ZendCon '07 is finally over, the dust
has settled, and I finally find myself with some time alone... practically
the first I've had since Sunday. The week was fantastic, and I had many good
conversations and brainstorming sessions. Oh, and I ended up giving three
different sessions, so it's time for links to slides and materials:
- Best Practices of PHP Development.
Sebastian,
Mike, and I presented a full-day
tutorial on PHP development best practices, focussing primarily on
testing and testing strategies, but also covering coding standards,
usage of SCM tools, and deployment. There were a ton of questions from
the attendees, and Sebastian even whipped out some extra slides at the
end showing new and little-known features of PHPUnit. Basically, reading
the slides won't really indicate what we covered, but is more of a
general outline. It was an honor and pleasure to work with Sebastian and
Mike on this, and I hope we can do it again in the future some time.
- Zend Framework MVC Quick Start.
This was basically the same session I did in my webinar
a couple weeks ago, with a few corrections and a small demonstration.
Cal put me on directly following Terry Chay,
in the largest of the four session rooms -- the one where all the
keynotes occurred -- talk about intimidating! Amazingly, the session was
really well attended -- others I talked to estimate between 100 and 150
people showed up. The most amazing part, though, was that when I asked
how many people knew what 'MVC' was, I don't think there was a single
person who didn't raise their hand -- definitely a sign of how well
accepted the pattern now is in PHP.
- AJAX-Enabling Your Zend Framework Controllers.
I did this talk for the Unconference,
mainly because its a topic I've been interested in and wanted to
present. In it, I detailed how to ajax-enable an application through
some easy tricks with Action and View Helpers and using JS to decorate
your existing application. The reference app I used was a pastebin, and
I've got code for both Dojo and
Prototype flavors available:
The two highlight keynote speakers, for me, were definitely
Joel Spolsky and
Cory Doctorow. Neither spoke about PHP,
but both spoke about topics that PHP developers should take to heart.
Perhaps I'll elaborate on those in another post.
Another bonus for me was the number of old and new friends alike I got to
see -- I had many good conversations with Paul M. Jones, Nate Abele, Ivo
Jansch, and Ralph Schindler, and opportunities to finally meet fellow
co-author Lig Turmelle, Ben Ramsey, Chris Shifflet (dude, we've been to four
conferences together, and never yet met!), and many, many others. I was also
overwhelmed by the number of Zend Framework users who sought me out either
to ask me questions or simply thank me and the others on the team for the
project; I'm deeply honored that I can work on a project that affects so
many developers.
And now for some down time to recuperate...
