Paul Osman

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...

Well yesterday was day one of ZendCon 2008. Actually, the conference proper started today, yesterday was just tutorials.

So far I'm pretty impressed. I attended the PHP Developer Best Practices tutorial in the morning and the Quality Assurance in PHP Projects tutorial in the afternoon.

The Best Practices tutorial was a little broad and most of it was focused on topics that were pretty common / basic. I'm not sure exactly what I wanted to get out of it, but for somebody who already uses an SCM system, who already tests (although not as much as I should) and writes api documentation it wasn't the most informative tutorial.

Sebastian Bergmann's QA tutorial was excellent. Of course, as the primary author of PHPUnit, I assumed Sebastian would know what he was talking about and I was right. He offered a really good, in depth look at PHPUnit and covered some of the newer features. He also covered Selenium and specifically Selenium RC in quite a bit of detail.

Looking forward to more sessions... the day of tutorials was a great start, can't wait to see what the conference proper has to offer.