This was my first Zend Conference and I enjoyed it immensely. The topic was “Creating Advanced PHP Applications”, and the two talks that I presented were “Upgrading to PHP5 with Style” and “Planning a PHP5 Rewrite”.

This year ZendCon was held in the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California. After driving down from LA with Jon Bauer, I called ahead to make sure that we meet up with some of the other guys for the obligatory pre-conference dinner.

As always, for regular speakers the conferences are more about meeting up with other developers than the conference sessions themselves. This being my first US-based PHP conference I was happy to finally meet up with some of my friends, many of whom I”m communicated with over the last few years but hadn”t had the opportunity to meet in person. One of the highlights of this conference was the extensive expo floor and the wealth of companies that were exhibiting.

On the second day of the conference Facebook opened the exhibition with a party to showcase their development platform to PHP developers. Facebook remains one of those platforms which I know exists, but have yet to visit the site in depth. Hearing about the development API and the possibilities presented through the SSO system gave me a good reason to explore the platform and see how it can be used in our projects.

PayPal/Ebay also had a great booth and, being a long-time PayPal user, it was great to talk to the developers. Not only discussed was the future of PayPal surpassing traditional merchant accounts and using the Paypal API to interact directly with PayPal, but I also got a firsthand account of the bomb blast that shattered the first floor windows of the PayPal headquarters earlier that day.

Another interesting company that was exhibiting was a new search engine called krugle.com. Krugle is a search engine for developers, and using the slick AJAX interface you can search through their extensive source code database and find snippets of specific code. Once you find what you”re looking for you can annotate it and/or share it with other developers.

This year IBM was a big sponsor. The main focus in the IBM booth was Systems i and the integration with PHP and running opensource applications on i5/OS. During the initial keynote five popular open source applications were demoed running on i5/OS and Zend Core for i5/OS. I always enjoy seeing the IBM machines, which they usually bring to these types of conferences, however they were missing from this expo hall. However, IBM made up for this by throwing a Halloween poolside pirate party, featuring “real” pirates, great food, and lots and lots of beer.

Oracle installfest ran parallel in an adjoining room to the pirate party, and as a long-time attendee of the installfest I was interested in hearing about the brand new Oracle Unbreakable Linux. The team had some beta copies of the software, but due to some incompatibilities with their laptops had not been able to demo it, so I took it upon myself to test the installation and became the first person outside the Oracle development to run Oracle Unbreakable Linux. This time I earned my t-shirt!

Sometime during the pirate party a group of us moved into the bar with Drew (from Microsoft) and after more than a couple White Russians the karaoke started, the pirates joined us, and the party got going. In the picture on the left are Ben Ramsey, Drew Robbins and I singing the obligatory “American Pie” karaoke rendition (my apologies to anyone who was in the crowd).

Back to the conference.

My sessions were held on November 30th, the 2nd day of the conference, and I talked about “Moving to PHP5 with Style” and “Planning a PHP4 to PHP5 Rewrite”. Moving to PHP5 with style was my main talk and covered aspects of the PHP5 migration which are not usually covered by PHP5 talks. Instead of discussing the main new features of PHP5 I talked about how to change your codebase to not only utilize the advanced features which PHP5 presents, but to use the advanced tools that PHP5 makes possible. These tools covered unit testing, restructuring your codebase to allow for a service oriented approach and abstracting your business logic into definable units which could then be documented, unit tested and used in other applications such as automated webservices.

The second talk discussed the pros and cons of rewriting an existing codebase in PHP5. This talk drew heavily from Joel Spolsky’’s “Things You Should Never Do” rant, as well as my own experience in the industry. This talk was in the business track and focused more on the implications huge projects like a code rewrite has on the future and life-cycle of a project.

Once the conference was done Jon Bauer and I headed up to San Francisco for lunch and then drove back to LA where I caught my 16-hour flight back to Frankfurt.

To end this long entry, I”d like to thank the guys at Zend for the great conference. Cal, you did a great job as the Emcee (even though nobody laughed at your jokes, tough crowd). It was great finally meeting everone who I have known for so long online but has never ventured to my side of the pond, and the total highlight was meeting my all-time favorite author, the one and only Scott Sigler! Thanks for joining us, your (two) fans were honored by your presence at our humble gathering! Jon, thanks for being my ride, had a great time sightseeing LA, SF and everything that’’s in between! Looking forward to seeing you all again next year.

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