In my previous post I collected rumours about the opening keynote. Turns out none of them were right. The announcements were a beta of Zend Studio 7.1 and the beta release of Zend Server 5.0. The latter does get a step further in the enterprise direction with the addition of a Job Queue feature. I personally wasn't too impressed, Job Queues were already available in Zend Platform a year ago, and has since been overtaken by Gearman adoption. The new 'code trace' feature, which adds a kind of 'flight recorder' to PHP apps, looks very promising. Where past versions were already able to pinpoint where the problems were, this version will also give you a complete trace of every function call and parameter up to the problem. According to Andi Gutmans it performs fast enough to do that even on a production environment. I'm definitely going to check that out.

Today I had my own talk, "PHP and the Cloud". I had a godo 45 people in my session, which means that I owe the PHPBenelux usergroup a beer, since they showed up with 63 people for my Try-out last week.

The slides for my session are on slideshare, or you can browse them directly here:

In about 15 minutes, Andi Gutmans is about to kick off ZendCon 09 with his opening keynote. Yesterday during the tutorial day and this morning over breakfast, I've been polling people to see what big announcements they expect this year. "Microsoft buys Zend" and other fun but improbable announcements aside, here's a selection of what people think might be announced today:

• Zend Certification for PHP 5.3
• Zend Framework 2.0
• a Google AppEngine for PHP
• Zend Studio Certification
• Zend Server for OSX
• Zend Server Enterprise Edition

If you follow me on Twitter, I'll probably mention any specific announcements there realtime.

It's about 2 months until the next Dutch PHP Conference in the Amsterdam RAI.

It's a step up from last year, with one additional conference day. The speaker lineup is awesome: people such as PHP core developer Scott MacVicar, Andrei 'Unicode' Zmievski, php|architect's Marco Tabini, Xdebug's Derick Rethans, Zend Framework architect Matthew Weier O'Phinney, security guru Stefan Esser, Restful Ben Ramsey, Paul 'KISS' Reinheimer and many, many others. See the full schedule here. It will all be hosted by our own Cal Evans.

I don't have to speak this year, I just get to do the closing keynote together with Cal and Marco. That'll be fun!

From all the DPC's I've visited before, this is the one I most look forward to. It's also nice to see industry adoption of the conference, with big names such as Microsoft and Oracle sponsoring the event. (Microsoft has xboxes and tickets to Las Vegas to give away, see their WinPHP Challenge.)

Oh, and if you order your tickets before April 30, there's a significant Early Bird discount. Register here.

Last Saturday I was at the 4Developers Conference in Poland, as I mentioned before.

There weren't many PHP developers at the conference, and I could really feel the language barrier was a problem (many of the English speaking speakers drew much smaller audiences than the Polish ones), but I met some nice people (such as Neal Ford, Ted Neward and Raymond Lewallen), and in terms of speaker treatment this was by far one of the best conferences I've been to. If you get a chance to speak at one of the conferences that ProIdea organizes, don't hesitate and go!

The amount of speaker dinners/lunches, and long nights in bars with countless Vodka (in the form of so-called 'Polish Mad Dogs') and other alcoholic beverages, and in general the way speakers were supported was amazing! Andrzej, Anna and Magda: thanks for making this a great experience for us, and if you ever do a PHP conference, ping me

Here are the slides from my presentation:

Those who have seen me speak before will notice that this is a more generic version of my "Enterprise PHP" talk, catered to a mixed audience.