• 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.

Joe had an interesting presentation, he kept it short and to the point, and had the majority of his time dedicated to Q&A. Naturally, being in a PHP audience, the questions were about Yahoo, Zend, Microsoft's open source policies.

The most important tidbits from this sessions were:

• According to Joe, Microsoft is not done talking to Yahoo. They'll need a way to align their cultural differences, but talks aren't over.

• Microsoft has no plans to buy Zend.

The second point was confirmed in Andi's keynote yesterday, so that's probably the truth. The first part however was new to me. Joe calls himself 'Microsoft's Opinionated Misfit Geek', which probably means that microsoft is able to deny anything that Joe states. But on twitter someone pointed me to this article which confirms this story.

There were also some discussions regarding how Microsoft and Zend are working together to improve PHP on windows, which lead to some comments from Derick Rethans and others that these improvements were closed source parts of Zend Core, but Stas from Zend argued against that and stated that all Zend's fixes to PHP are contributed back.

In any case, Joe's talk was a very interesting keynote that raised some controversy among the audience.

Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

Andi was not heckled by the audience, no tough questions were asked (only a handful of the audience had read the news anyway it appeared).

It's at 9.00 am PDT (18:00 CET), and you can enroll through the Zend site. (It's free )

Oh and it's live, so you have the opportunity to ask questions.

It's been 7 years since I started to work for Ibuildings. Back then, they were an average development startup, focussed on delivering web applications, and they were using this fairly new, experimental, open source scripting language called PHP3.

It's fun to see how a company can grow with a language. I've seen PHP go from PHP3 to PHP4 and later from PHP4 to PHP5, and in the meanwhile, Ibuildings' focus has shifted more and more from a development shop to a PHP service company. Companies that used to be our competitors, gradually became our customers. And we've grown from a 3 people group to a crowd of 48.

And I'm proud (and not too shy) to say that at the moment, we are the only 100% PHP service company in The Netherlands, with projects ranging from plain old development and outplacement, to training and consultancy (audits, development methodology implementation, architecture etc.). And promoting PHP in general, with events such as the DPC earlier this year.

Last year I was very proud when Zend made us their official representative in The Netherlands. Besides the fact that we can now sell Zend products and services, which is nice for our sales people, I was particularly fond of this, as it confirmed that we must have been doing something right.

And now we're happy to announce we're going to do something left.

Recently we've seen increasing demand for PHP services in the UK. The adoption of open source in the UK has been a bit slower than on the European mainland, but PHP is finally gaining momentum there.
And if there's a market for PHP, there's a market for PHP services.

So now we are not only 'Ibuildings.nl BV', but also 'Ibuildings UK Ltd', and we have a home in London. Whoot! PHP on the right and on the left side of the road.

We already have a small group there doing cool things with PHP. And we're happy to have bright people such as Gavin Lee Foster, the author of Xinc on board.

I'm not bragging entirely without a reason. We are hiring. We have job openings in both the Netherlands and the UK. And we have plans in several other European countries as well (servicing those primarily from the UK and NL for now).

So if you're above average in terms of PHP skills, have good communication skills, and you want to use those skills not only to develop, but also to help others learn to see the power of PHP, send us proof of your skills, and an up to date resume, and we'll be in touch.

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.

The green screens have mostly made way for more modern interfaces, but the servers that run them still exist today. Many of the applications on them have been modernized by adding a web-interface to the existing applications.

There are several ways to make a web interface for green screen applications, or 'RPG programs', as System-i developers call them; RPG is the programming language that they traditionally use on those machines, and it is complete abacadabra to most PHP developers.

For a while now it is possible to use Java to make webinterfaces on System-i, and there are several cgi based tools. And recently IBM and Zend have teamed up to port PHP to the i5/OS operating system. So far this port seems succesful; one of the reasons is perhaps that PHP is easier to adopt by traditional System-i developers than Java, which forces you to learn Object Oriented Programming. In PHP you can do OOP, but you don't have to. You don't even have to use functions, and this is a lot closer to classic System-i languages (although I would of course recommend any System-i developer moving to PHP to learn at least about procedural programming).

When running PHP apps on System-i, you can use the standard db2 database extension to access the db2 database, but alternatively you can also use the 'i5 toolkit' that is available in PHP on i5/OS. There are some subtle differences, and if you find yourself having to write PHP applications for System-i, it's good to know about how to use the i5 toolkit to use the db2 database. Harrie Verveer has written an article on this topic on our company blog. It explains one of the differences between the db2_* and i5_* functions, but it contains some sample code and as such is a nice example of how to use the i5 functions.

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

Zend, in an effort to better serve the Dutch market with a local presence, has selected Ibuildings to be their official representative in The Netherlands. This means that we are going to support the Dutch PHP community with the entire Zend product range, training and support offerings.

This is a big step for us, and I think it is a great reward for having provided professional PHP development services over the last years. I'm very excited about the partnership, the people I've met at Zend in the last months are all great people, and I think we will have a fruitful relationship for all parties involved.

You can read the official announcement in Dutch on our site here:

Dutch press release on ibuildings.nl

and in English on the zend.com site:

English press release on zend.com

I cannot disclose yet what we discussed there (expect some announcements soon), but I wanted to share with you what a great week we had, and what great people the Zenders are. Here's a report of our visit.

We arrived in our hotel (Dan Panorama) in Tel Aviv on sunday morning, around 3 a.m. When I woke at around 7, my head told me to turn around and get some more sleep, but I noticed light shining past the curtains, and I was too curious not to get up and have a look (I've never been to Israel before). When I opened the curtain, this was what I saw:

I couldn't suppress a 'Wow!' and I was wide awake. Since it was way to early to have breakfast, I went for a walk along the beach. Tel Aviv was nothing like I had imagined. It reminded me of Italy. Perfect weather, nice people, great!

That sunday was Jewish New Year's day, so we didn't have to work yet, and Idan and Uval from Zend picked us up and took us to Jerusalem. Although both of them apparently did not know the way (they nearly drove us to Gaza ), we eventually got there and they showed us around in the Old City in Jerusalem. Christian places, Arab places, Jewish places, a nice mix of cultures and beliefs. They also introduced us to 'hummus':

Zend's Idan is on the left, Uval is on the right.

In the evening, Zeev invited us for dinner in Tel Aviv. Zeev is a great guy, and it was nice to meet him in person and to be able to talk to him about his ideas and about the past, present and future of PHP and Zend.

From left to right: Jan-Willem, Zeev, me, Idan, Tom and Ludo.

From monday to friday, we had lots of meetings and met a lot of people from Zend. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to take pictures there. All of them were very nice guys and girls, and we really enjoyed our stay. Roy acted as our Tel Aviv Bar Guide and made sure that we had good food and drinks in nice bars each night.

The last night, we went out in Tel Aviv Ports, where Uval made a waitress get on a picture with us, to prove at home how beautiful Israeli girls are:

On saturday morning, after a nice game of pool where we beat Uval and Idan , our trip was over, and we went for the airport. Several hours of security checks (by far the toughest checks I've seen on airports so far) later, our plane took off.

I look back on a great week, where we met interesting people, and have come to know Israel as a very nice and welcoming country. Before we came, Uval told us "you will experience first hand the difference between CNN and reality", and that was very true. Israel was a lot more beautiful than I had imagined.

I'd like to thank all the people at Zend we've met, and especially Idan and Uval, who acted as our personal guides to Israel and Zend in particular. And ofcourse Zeev for inviting us to dinner. I'm looking forward to the-things-I-can't-talk-about-yet and I will make sure I will visit Israel some time again. If only to give them a chance to beat us at pool (practise guys, practise; that pool table in your office is there for a reason )

The rest of the pictures I took are here. Ludo's pictures are here. Tom made some video's, which will probably be online somewhere soon too.