The release of Zend Studio 6.1 means an upgrade to Eclipse 3.4, better JavaScript support, several performance improvements and more. The goal of the partnership with Adobe is to make it easier to use Flex with PHP, you can read more about that on Andi Gutmans blog. The announcement of the Dojo integration in Zend Framework was a bit strange, because it was already announced at php|tek in May.

After the keynote I stayed in Hall B (the main conference hall) where I attended the "Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning for MySQL" session by Jay Pipes (MySQL). It was a brief summary of the tutorial he did the day before, but interesting nonetheless. He described several things you should take into account when writing/optimizing your queries and creating your table schema etc.

After Jay's session there was another interesting session in Hall B called "Static and Dynamic Analysis at Ning" by David Sklar. He showed how you can use regular expressions or better the tokenizer extension to find for example all code that accesses files. He also showed how to use the xdebug extension to profile or trace an application (using tools like ktrace, dtrace etc.).

During the lunch break that followed there was an exhibition in the central hall. Several companies like Yahoo, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft etc. showed either what they were doing with PHP or what they had to offer for PHP development. Of course you could also score different goodies like USB keys (Yahoo) and even remotely controlled cars (Sybase).

So when I joined the afternoon session "Make 'em Talk!" by Joe Stagner of Microsoft I was playing with the remotely controlled car. Joe noticed and asked where I got it from. After explaining where I got it from he asked if I wanted to make a picture of it and send it to him by e-mail. He wants to convince the marketing guys at Microsoft that they should give cool stuff away like that too. Joe's talk was about integrating PHP in an ASP.NET environment. One cool thing he showed was how IIS allows you to run different PHP versions for different directories, I really liked that. He also showed how you can use COM from within PHP to do authentication and other stuff. Although I'm not a Windows guy the talk was interesting nonetheless.

After Joe's session I visited a session from fellow Dutch guy Robert van der Linde called "PHP and the secure application development life-cycle". I met Robert back in the Netherlands when he and I both gave a talk at our business seminar in The Netherlands, for us both the first time we gave a talk. Robert has gained experience since then: he didn't look nervous at all even though it was a pretty big crowd (he had the main hall). I found the talk itself slightly less interesting because I heard parts of it already back in The Netherlands and I personally had hoped for a more developer oriented talk this time.

The next talk I attended was "PHP Extension Writing" by Sara Golemon. I'm not really a C guy, but I wouldn't mind writing some glue code for making a C library available in PHP. Sara had some technical problems with her laptop so she borrowed one from somebody else. Unfortunately that meant she couldn't easily show everything she wanted us to show. That made the talk sometimes somewhat hard to follow, however that didn't make the talk less interesting. I don't think I will be doing any extension writing real soon, but you never know what comes up.

The last talk I went to was one of the "UnConference" sessions. These sessions are unplanned extra sessions which can be scheduled and delivered by both presenters and attendees. The talk I attended was given by Matthew Weier O'Phinney and was about the Dojo integration in Zend Framework. Matthew did a great job explaining the reasoning behind choosing Dojo for Zend Framework and showing the possibilities it offers. He also explained that the current integration is only a first step, future versions of Zend Framework will even get better integration like for example shared validation rules. It was an interesting talk and I will certainly go check it out myself sometime.

All together a great day.