So one day, Scott McNealy, founder and chairman of Sun, read in his morning newspaper how the use of Java was rapidly diminishing, courtesy of something called 'The LAMP Stack'. Furiously, he called his accountant.

Scott: "I knew this Java thing was a bad idea in the first place! I see only one solution. We need to buy this Lamp!"
Accountant: "Euh, LAMP is not a company. It's an acronym. It's Linux , Apache, MySQL and PHP"
Scott: "Then buy me Linux!"
Accountant: "But we still have this Solaris thing.."
Scott: "Then buy me Apache!"
Accountant: "That's a foundation. Nothing to buy there."
Scott: "Then buy me MySQL!"
Accountant: "We don't do databases."
Scott: "It's a database?"
Accountant: "What rock have you been living under?"
Scott: "Sweet. I can own the Lamp AND piss off Oracle at the same time!" (waves fake plastic magic wand) "Make it so!"

And so it happened.

Ten days later, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was reading the CIO Magazine, and read about this interesting thing called PHP, that according to the author you could use to write "WHAT?!". "WHAT?!", obviously a highly advanced and evolved version of "Hello World", caught his attention. So he called Bill Gates.

Steve: "Hey, you heard about this PHP thing?"
Bill: "Pee Age Pee? You're not that old yet, are you?"
Steve: "What? No, wait, it's a programming language, apparently better than ASP.NET."
Bill: "Who cares if it's better. I mean; we made the worst operating systems ever and still rule. (Checked out Leopard yet? It is SO cool.)"
Steve: "I don't know Bill... remember that internet thing that we didn't know about years ago? Kind of nearly missed the boat there."
Bill: "Right. Didn't we solve that in the same way? Worst browser, highest market share, that sort of thing?"
Steve: "Yes we did, but then we also didn't know about this 'mp3' thing until it was too late."
Bill: "We did manage to make Zune the worst player, but somehow we're not market leader. Guess we got sloppy?"
Steve: "Maybe it's just different times. Maybe we should have a different strategy."
Bill: "Ok, so let's just buy PHP then."
Steve: "It's not a company. But Encarta says it's written by a Rasmus Lerdorf."
Bill: "So let's hire him."
Steve: "Tried that. Didn't want to join. Can't blame him, works at Yahoo."
Bill: "Then I guess we'll have to buy Yahoo."

So it happened.

Two of the most controversial announcements of this month, and both appear to be part of devious plots to take over the LAMP stack. What's next? My prediction: Red-Hat buys Zend; Oracle buys Red-Hat; Sun and IBM join forces to buy Oracle, Microsoft buys Sun, kills IBM and peace is restored in the galaxy.

P.S. Can you imagine Microsoft running sites like Flickr? These guys invented MS Paint!

For the impatient, I've took only a few pictures, you can see them in my gallery.

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!

While preparing my demo applications for the PHP conference tomorrow, Sandy showed me VertrigoServ. It's a PHP distribution for windows with Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin. I used to use NuSphere, but that one comes without MySQL.

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.