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:

• 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 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.

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.

Since I'll be opening the 'dedicated languages' track, which has a mixed audience of PHP, Ruby and Python developers, I revamped my 2008 Enterprise PHP talk into "Dynamic Languages in the Enterprise" and extended the scope to include Ruby, Python and Perl. Let's see how that works out.

I have never been to Poland before (despite having some Polish roots several generations before me), so I'm excited to be there.

Ibuildings colleague and friend Stefan Koopmanschap will also present, he's doing his 'The Power of Refactoring' talk. Other speakers in the same track are ThoughtWorks's Neal Ford and Ted Neward.

If you are from Poland and know me from the PHP community, come and say hi!

Since the advent site doesn't have a comments feature, feel free to post any comments you might have below.

I'm very impressed with the quality of the advent calendar this year. Articles like yesterday's 'The Framework as Franchise' by Paul Jones are really insightful. This year, there are hardly any articles with code samples. That's a good thing, there are enough of those on the regular sites. So this year's advent is one to treasure, it will be a nice collection of insightful articles on a wide range of PHP related topics.

For an overview of the articles so far, go here.

The day to day reports can be read on our company blog so I'll just give a more general opinion on the conference and pick two favorite talks.

In many ways, Zendcon08 was an improvement over Zendcon07 (which already was a great conference, but it's nice to see Zend was able to improve it even more). Most notable for me was that the community aspect was bigger than last year. The Uncon (sessions organized by the community outside the main conference) was more prominent and more popular, and featured several outstanding sessions.

Also, the evening events got a lot more visitors than last year. The Yahoo! party was generally considered to be less than last year however, mainly due to the fact that unlike last year, there was only one free drink and any drinks afterward had ridiculous prices. But the ZCE party on monday, the general reception on tuesday and the meet the team session on wednesday were very nice and I got a chance to talk to a lot of people.

The opening keynote was still a bit 'corporate', with Harold, the CEO from Zend talking mainly about PHP adoption in the enterprise and some case studies. I liked it, but 'enterprise php' is kind of my thing; I heard several developers say they rather have something more technical. Another way they made the conference less corporate was that they dropped the vendor keynotes they had in 2007. Since those tend to be overly commercial, it was a good idea to skip them.

My favorite presentation was "The State of Ajax" by Ben Galbraith. I hadn't expected that actually; from the title I thought it would be Yet Another Ajax talk, but it was very insightful and Ben did a great job explaining current and future trends. Most interesting thing I got out of it was getting to know Fluid, a 'site specific browser' that lets you treat webapps such as Gmail, Facebook, Google Calendar etc. as separate desktop applications with even nifty things such as Growl notifications or 'new mail' indicators in the OSX dock. I immediately installed it on my macbook and I love it.

My second favorite was Terry Chay's uncon session on 'Making Frameworks Suck Less'. I hope Terry will convert that into a real talk, as it was even better than his 'The internet is an Ogre' talk: this time he had a lot more valid points and he did a better job of getting them across. (On the other hand, if he converts this to a real talk, probably the charm of running it as an informal uncon session using just a flip-chart will be lost.)

The next conference I'm looking forward to is php|works where for the first time a PHP conference is combined with a Python conference. It will be interesting to see how that works out. But first I'll be visiting Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference in October. Although that is not likely to contain a lot of PHP, I was invited by Microsoft because they want to reach out to the PHP community (which was also obvious from their ZendCon presence), so let's find out what they have to tell us.

In Dublin, on September 10, I'm doing an Enterprise PHP talk (it will be similar to my ZendCon talk so if you can't make it to Santa Clara this month, you can see me in Dublin).

Information about these events can be found on the Ibuildings website.

Last week, I also got the confirmation that I will be speaking at php|works in Atlanta in November! I'm very excited about that. I visited the php|tek conference earlier this year, and if php|works is anything like that, it's going to be great, and I'm proud to be able to speak there!

The presentation I will be doing has grown into a sort of companion or introductory talk for my book, describing the life cycle of PHP projects from the early start to completion, including tips on tools to use in each part of the process.

I'm really looking forward to Zendcon. Last year's was great too. A lot of people to talk to, and an enormous amount of sessions. Of course there will be a lot of Zend promotion, but can't blame them for that. They organize it, and we did a lot of Ibuildings promotion when we organized DPC. That's the privilege of organizing.

The only annoying thing is that Zend pays the speaker's airfares in the form of a check. Check's are hardly used anymore outside of the US, and as such, the fees for processing one are ginormous. php|architect once mailed me a check which cost 20% of the amount on the check to clear. Zend: welcome to the internet, please consider electronic wire transfer or paypal.

Registration for Zendcon is still open. You can register here.