RubyGeek

Its been over a week, seems like I just got back!

Since then, I’ve done alot of thinking about the PHP Community. Last fall I was ready to throw in the towel on PHP and started studying Perl and Ruby. I’ve learned alot and its made me think about problems in terms of algorithms not “which php function do I use to do this” … and being at the Zend Conference has renewed some PHP hope — with the PHP Unit testing, Selenium integration, XDebug and the focus on design patterns and appropriate use of OOP, I think I’ll put my energies into PHP for awhile.

The official start date of the conference was Monday and started with a presentation by Zend about the state of PHP. It was this that made me think, hey … PHP is making good progress. Zend announced quite a few things. Here’s what stood out to me

ZendBox - PHP5 Dedicated server hosting, with the latest Zend software. One of the problems right now is finding hosts that will have the latest PHP software. Its probably been one of the drawbacks to getting into PHP5.

Microsoft - They announced a partership with Microsoft to improve the performance of PHP on IIS. At first I was like ahhhhhhhh… then I was like, ohhh, if PHP performs well on windows it will take more marketshare from ASP.

IBM - They announced another partnership with IBM who is now shipping Zend products on their new ‘System i’ line of servers.

Here’s an interview with Andi about these new partnerships.

Another thing I noticed, and in contrast with YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) there is not the bitterness and jealously over Rails success in PHP as is in Perl. There was a few comments about Rails at the PHP conference, but if anything, PHP has been inspired by Rails. Anyways, interesting contrast. The PHP community doesn’t see Rails as much of a threat.

I’m here at the PHP Zend Conference in San Jose, CA … what a beautiful city! I’ve never actually seen mountians! I don’t think I’ve ever been west of Iowa actually.

I got here saturday and had a lonely lunch by myself in the hotel restaurant, never before had I sat at a resturant and ate by myself! My coworker arrived later that evening and he talked me into trying Sushi. It was ok.. but… given a choice…I’d go for steak anyday. Not a big seafood fan.
Sunday - my coworker and I got adventurous and managed to get downtown and find directions to a mall. It was pretty much your average mall.. I bough a fleece shirt that came in handy on the ride back to the hotel.

Monday - Zend tutorials! I attended

Improving Performance of PHP Applications - Ilia Alshanetsky
It was very good, he’s a good speaker and I learned alot of things. About half of it was more hardware, apache fine tuning … and the other half, specifically PHP. For example, the @ error suppressor operator is actually quite slow. What it does is take the value of error_reporting and store in a variable, set the level to none, do your command, then set the reporting back to what it was. There were many other such things that I didn’t know before.

Essential PHP Security - Chris Shiflett
I thought I knew security stuff, since I’m an avid reader of Chris’s blog. But when I took the PHP Zend Certification practice tests at PHP Arch, I failed the security section!! So I knew I had to go to this one, I learned a few things I didn’t know or really understand before. I will be happy to say, that after this session when I took the practice test again - I passed  the security session!! Hope you are proud of me Chris!

more later ……..