Posts Tagged ‘conference’

I've been asked to post some updates on DPC2008.

The first results of the CFI have been announced. Most requested speaker was Derick Rethans. He'll be at DPC and present an XDebug workshop on the Tutorial Day, and a presentation about the ezComponents framework on the main conference. Most requested topic was a look ahead at PHP5.3 and PHP6. We've found Stefan Priebsch, experienced speaker and expert on PHP migration, to be willing to present this topic. On the main conference day, he will give an overview of the future of PHP.

There are 2 more slots to fill. We're already talking to candidates so expect some more speaker announcements soon.

The total line-up right now is: Zeev Suraski, Marco Tabini, Sebastian Bergmann, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Lorna Jane Mitchell, Derick Rethans, Stefan Priebsch, Fabien Potencier, Stefan Koopmanschap, Gaylord Aulke, Dennis-Jan Broerse and myself.

The Tutorial Day is almost sold out, there are about 20 tickets left, so hurry if you want to join one of the tutorials. For the main conference day, which has a bigger capacity, 40% of the tickets is sold right now. If you haven't purchased your tickets yet, you might not want to wait until the end, we expect to sell out (luckily not as fast as last year, but it will happen ).

Main website: http://www.phpconference.nl
Registration: http://www.phpconference.nl/register

Last friday was the third edition of the PHPLondon conference. I had the pleasure and honor of opening the conference with my 'Enterprise PHP' talk. (My slides are on slideshare).

I've attended the first PHPLondon conference 2 years ago, and it was great to see the progress that they made since then. The venue, the presentations, the catering, the organization, everything was improved significantly and contributed to a great conference. I'd like to thank Paul Morgan, Matt Raines and all the crew for organizing this conference. I'm proud that my company was allowed to sponsor this event.

And as with most conferences, the social aspect was even nicer than the actual talks. I've met many old friends, and was introduced to many new ones.

It started with the pre-conference speakers dinner, where I had some interesting discussions on a range of topics including music, PHP, DRM, web 2.0 and how social networks are changing the recruitment business, with Paul Morgan, Ian P. Christian, Toby Beresford, Jonathan Mills and Matt Raines. After dinner, we went to the Theodore Bullfrog pub where members of PHPLondon had just had a presentation on Imagick by Mikko Koppanen.

In the pub I had an interesting talk with vBulletin's Mike Sullivan about running a succesful commercial php project, and met Lorna Jane Mitchell for the second time in two weeks and got to know her better half Kevin.

For someone who lives in a country where hardly anybody goes to a pub before 23.00h, it's still a bit weird to see pubs in London closing at that time, but we went back to the hotel and some of us continued drinks and conversations in the hotel bar. Derick Rethans at one point used the phrase "Why does everything around me look green?" at which point I thought it would be better to look up my bed so I would have a clear mind the next morning. Had a final quick glance through my slides before I went to bed, but I actually fell asleep behind my laptop in the process, so I left that until the morning.

Friday was the conference day, which, as I mentioned above, was great. After the conference there were a few hours of drinks and snacks. Richard Harrison was kind enough to give me one of the famous blue Elephpants (will upload picture soon) and he told me about his new company, Pluggable, which looks very promising.

At the end, a group of roughly 35 went to the Bavarian Beerhouse where we had lots of German beer, German food and 'Dirndl' waitresses.

And that marked the end of a great conference. It's one I'm sure to visit again next year!

I'm proud to announce that we're organizing another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference, with the help of the great people at Zend. It will be in Amsterdam on June 13 and 14 this year.

Last year we organized it for the first time, and based on feedback from our visitors we have made several changes to this years event:

• We now have 2 days instead of 1 (1 tutorial day + 1 conference day).

• Last years event was sold out way too early so we increased capacity (still, don't wait too long to get tickets ).
• A new website with more relevant information, which will be updated regularly as we move closer to the conference. The new site is at www.phpconference.nl.
• We only fixed part of the program, and visitors can help finalize it (more on that below).
• The conference will be in English, because we had more visitors from abroad than we had expected last year.

So far, we already have been able to attract great names from the PHP community such as Zeev Suraski, Marco Tabini and Sebastian Bergmann. More will be added as we get closer to the conference.

To finalize the schedule, we want to do something different. Instead of the more common 'Call for Papers' where speakers can submit their talks, we're doing a 'Call for Ideas', where we want to hear from our visitors (or potential visitors) who they would like to see at the conference, or which topics they would like to hear about. We can't guarantee availability of speakers of course, but we'll try to match the requests as close as possible. Enter your ideas at the box in the bottom right of the website.

Oh, and for those who were present last year, this time we have a dedicated internet connection for speakers and a redundant beamer.

I hope to see you all in June!

Last week, I explained on our company blog that I'm a fan of the London PHP Conference since its first edition 2 years ago, so I'm really proud that this weekend I've been contacted to do a talk there.

The slot became available when Wez Furlong had to cancel due to unforseen circumstances, which is very unfortunate. I hope to be able to do a worthy replacement presentation.

My talk will be about the PHP development process, related to the book I'm writing for php architect. There are so many area's to cover there that I have no doubt I will be able to fill the one hour slot I have available.

More info on the conference can be found at the conference website. There's an early bird discount: registration is only 90 GBP at the moment.

I'm going to ZendCon this year.

First time I visit the conference. First time I visit San Francisco and first time I visit the United States.

Landed yesterday in the afternoon. I'm here with fellow Ibuildings-guy Tom and our girlfriends.

Today we went into San Francisco to do some sightseeing. Went to fisherman's warf, saw an airshow, did some shopping (both Tom and I did take european->us outlet converters, but we hadn't taken into account that some of our adapters do not support 110 volt

San Francisco is a very nice city with remarkably friendly people. Tomorrow we'll visit the Golden Gate Bridge & Park, and for next friday after the conference we've got tickets for Alcatraz.

I'm really looking forward to the Zend Conference. Meeting lots of old friends and hopefully a lot of new PHP enthousiasts. Sessions that I'm interested in are the ones from Matthew, Ilia, Eli and
Joel. There are many more I'd like to see; unfortunately I can only visit one at a time.

Some tips for those that haven't arrived yet:

• Tom is in the Hyatt (where the conference is); I'm in the Bay Landing Hotel about a 3 minutes walk from there, because the Hyatt was already booked for some of the days I'm here. However, it turns out that the Bay Landing Hotel not only is 80$ per night cheaper, it also has complementary breakfast (18$ in the Hyatt) and free internet (9$ in the Hyatt), so that turned out just fine.
• When we arrived, we took a taxi to the hotel. Today we discovered that one floor up from the taxi stand at SFO airport, there is a 'hotel courtesy shuttle' stand, with free shuttles going to most hotels in the region, including the Hyatt.
• When you do take a taxi, tell them 'Hyatt Burlingame'. Tom discovered that just 'Hyatt' takes you to the Hyatt in san francisco city center.

So, if you're going too, see you at ZendCon! And if you're not going, you're missing out on a great event!

"Oh no, yet another framework for PHP..."

Admit it: that was what you thought when you read the title, didn't you?

But rest assured, we haven't created a new framework.

But we did launch something.

For 7 years now, we've been working on ATK, and it has found its niche as a framework for developing business applications. Where some frameworks focus on providing components, and other frameworks focus on websites, ATK has more and more focussed on business apps: these internal applications that companies use to run their business. (And also often as an easy-to-build administrative backend to some webapplications).

ATK typically lives on an internal Linux or Windows server in an office or corporate environment.

This year, a specific set of circumstances led to a whole new market for the framework.

The most important in this respect was the release of Zend Core for IBM's System-i. "System i" may be relatively unknown in the PHP community, but it's the new name (they change it every few years) of what was once called the AS400, and if that doesn't ring a bell, it's the big machines that run all these enterprise 'green screen' environments of large retailers, factories etc.

Zend Core basically brings native PHP to the System i world. This means that PHP is now a valid alternative to Java, when modernizing all these enterprise applications, and creating a web frontend for them.

The fun thing is: about 90% of the apps running on System i are business applications. Data management, data flows, workflows, business processes. Things that ATK is good at.

So this provides a great opportunity for the framework.

The operating system running on System-i is called 'i5/OS', so the calculation we did was:

i5 + PHP + ATK = i7

Corny, granted; but giving it a new name (which seems to be relevant in the IBM world) gives us the possibility to make this a separate product range. i7 basically is ATK for i5, with native i5 drivers, and an extensive support package. For some reasons, in the big blue IBM world, 'free software' is considered evil, so we had to add a support package in order to be taken seriously.

The past 2 days, we have presented "the i7 Framework for System-i" at the System-i Expo in the Netherlands. We did 2 sessions of 50 minutes demonstrating the framework to IT managers, most of which hadn't even heard of PHP yet. And the results are promising. Not only for our little framework, but also for PHP in general.

Info on the i7 framework can be found at i7.nl. Currently in Dutch (because of time pressure before the Expo), but an international version will follow soon.