ZendCon '08: Day 02

Ok, here we go, end of day 2 and I got a horrible sore throat, and a headache.. but let me try to tell about my day.

First thing, at ZendCon when you pay for your registration, you get your money’s worth.. breakfast, lunch and dinner! Every conference should learn valuable lessons like ZendCon has.

The day kicked off with the Opening Keynote by Harold Goldberg, and I could not get the Steve Jobs at MacWorld image out of my head, but he was talking about PHP! So Zend’s CEO gave a great keynote showing PHP evolution to the Enterprise world, which was last year’s Call for Action, so hey, hooray for us! So a few stats, clients, smart people dropping java, more jobs, and we started getting the Apple-style surprises like uncle Steve always does it.

First up, new Certifications! You can now be a Zend Framework Certified Engineer!, Second up Zend Studio 6.1 with ajax, dojo integration, eclipse 3.4 and visual query builder, IDE goodness! Third thing, Zend + Adobe! Yay!, here comes AMF support for Zend Framework and Zend Studio, Flex Builder merger!

Closing it up, this year’s Call for Action, let’s evangilize PHP, forget Why PHP, we know that, move on to When PHP? What PHP? How PHP? Where PHP?

After that i moved on to Jay Pipes Join-fu Session for some Karate style SQL queries. It was a cool insider’s view to MySQL’s internal optimizer, and i’ll blog some more about (and all talks) later on, no details today, sorry. But we did get a run down of good practices, tips and tricks and karate join-fu!

After that we were off to a trip in Ning-ville with David Sklar, who gave us an inside look at static and dynamic analysis they do over there. So this was an interesting session where you could learn some cool techniques to get info on your code, first off static analysis, which you do on your source code, with tokenizer, regular expressions and opcode dumping.

Then the Dynamic analysis took us through Xdebug, functions traces, truss and dtrace, checking out what happens when php functions are called, lookig at all the syscalls what happens behind the scenes.

So of to lunch, again given to us by Zend and its sponsors, but first a stop at the Exhibit Hall, where I got stuff from a whole bunch of exhibitors, and i’ll talk more about them later on this week.

After lunch i made a bad call.. and got into a Zend Plataform session that was intended for “decision takers” so I skipped to Elizabeth’s PECL Picks session… unfortunatley she was into speeding and running red lights.. so i just got like, 10 minutes of the session, well.. free tome to check out the exhibitors.

Next up was Robert van der Linde with an awsome PHP Secure Apps Developement Life-Cycle, which gave us some insight into security measures for your apps, and your office. So testing, OWASP, best practices like whitelisting and FI/EO all came up during the talk, and then the real killer app was PHPIDS, a Intrusion Detection System written in PHP and for PHP, must say this was cool, and will definately look into it.

Another break and here we go with Zend Studio Secrets, – ok, skip that one, too many keyboard shortcuts in 1 minute of session, next room, RickRolling with Brian DeShong and WUFRL and associated techs. Intersting stuff, cool video clip, but nothing too new, but cool set of extensions to handle mobile browsers.

And then, finally (i was getting tired you know?) Derick Rethan’s session on Test Driven Development. I was really into this, so this was a reat talk, Derick also does great sessions , so it was best of both worlds. So why TDD? a great bunch of tools, like phpUnderControl, PHPUnit and a inside look into how ezComponents does actual TDD adapted for their reality. A great session, and I say, i’m should really get into TDD, and take the whole team with.

From there.. dinner, well booze, food and shirts! So cool, answer a Zend crossword puzzle, and there you go… cool shirt! That lasted some hours and my throat just could not take anymore, so here i am, blogging and drinking cough syrup.

Time for some shut-eye and Day 3 is upon us.!