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.

On friday, the conference started with a tutorial day. There were 5 tutorials: PHPUnit by Sebastian Bergmann, XDebug by Derick Rethans, Zend Framework by Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Symfony by Fabien Potencier and Stefan Koopmanschap, and Advanced PHP: Design Patterns by Dennis-Jan Broerse. The tutorial day was attended by 150 people.

The day started pretty chaotic; the van that contained the registration badges arrived late, so there was hardly enough time to prepare the registration desk, so we had a small queue, but eventually everybody got in. The other issue we had was that we had asked the venue to provide power because people would bring there laptops. We started off however with only 4 outlets per room, and with 30-40 peple in the room, that obviously is not enough. Luckily, before the first break we were able to get a whole cart with power supplies, which we hastily dropped in the rooms. It looked a bit like a cable jungle, but at least people had juice.

For the rest, the day ran smoothly and according to plan, we had a nice lunch around noon, and overall feedback on the tutorial day was good.

At 17.30, we went to the Werck bar where we had dinner with the Ibuildings crew and a bunch of Zenders (Matthew, Gaylord, Zeev, Steven and Howard). At 20.00, DPC conference people started showing up at the bar for the friday-night conference social. Dinner ran a bit late but around 20.30 we were able to join the other DPC visitors in the bar, just in time for the Netherlands-France euro2008 match. The party was great, the match was superb (NL won by 4-1), and the atmosphere was awesome. Speakers like Terry Chay and Derick Rethans were dressed up in orange (Terry even had created a custom orange shirt with php code on it) and we all had a great time.

At around 23.30 I went back the hotel area with Derick, Terry, Scott, Mike, Helgi and one of the phplondon guys who's name I can't remember. Derick and Terry walked back to their hotel and I had a last beer with the other guys.

I made some final adjustments to my slides for the opening address (which for some reason is more difficult after more than a couple of beers) and at around 1.30 I went to sleep. At 6 I woke up, checked if my adjustments were ok when sober, made some more changes, went over the slides for my afternoon presentation, and got prepared for the main conference day.

The main conference day went even smoother than the tutorial day. Registration was properly prepared and went smooth, everything was nice on schedule (with just a small exception caused by a crashing macbook right before the closing keynote), and I think we were able to organize a very nice conference (feedback is appreciated!).

We had some php|architect books for sale during lunch. We had about 50 books because we had no clue if people would be willing to buy them, but we ended up selling 45 books within the first 20 minutes. We will bring a little more next year.

An interesting observation was that the PHP Women had trouble getting people to take their promotional shirts. Where at the PHPLondon Conference they were gone before they knew it, in Amsterdam the men were a little hesitant to wear a shirt with the word 'women' on it (by the way only 1% of the DPC audience was female, which is startling). Together with Matthew Weier O'Phinney I was selected as the girls' official 'Booth Babe', a kind of supporting role with a special edition of the shirts, but I got some really weird remarks on that. I think the phpwomen have to change their marketing to cater to a continental european audience or at least to get the men involved. (Suggestion: s/babe/hunk; babe is usually only used for the female version over here).

When the conference ended, there were drinks and snacks in the lounge, giving people the opportunity to discuss the presentations and talk to the speakers.

And then the day ended with a final speaker's dinner, and that was the end of the Dutch PHP Conference 2008.

There are already over a 100 pictures on flickr, which give a nice impression of the conference.

I'm already looking forward to organizing it again next year! (mark June 12 and 13 in your calendars!)

This year alone, there are already 6 major (>50) events; 3 done, 3 to go. Here's an overview:

Dutch Joomla Days

2-day conference on the Joomla CMS.
When: April 4 + 5
Location: Utrecht
Attendees: 250/day
Presentations: 36 (both Dutch and English)
Price: € 65
Website: http://www.joomladag.nl
Reviews: Joomladays site, various authors (Dutch), Danny Peeters (English)

pfCongrez

Conference organized by the Dutch PHP usergroup phpFreakz.
When: April 12
Location: Maarssen
Attendees: 250
Presentations: 4 (Dutch)
Price: € 17.50
Website: http://www.pfcongrez.nl
Reviews: Dimitri van Hees (Dutch), Peter Paul Koch (English), Rool Paap (Dutch), Ruud Alberts (English)

PHP Business Seminar

Seminar targeted at promoting PHP to businesses and enterprises.
When: April 22
Location: Vianen
Attendees: 120 (70 main seminar, 50 tech-evening)
Presentations: 6 (5 Dutch, 1 English)
Price: free
Website: http://www.phpseminar.nl
Reviews: Cal Evans, Stefan Koopmanschap, Christiaan Lam, Remi Woler (all in English)

Kings of Code

Web development conference. Not focused on PHP alone but on web development in general (JavaScript, Ajax etc.; PHP is covered by a CakePHP talk)
When: May 27
Location: Amsterdam
Attendees: 300
Presentations: 6 (English)
Price: € 160 (early bird discount of € 30 before May 1st)
Website: http://www.kingsofcode.nl

Dutch PHP Conference

2-day PHP conference (1 tutorial day, 1 main conference day)
When: June 13 (tutorials) + 14 (conference)
Location: Amsterdam
Attendees: 400 (conference day) / 150 (tutorial day)
Presentations: 17 (English)
Price: € 150 (main conference day, tutorial day sold out)
Website: http://www.phpconference.nl

Eduvision PHP Conferentie 2008

Afternoon PHP conference on various topics.
When: October 23
Location: Apeldoorn
Attendees: 80
Presentations: 4 (Dutch)
Price: € 99
Website: http://eduvision.nl/phpconferentie

(if I forgot an event, feel free to post it in the comments.)

It is interesting to note that we also see a growth of PHP usage at the larger IT corporations. The PHP Business Seminar for example, was an event jointly organized by us and Sogeti. Sogeti is one of the largest IT companies in the Netherlands. When we first talked to them 2 years ago, they had a campaign called 'From now on, only do Java', and now for the second time they've organized a PHP event with us. This growth in big companies is a nice accomplishment for PHP.

P.S. The program for DPC is now complete, see the post on our company blog.

P.P.S. Ibuildings is on twitter now. For blog, conference and other event updates, follow us.

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 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!

Also, I was annoyed with having to consult many different resources when I plan a business trip.

So I began building frekfly, my own little mashup.

Version 1

The first version, which took me only a few hours to built, offered only a google map, basic weather information, flickr images and currency conversion. To built this, I used the following tools:

• PHP5's Webservices API, which made it possible to consume webservices with only very few lines of code.
• The Flickr API to retrieve images
• Google Maps for the map display
• Some webservicex services, for weather, geographical and currency information.
• Zend Framework, mainly for its Zend_Service_Flickr class, which makes consuming the flickr rest service easy.
• ATK, for its debugging console and file-caching.

It's really easy to construct an application like this in PHP, given that a few lines of code give you access to any available webservice. The first version of the app did not even use a database, everything was retrieved from webservices and cached in files.

Version 2

Then, I wanted more. When I travel for work, I usually need hotels that are located close to the airport, so I looked for a webservice that could provide me with hotel information. I requested access to the API at expedia, but they have a manual approval process and I'm still waiting for a response. Luckily the people at booking.com were a lot more helpful and they provided me with an iframe based interface to their hotel reservation engine, and they even styled their pages according to the design (well ok, that's not really a design yet, is it ) of frekfly.

The only thing missing from their API was the ability to search by latitude and longitude, which was my close-to-the-airport criterium. However, they kindly send me a dump of their hotel database including the coordinates.

So in version 2 I had to add a database, and I used the database abstraction layer of ATK to easily access it.

Version 2 is what is currently online. I may post some code examples of the webservice interfaces later on, because I found this to be a very instructive experience.

Future plans

In the next version, I want to add other nifty web-two-point-oh features to the site, including the ability to have visitors enter comments and details, so they can help complete the airport information. (such as 'are there better restaurants before or after security?'). Here I plan to use the JSON functionality of Zend Framework, to make this very 2.0-ish.

Issues to deal with

One of the major disadvantages of mashups is the fact that you're dependent on external systems. At night, the site is hardly usable because webservicex is very busy at that time and gives a lot of timeouts. Of course, this is countered by caching, but I can't cache every output for every airport on the planet, so caching is based on a 'retrieve the first time its needed' approach. So that's a disadvantage at this point.

Another interesting issue you have to deal with when writing mashups is standardization in naming, or rather, the lack thereof. For example, I consult 2 different webservices and a few file based airport resources to get airport information, but each of them use different names for the same airport. Where possible, I use the official 3-letter IATA code, but some of them do not support that.

So instead of actually matching data from different sources, you have to use a more probabilistic approach, where you say "hmm, 'Schiphol Airport Amsterdam' and 'Amsterdam, Schiphol' are probably the same airport.

I had a similar issue with the weather service; it doesn't support latitude and longitude, so what it does is 'guess' what the nearest weatherstation is, based on the airportname, the nearest town name, the biggest city close to the airport and finally the country capital if all else fails.

These are all issues to deal with in a mashup-based application, and I would encourage everyone to built a mashup at some point, because it teaches you things that you don't usually encounter with standard mysql+php based websites.

We've decided to make it a yearly event, so mark June 14, 2008 in your agenda for the next instalment.

I did a presentation on business frameworks (and ATK in particular) at the conference, the slides of which can be found on slideshare.

The DPC was not the only new conference, last monday I visited the first Zend UK PHP for Business Seminar organized by the London office of Zend. This conference was targeted at 'business people', and featured speakers such as Zeev Suraski, Harold Goldberg (Zend's new CEO), David Boloker (IBM) and Clint Oram (SugarCRM).

I had the honor of presenting a talk on 'enterprise PHP development' on the seminar. Since it was targeted at business people, I explained the development process of PHP applications using metaphors. What may be obvious for most of us, isn't so obvious for a lot of people and companies, so I found it important to talk about the process surrounding PHP development, and not just plain PHP coding itself.

Below are the slides of this talk:

This is the 7th presentation I did in 3 months time; I'm beginning to get the hang of this.

Apparently there is much demand for such a conference because we already sold out all tickets one day before the early bird discount ended, and our line-up wasn't even complete at that point.

We just confirmed the last addition to the program: Derick Rethans, from Xdebug and ezComponents fame, will give a talk about Test-driven Development.

The complete program is available on the conference website.

We've worked hard the past few weeks to pull this together, and I am happy to announce that on June 16th, we will have the first instalment of the official Dutch PHP Conference!

The conference is oranised by Ibuildings with the help of Zend, and is targeted at a Dutch audience. We are still finalizing the program but we already have quite a lineup, with speakers such as Cal Evans, Lukas Smith, Kevlin Henney and Gaylord Aulke (all present in the PHP card deck ).

In total there will be 12 presentations divided over 3 parallel tracks. The Dutch PHP Usergroup will arrange an exhibition area where open source PHP project can show off their projects.

Following the example of the UK PHP Conference we are keeping the price low, at 75 euro if you register before the first of June. Registrations will start on monday, but you can already have a look at the conference web site:

http://www.phpconference.nl