There was one particular thing I noticed though: the amount of people using macbooks. I know that it's a popular notebook, but almost half of the laptops there was a mac!

See picture:

4 of the visible laptops are macbooks, and there were even more not directly visible on this picture.

Maybe my own laptop got scared of this, because it decided to die during the second day of the conference. It's probably a motherboard failure and repair will be expensive, so I'm thinking of buying a replacement.

Now I'm stuck with a dilemma. Should I buy a macbook?

Regardless of it's Cool Factor, what makes a macbook useful for PHP developers? What are features that are good, what are features that are hard to get used to for a developer switching to mac? Any ideas?

One thing I will miss if I buy a mac is the ability to write on it; I had a tablet pc and since I got it, all my notes were digital. So the alternative is a new tablet.

Tough choice!

(If you're curious, the picture was taken during Stephan Schmidt and Frank Kleine's talk on Annotations. Interesting presentations, although I have my doubts abusing the docblocks for declarations)

Most reviews I've read so far were either of speakers or visitors. I hope to provide a little bit different perspective as I had a booth for ATK.

We arrived on monday, on the management day. The exhibition was officially on tuesday and wednesday, but optionally we could already exhibit on monday. So we drove off at about 7.30 in the morning, to arrive in Frankfurt at about noon. We could only check-in to our rooms from 15.00h, so we decided to setup our booth first.

Our booth was located quite nicely. Whereas some projects were located in a kind of corner room, we were located right outside that room, next to Pearson VUE and O'Reilly, on a spot that a lot of people had to pass by on their way to the sessions. That first day was meager though. Not too much managers were walking around, and the people attending the workshops did not really walk around at the exhibition much.

We had lunch, where we were joined by Daniel Convissor, and had a conversation about what he did, what we did, etc. When telling him about Achievo he appeared to be a user of Achievo, so we discussed some features he would like to see in Achievo. He was in a bit of a hurry though, as his laptop had broken down and he had to arrange a new one before his sessions on wednesday. Later I read that he didn't manage to get a new one. A pity, I would've borrowed him mine for the session had he asked.

Anyway, for the exhibition, monday wasn't too interesting. In the evening we visited Frankfurt to have a glimpse of the city center (which for some reason reminded me of Gotham City, with its tall black buildings with yellowish lighting).

Tuesday was excellent, we had a lot of visitors at our booth, and those who saw the demo were enthousiastic. Some wondered why they hadn't heard of us before. To them I can only say: help us spread the word .

At dinner, we had a conversation with a manager from MySQL AB, who gave some interesting insights into their business model. This was interesting, as we, like MySQL, employ a dual licensing model.

Later that night in the PHP lounge, I had a beer and a very nice conversation with Danne Lundqvist (triggered by this blogpost). I showed him ATK, and he showed me a preview of his wysiwyg editor. What made this conversation interesting was that he seemed to share some of the same ideas that we try to incorporate into ATK, such as code minimalisation, and he also took pleasure in writing generic, clean code. When his editor is finished a bit more, I will integrate it into ATK.

Wednesday was interesting too. A lot of attention again at our booth, although somewhat less than tuesday. At about 15.00h we drove home.

(In between demo's, I managed to add some features to ATK which I will put in 5.4 once I released 5.3)

In general, it was a nice conference. One worry though; I spoke to a lot of people who visited sessions, and while some of them were good, there were also complaints about a lot of them (ill prepared, too shallow, too specific). I can imagine that it's hard to get to exactly to the right depth, as there is a great variety in audience, but if a presentation is not prepared well enough, that's really a pity. People pay a lot of money to visit a conference. The least the speakers can do is prepare. But in general, the responses were positive.

This was my first time in Frankfurt, whereas I had a booth twice at the spring edition in Amsterdam. What I noticed about that was that the Amsterdam conference seemed to be a little bit more 'international'. There, we had a lot of visitors from France, Spain, Italy and other countries, whereas in Frankfurt most were German.

All-in-all, it was a pleasure being there. The hotel was nice, the people were nice, the conference was nice. See you at the Spring Edition in Amsterdam next year!

I have to get some sleep before I depart, but I'm currently preparing my laptop for the demo's. I've started this much too late this time, but luckily, Sandy prepared all the demo's so all I have to do is do a 'cvs -q update -d' and I should be up and running. Currently installing Open Office 2.0 to showcase the open office template engine we've added to ATK recently.

On to a different subject. This week, one of our users wrote a nice testimonial about his experience with ATK. It's always nice to receive compliments, but messages like this are of course extra motivating.

Still, last week I amazed myself in how stupid I can be.

ATK can be downloaded with a demo application. To aid the developer, most pages in the demo application have a 'view source' link. What was I thinking when I used __FILE__ to determine the source file and pass that to a viewer through the url, not checking the validity of the filename? I created a 'Local File Include Vulnerability': any logged in user was able to tamper with the URL, and for example use ?file=/etc/passwd to view any file that the webserver has read access to.

I've read numerous blogs about the subject, read slides and articles from security experts such as Chris Shiflett, but still, one unguarded moment of late night, sleep-deprived hacking and bang, there you have it.

Luckily, it was only the demo application, which is usually not installed in public places, and also, you still have to log in to actually be able to exploit anything, but still, given how relatively easy it is to make such mistakes is discomforting.

(A fix was immediately released of course, at http://www.achievo.org/atk/download you can find the 5.2.2 version which fixes this issue).

There is also some positive news about ATK. Boy wrote a new howto on custom record actions. This shows how to do a lot more with your app than the usual CRUD operations.

Guido did some excellent work last week on an Open Office template engine. It is now possible to generate Open Office documents right from an atkNode. As usual, documentation comes second, so it's undocumented right now, but it is already available in the nightly build. If you want to experiment with it, we can help you on IRC or in the forum. We will give a demonstration of this new functionality at our booth at the PHP Conference in Frankfurt next week.

Finally, Sandy created a new CRM module for Achievo. It's far from finished (it only works with Achievo 1.1, not yet with the development version), but it's a start. This one is available from Achievo's nightly build page.

I'm going to experiment with this. If it works in the common browsers, I'm going to put it in ATK. Dynamic contents for listattributes, recordlist paging without reload, frameless application with dynamic menu loading, I think the possibilities are endless, or, as is the slogan at Ibuildings, 'even the sky is no limit'.

Conference wrapup
The PHP Conference was nice. The second day had a lot less traffic than the first, but we still had some nice conversations. Several people came around for a second chat about ATK or more questions.

One of the features that people particularly liked in the demo, was Peter's atkMetaNode. The one-line employee admin mini application came down to:

[code]
class employee extends atkMetaNode
{
function employee()
{
$this->atkMetaNode(array("type"=>"employee", "table"=>"lesson1_employee"));
}
}
[/code]

(Ok, that's 7 lines, but I only count the ones that matter )

This was a very nice part of the demo, after first showing off with the 10 line demo. I should encourage Peter to finish his howto on the metanode. Sandy already created a 'lesson6' about the atkMetaNode for inclusion in the ATK demo application.

Near the end of the day, I had a short chat with IBM's Dan Scott. He suggested adding IBM DB2/Cloudscape support to ATK. It shouldn't be too difficult. I'm thinking about setting up a test server to create the drivers. atkDb2Db should not be hard to create, and creating an atkDb2Query for the SQL query abstraction would require some experimenting, but sounds doable. It might bring us a whole new set of users, and give DB2 users an easy way to start a web application.

I look back on a very fruitful day. Many people saw our demo, and reactions were overall very positive. What I particularly liked was when people visited us, then went away to attend a session, and afterwards came back with more questions. It's nice to see that the demo got them thinking about ATK during the sessions. This happened 3 or 4 times. I hope we can welcome many new users in the near future. Several people told me they would join the mailinglist. I'm looking forward to meeting them there.

Our neighbourws at the exhibition where the people behing the Dutch PHP User Group. This was a nice opportunity to become a member, so I did.

Our other neighbour was Oracle; they showed me a PHP plugin for their JDeveloper java IDE. It looked very interesting. Tomorrow I will try to give them a demo of ATK. I'm very curious what they'll think of it, as it runs on Oracle databases too. I've not yet visited the booths of Weaverslave, PEAR, Xoops and Maguma. Both Weaverslave and Maguma have a php-editor/IDE. I'm wondering how they compare to the Zend IDE I'm using. Will have a look at that tomorrow.

During sessions, when there were no visitors at the booth, I've worked a bit on an atkExportHandler for ATK. By setting the flag NF_EXPORT in a node, the user will see an 'Export' link in admin screens, to export records to a CSV file. It's a bit rough, but maybe I have some time tomorrow to finish it.

Tomorrow is the second and last day. I'm already looking forward to it!

VertrigoServ seems ideal for demo setups.
It's easy too. You just need to start one program and it will start Apache and MySQL for you. The default configuration runs out of the box. (The only change I made to the default config was to disable register_globals in php.ini, as this is a possible security risk).

VertrigoServ is a bit lacking in documentation. It took me a while to figure out the default MySQL root password (requires configfile digging, and in case you're looking for it too, it's 'qwerty'), but once I got past that, the ATK demo ran like a charm.

I've got some 4.5 hours of sleep left before I have to wake up to depart for the conference. If I find some time during the conference, and a wifi connection, I will try to update the blog with info from the conference.

Stewart James has been kind enough to set up a Wiki for the ATK community. Its purpose is to have a place where the community can help eachother with ATK issues. I invite you to create an account and contribute to the documentation.

We will have a booth at the International PHP Conference Spring Edition, in the Amsterdam RAI on May 3 and 4. If you're visisiting the conference, you're welcome to stop by to talk about your ATK experiences.

Finally I need to make a correction to a previous entry. Two entries ago, I talked about the Zend IDE and its template feature. I said that there was a free personal edition. A reader told me he couldn't find it on the Zend site. Well, there actually was such an edition once, but it doesn't exist anymore. The 'Standard Edition' is a good alternative. It's only $99 and that's well worth it if you code a lot of PHP.