies, started the day off with a talk called "Insights from the Experts: How PHP Leaders Are Transforming High-Impact PHP Applications". The talk was basically a run-down of how PHP is doing out there. (Answer: Fairly well!). There were a few case studies of larger companies using PHP (and of course Zend products) and a few reports / surveys / etc. Nothing particularly groundbreaking but it was good to start the day feeling pumped about being a PHP programmer...
Later on I attended "Tiery-Eyed", a talk given by a Zend employee, Kevin Schroeder on ... you guessed it, tiered application development. It was pretty decent, Kevin walked the audience through the creation of a micro-blogging application using a variety of different backend tiers. I left with an urge to create the smallest application I could think off with one SOAP backend, one XML-RPC backend and one REST backend.
The highlight of the day was Sara Goleman's talk on PHP Extension Writing. This was the most in-depth of the talks I attended and despite a few technical problems, the talk went smoothly. It was pretty broad but still managed to be quite inspiring.
The day ended with a reception in the exhibit hall. Free drinks and food is never a bad way to end a day...
