PHP

It's been just over a year since my last blog post and I'm sure holding breath has become somewhat difficult for some of you... I thought it was worth sharing an interesting experience that I had when for the first time (for me at least) I gave a keynote in a conference, without actually attending it.

Last Saturday, the first PHP-centric web conference has taken place in Istanbul, Turkey. A couple of months ago a guy name Sidar Sahin touched base with me, inviting me to give the opening keynote in that conference. I've been to PHP conferences in many countries, mostly in Europe, the US and the far east - but I've never been to a conference in my own 'neighbourhood', and I have to admit I had little knowledge or interaction with that community beforehand. I happily accepted - it seemed like a great opportunity.

And then - all hell broke loose. While things are rarely completely and entirely quiet around here, I have to say the timing, from my personal perspective, was astounding. After it became clear that this wasn't a short crisis, and after vocal protests spread out around Turkey, it became clear that coming there at this time might prove to be dangerous.

We debated what we could do. I've had situations where I couldn't attend a conference due to a last-minute issue - even as recently as the last AFUP conference in December, but they've always been in places where I had local Zend colleagues that could back me up - and in this case it wasn't an option. We considered using a Skype video conference, but my past experience with it was that is unreliable, and the quality is nothing to write home about. Eventually, I decided to simply videotape the keynote (a shortened version of it), and send it over. Doing it was slightly more challenging than I expected - given that I wanted to show both myself and the background slides in the same video; But I think I managed to create an OK compromise, where both myself and the slides behind me were reasonably bright and in focus. Having a camera with a large sensor and with lenses that absorb a lot of light definitely helped.

Video quality aside, I was worried that a 'passive' presentation in the form of a movie will have a hard time catching and keeping the audience's attention, but after the conference I was happy to hear from Sidar that it went very well, well enough that some of the attendees actually still want to meet me in person I'm still hoping that when things settle down I'll get another chance to come over there and actually meet with the people face to face.

I got one photo from that conference (so far), and I found it amusingly similar to the Steve Mobs presentation from the Simpons' Mapple parody (unfortunately I could no longer find the whole piece online because of copyright issues). I'm certainly not Steve Jobs, so at least I only got closed-captions and not dubbing by Bart...

I'm curious if anybody else has similar stories where you ended up presenting over a video or over the web? Also - if anybody who actually attended this conference can share your experience and/or photos that would be great.

Two of my photos are finalists in a local (Israeli) pets+owners photo contest.
You can find them at http://tinyurl.com/2oodug
While it's in Hebrew, the photos are pretty universal so you can still appreciate them.
If you feel like voting for one of mine - one is on the fourth row on the left column (Anya & white dog), and the other is on the last row in the right column (me + kitten). One vote per person (or at least per browser ). Click on the arrow icon on the bottom left once you've made your choice. The pets thank you

Yesterday, I had a heated debate with Stefan Esser, one of the most active people (if not the most active person) in the field of PHP security. I told him that I, as well as a lot of other contributors to the PHP project, are at odds with the way he's behaving; While at the same time appreciating the highly skilled job he's doing for PHP.

Unfortunately, Stefan decided to call it quits and from a blog post on his web site, it appears he'll now attempt to become even more aggressive, do his best to ignore the best interests of PHP by disclosing unpatched holes, and in general trying to expose as many security holes in PHP. That was not my intention when I truthfully told him what I (and many more) feel about the style of his involvement.

Since Stefan is obviously not listening to me, I think it may help if people who feel his behavior is inappropriate go to his blog and submit their thoughts, or send him emails. Do that in a responsible and appropriate language, though. Maybe if he sees it's not just me he'll reconsider.

It's been a while since I personally contributed code to this project, but a bunch of my most-wanted features are now in there, most notably multilevel code completion and native web services support.

Multilevel code completion means that almost always you'd get code completion for objects, even if they're return values from functions (as long as you phpdocument them!) or a 10th level indirection, $foo->bar->baz->.... As a code-completion addict, that's great news.

Native web services support means I no longer have to start writing web services by taking an existing WSDL file (a.k.a. scrolls of magic) and change it, but can instead use the WSDL generator now built into the system. Not to mention the code completion for SoapClient objects (did I mention I'm a code completion addict?)

The beta is available for free download on zend.com. Free T-shirts will be given to the most valuable reporters so start smashing it today

Can anybody spot the new sponsor here? You have to admit it wouldn't be the first on your guess list.

I'm not sure how many of you have been to the Z/PC&E2005 (*) as of late, but it's definitely an interesting visit. While it's not the first PHP conference to feature some pretty impressive sponsors, I think it would be fair to say that it's the first PHP event that is backed by the leading technology companies in the world today. Including some you'd never suspect would be interested (will update tomorrow, stay tuned).

Needless to say, that reflects greatly on PHP.

It's no secret PHP was (and to a large degree still is) a grassroots phenomenon. Most of the companies using PHP today chose to use it based on a developer's decision, as opposed to a management (CIO/CTO) decision. However, in many companies, especially the larger ones - PHP's penetration ended as soon as the developer(s) tried to sell the concept of using opensource in general, and PHP in particular to their boss, and sometimes to their customers.

"How do I sell PHP to my boss?" was one of the key questions that I had to deal with personally in the past. As a proliferator of PHP, this was one of the key challenges Zend faced as well. It has also been the topic of numerous presentations in various PHP conferences. The answer that was always given was based purely on technological merit - it was clear that nothing we (community, Zend, or both) can do can match the mammoth marketing power that was pushing the commercial or even free (Java based) alternatives. Years and years of relentless work to change the world's perception have finally paid off. Today, the same powers are now beginning to push PHP itself, especially into places where it stood no chance to penetrate in the past. And it's not just marketing either - the OCI8 extension and the new SDO extension are just two initial examples of how this involvement is going to translate into additional 'tangible' benefits for the PHP community.

2005 definitely signifies a turning point in the history of PHP. From an underdog that is technologically superior but lacks industry backing, to an overdog(**) - still technologically superior, but an accepted industry standard as well.

I'll see you all at the conference!

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(*) Zend PHP Conference & Expo 2005
(**) Improvements to this word welcome!

As some people may have noticed, Zend Core for Oracle went into a public beta stage a couple of days ago. This free product is excellent news for anybody using PHP and Oracle together, since the OCI8 extension was vastly improved to bring it on par with (and sometimes better than) other database extensions, both in terms of stability and performance.

It's actually good news even for people who won't be using Zend Core - since like with any other fixes made to PHP in the course of the work on Core (and in general), these will be committed to the PHP CVS as soon as they're tested (probably a couple of days' time).

While deleting old files to save some space on my homedir, I stumbled upon a PHP history gem - David Axmark's photos of what was the first PHP conference ever - the PHP Developers' Meeting, or PDM, held in Tel Aviv, Israel, January 2000. That's more than 5 years ago, the days where men were men, 2 megapixel digicams were cutting edge, and the entire PHP development team (almost) could easily fit in a fairly small room.

In addition to the conference pics themselves, the galleries also include photos of the trip we took to Jerusalem as well as some random pictures of Tel Aviv.

Enjoy!

Two new plugins were officially released today by Zend.

First, a plugin that allows integration of PHP code snippets from zend.com's code gallery, directly into Adobe GoLive. That replicates a feature that's built into Zend Studio 4.0, and makes it available (for free) in Adobe's HTML WYSIWIG editor, quite a nice addition for advanced PHP-aware designers.

And more interestingly from my point of view - a FireFox plugin that provides full Zend Studio integration with the browser (actually, the plugin is also available separately for Mozilla, so I guess you can count them as three).

The idea of integrating PHP debugging and profiling capabilities directly into the browser was introduced in Zend Studio 3.0, in the form of the Internet Explorer toolbar. Even though I'm far from being objective about the brilliance of this toolbar (...), it was very pleasing to see the tremendous feedback that it generated. Finally, it was possible to debug even the most annoying forms and most complicated pages, at a simple click of a button.

Internally at Zend, where a lot (not to say most) of the developers use Linux, it actually generated some angry "grr, when will it support Mozilla?#!$" feedback, which I silently ignored. Back then, I had very little faith in Mozilla, and I have to admit I dismissed it as a noble effort that will never actually be fruitful. Nonetheless, I wrote a simple XUL version of the toolbar that was used internally for quite some time.

Times have changed. Firefox has become the browser of choice for many users, including myself, and for the first time in years, a challenger is posing some serious competition to the IE monopoly. It was clearly time to take the Firefox userbase more seriously. A recent blog post by Davey Shafik made the need for a good Firefox plugin bluntly clear. Thankfully, by now we already had a rewritten plugin for Firefox, that arguably has more functionality than its IE cousin. Today it was finally officially released to the public.

One final interesting note about these plugins - they're all written as scripts. Is the end of compiled languages for daily use nearing?