ZendCon 08: Day 3

So, Day 3 begins, sorry for the delay, but day 3’s night was spent with ZCE studying and Yahoo partying, so here we go.

The day was supposed to start with a Keynote on The Age of Literate Machines, but unfortunately Zak could not make it, and we watched a demonstration by the Magento Team. I t was interesting, but not exactly what the croud was looking for, but hey, the IRC channel is always a cool place o hang out during these talks.

Afterwards I went to Matthew’s talk on Webservices, which was unfortunately marred by notebook problems, but was a very interesting overview of Zend Framework’s pro and cons relating to the various webservices.

For a little break after this i went to a UnCon Session, on Zend_View and Zend_Layout, which was really good and helped Neil get a new view on how we could do ZF integration with Smarty, one of our problems back in the office, also got more feedback from other guys who have been through this.

Along came lunch, another excelent lunch provided by Zend, and afterwards a much awaited Keynote, the State of Ajax with Dion almaer and Ben Galbraith, unfortunately Dion could not be here, but Ben did a wonderful job and painted a cool picture of where the web is going heading, I always have fun at this session.

Next up came Pharscapes by Marcus Boerger, tellling us about .phar, a new extension that will be inplemented in the core, and let’s us do, jar-like files in PHP. The topic is interesting and the presentantion gave a little insight into it, but no wow yet, I’m still not sol on this one yet.

Next up, one of the sessions I was most interested in, Continuos Integretion, by Sebastian Bergmann. This was almost complimentary to the Test Driven Development talk, especially because it refered to the same team, but was a wonderful introduction to the power of PHPUnit + phpUnderControl with CruiseControl in the background, also helped me and Neil get answers to some of our PHPUnit questions and get some notes on recipe’s for the SWAT Team, real good stuff!!

From then I attended a UnCon Discussion Panel on PHP User Groups, hosted by Keith and Ben Ramsey, representing all 19 UG’s in Brazil. This was really good, Zend was present and we should have great news in the next few months.

That wraps up the Con. But after this we had some more exhibit hall swag goodness and Me and Neil got some Mock ZCE Exams done, and headed out to the Yahoo sponsored party!

Power was running low with my sore throat, so i could not blog, but hey.. it worked out.