First off, the big impression I had when the conference finished is that either PHP developers in Holland are incredibly professional, or that the best practices advocated by various community leaders are finally taking hold. My last talk was one addressing development best practices, and I was constantly amazed at how many people were already using most if not all the best practices I touched on in my talk. This is really fantastic news, as far as I'm concerned; hopefully all those PHP detractors out there are going to start taking notice that PHP development has matured, and, in fact become very quality oriented. Here's that presentation:

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The big event for me, of course, was the full day Zend Framework workshop. My two regrets: a) not having a better script for the final hour, when I covered a simple demo bugapp used for developing the workshop, and b) running opposite Sebastian Bergmann -- as I wanted to see what he's been working on recently with PHPUnit. That said, I feel the workshop went over very well; I was able to finish each section early enough that we had time for 5 - 15 minutes of questions over the material just covered, and there were excellent questions from those attending. The funny part was that with two of the questions, I simply fired up my browser to the tutorials I wrote on DevZone, and used the examples and materials from them to answer the questions.

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As promised, I've uploaded the bug application I worked up to create the session. Be aware that it's incomplete; the main thing was to see how each of the various pieces could interact so I'd know what to cover and when in the workshop.

Following the night of the workshops, Ibuildings had a dinner for their employees, and I was invited to tag along. I had some great conversations with Lorna Jane and one of her colleagues, Bill, discussing topics ranging from family to training, from travel to PHP, and more. Dinner was timed to end as the big match between Holland and France began, and all I have to say about that is: if you've never witnessed the fans of a big football match in Holland when Oranje is winning, you haven't lived. 'Nuff said. :-)

I had a number of good conversations with a variety of people, really -- Stefan Priebsch, Sebastian, Zeev, Marco Tabini, Lorna Jane, Stefan Koopfmanschap, Fabien Potencier, and more. (Believe it or not, you can get more than one framework lead in the same room and have things stay civil; Fabien and I swapped some information regarding plans for our next major releases, what issues we've seen, and what features we're excited about.) Felix De Vliegher and Michelangelo Van Damme were also there, representing PHP Belgium, and it was great to hear how their region's PHP community is starting to come together.

I also got a chance to meet a few people from the Zend Framework lists and IRC in person: Andries Seutens, Jurrien Stutterheim, and Bart McLeod -- and a few others whose names I most regrettably forget. I wish I could have had more time to talk with each of you, and discuss your projects more.

Now, while the conference was fantastic, probably the best part for me personally was the day prior. My good friend Remi, with whom I've worked on some projects at Zend a number of times over the past year, came up from Gouda to hang with me for the day. We walked all over the city -- through the Vondelpark, up by the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museums, along and over countless canals, near (but not through) the red light district, by the RAI (where the conference was held) and all the way up to Grand Centraal. I complained about sore feet and legs all weekend, but it was the best tour I could have imagined of the city, and one I shan't forget any time soon. And the reason we went to Grand Centraal was to meet up with Stefan Koopmanschap, with whom we would then have dinner and drinks that night. I feel very fortunate to have had the chance to spend some uninterrupted time with each of these fantastic developers and individuals.

So, the short summary: excellent conference, excellent friends, excellent city. Looking forward to DPC '09!

I'll be presenting two separate sessions: an all day tutorial on 13 June 2008 covering Zend Framework, and a regular session on 14 June 2008 covering Best Practices for PHP development, which will focus on how to utilize Zend Framework coding standards and methodologies to help deliver efficient, high quality code for your organization.

I'm looking forward to meeting old and new friends alike at the conference!

• 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:
  • Dojo pastebin
  • Prototype pastebin

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...

I'll be presenting a number of times:

• On Monday, I join Sebastian Bergmann and Mike Naberezny in a full-day tutorial session on PHP Development Best Practices and Unit Testing. This expands on what Mike and I did last year, and will more heavily emphasize the role of testing in the development process -- arguably the most important best practice you can adopt.
• On Tuesday monrning, I'll present a Zend Framework MVC Quick Start. This talk is based on a webinar I recently gave for Zend, and covers the various pieces of the MVC layer in Zend Framework.
• Tuesday evening, I'll present an Unconference session on Ajax-enabling your Zend Framework controllers. I don't know yet if I'll need the whole hour, but I can probably fill it up with some examples of decorating your apps with AJAX.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!