Outreach Technology

Last day of ZendCon 2008.  Great conference so far, with more good talks ahead.

Scaling Mozilla’s Websites with PHP – Laura Thomson

Laura’s talk was focused on how Mozilla scales their sites using PHP and a whole lot of caching.  Mozilla uses a lot of different technologies…PHP, Python, Drupal, and…surprising to me anyway….Tikiwiki.  A lot of the talk was focused on implementing Tikiwiki for their Firefox 3 support tool.  I have used Tikiwiki before and my experience with it was that it wasn’t all that great.  It was a surprise that Mozilla picked that to use, but I suppose it is working for them.  She also talked about the Firefox 3 Download Day and what went wrong and where.  They got a 300x spike at 10am when FF3 went live.  I guess that is enough to kill any service.

What’s New in PHP 5.3 – Lots of people

This was a “panel” style talk with people who actually write the PHP engine.  There are lots of websites that have all the new features of PHP 5.3, so I am not going to write out all the changes.  One of the things to note is the internationalization that was previously planned to be added to PHP6 is now going to be in PHP5.3 (unicode support).  Not that that affects us much, but it shows the type of community around PHP.  They saw that their users were going to need this sooner than later and then made it happen, so that is cool.

Shawn Lauriat – Digging Through the Guts of Enterprise PHP

Shawn’s talk was not exactly as expected, at least not from my standpoint.  He talked mostly about best practices in PHP and how they had used those best practices to create a home-grown framework.  He talked a little bit about what is coming with PHP 5.3 and what he was excited about.  He had a lot of talk about design patterns (which I always like to hear PHP developers talk about…we, as developers, don’t focus on that enough in my opinion).

Closing Keynote – Mark de Visser (Zend) and David Neff (American Cancer Society)

Another year, another successful ZendCon.  This year, there were about 700 people who came, with about 60 presentations, not counting the un-con.  I think Zend has started a ZendCon trend with having folks for NPO’s present on the last day of the conference.  I think the focus is to show how PHP is not just helping enterprise, but helping make people’s lives better.  Last year it was Kiva.org, this year it is the American Cancer Society.  David talked about a video sharing site that they put together to allow cancer survivors to share their stories.  It seems to be a good idea which will allow people to inspire others.  Basically, it shows that PHP is NOT EVIL!

Later, we will recap the whole conference…pros, cons, etc.

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