The second day of ZendCon is always a busy day. That is the day the sessions start; when you try as hard as you can to be in three places at once; where you spend half of each session reading Twitter for all #zendcon hash tags or hang out on the #zendcon IRC channel; when all you can think of outside of PHP is free swag and free beer.

Today was like that for me. Well, minus the mad rush to sit in on the morning keynote. I spent the early morning reading up on the Zend Framework so I can stand a chance at passing the ZF Certification Exam tomorrow. There is a lot to learn in that stupid manual (214 pages long – gripes!) so there was naturally lots of reading to do. After that we started the day.

Session 0: PHP 5.3 = Awesome
Ilia Alshanetsky gave this talk on PHP 5.3 and some of the new and exciting features in it. Outside the fact that Ilia never stops talking… I mean never… this talk was filled with some pretty cool stuff that a lot of programmers have been waiting for in PHP.

He opened with talking about namespaces and how they can be used. There are so many ways to utilize the namespace feature that to repeat that here would take a lot of screen real estate. I would recommend getting your hands on the slides of the presentation and reading through the first few slides. There is lots of useful information on namespaces in the slides.

The next thing he talked about was the new usage for the ternary operator. While there are, I’m sure, different ways to implement this feature, the manner in which it is implemented right now is pretty neat. Essentially you can now say “If the first condition evaluates to true, use it, otherwise use the second” without saying it exactly that way:

<?php
// We used to do this with ternary
$var = $a ? $a : $b;
 
// Now we can do this
$var = $a ?: $b;
?>

That is pretty slick in my opinion.

There was also mention of the use, internally, of the MySQLInd client library for MySQL Database Server interaction and how much overhead is being saved on select queries when not manipulating SELECT query result set data. Essentially you can cut your memory consumption in half because of this change. Sweet.

After this the talk moved into some new stuff you can do with INI files and data you can set in them. This change will make configuration pretty freaking sweet in my opinion, just because of what you can set and how you can set it. There is also some pretty nifty stuff that is happening with the DataTime built in objects in PHP. And lastly, there is a new PHP constant being introduced. That constant is E_DEPRECATED and it will be used to tell you, when you have error_reporting set to E_ALL, if what you are using in PHP 5.3 is slated for deprecation in PHP 6.

Overall this was an awesome talk. Ilia is a great speaker, knows his stuff very well and packs in about three hours worth of presentation into about an hour.

Session 1: Xdebug — PHP developer’s swiss-army knife
Presented by Derick Rethans, the author of xDebug, this presentation covered an enormous set of the features included in xDebug. Derick also talked about kcachegrind and utilizing xDebug with PHPUnit to cover many aspects of unit testing and debugging

Slides for Derick’s talk are available for download at his website.

Session 2: Mastering OpenXML Documents with PHP
Aaron Wormus gave an excellent talk about the PHPExcel library and how it utilizes the OpenXML standard to write complex and feature rich spreadsheets for Microsoft Excel, Open Office and other text based formats. This was very well presented session and covered several different, clearly coded examples.

Session 3: Premature Optimization Mistakes
Another awesome presentation by Ilia Alshanetsky, this session talked about some of the wrong directions programmers can go into when trying to optimize their applications. Many myths were debunked in this session, like the idea that smaller code is better code, removing comments in PHP makes your applications faster and changing your code makes it better. I even installed APC on the PHP Developer’s Network forums during this presentation to buy some performance gain without having to do any really heaving lifting.

Again, Ilia put about three hours worth of information into an hour long session and knocked it out of the park.

Session 4: Taming the Deployment Beast
Chris Cornutt, the man behind PHPDeveloper.org and joind.in, gave a hugely informative presentation about deployment and managing your applications from the start of development to the implementation of production over both teams of developers and for individual programmers.

Covering an array of various tools, practices and principles, Chris’s presentation was filled with application lifecycle management concepts, deployment practices and low level programming practices.

Slides can be downloaded here

Day 1 wrap-up
Much like last year, the first day of ZendCon was packed with information, networking, free swag (thank God for vendor fairs) and great food. Seriously%2

Woo to the frickin’ hoo! ZendCon 2009 is back in town!

I am fortunate enough to work for a company that believes that you should continue your education within your professional field. They back up that commitment by putting their money where their mouth is and actually spending money to send their employees to various training seminars and conferences throughout the year. And this year, like last year, ZendCon is that conference for me.

Like last year, this year opened up with the conference tutorials day. This year I chose to focus on Zend Framework and learning what I could of it. It is a fast growing framework and is quickly becoming a popular tool in the arsenal of many a PHP developer. I am seeing more and more recruiter emails that are asking for ZF experience. And it is a beast of a code base, well written and extremely well organized, developed by a team of people that are some of the biggest and brightest names in PHP development around the world.

Session 0
My day started out with an Introduction to Zend Framework by Matthew Weier O’Phinney. Matthew gave a stellar presentation on using the Zend Framework to develop a pastebin application. Covering some of the ins and outs of the MVC architecture employed by the Zend Framework, he also taught some programming practices as he started out first by developing his models, then his forms, then his controllers then his views. He taught techniques like setting view variables as their lowest PHP variable type so they are not to tightly coupled to a particular implementation should controllers or models change (like passing a result array to the view as opposed to a DB result object).

He also went into a decent amount of detail on Zend_Tool, Zend_Config, plugins and routing. In the end I felt like I could actually do something cool with the Zend Framework. Maybe not as cool as what he did, but cool nonetheless.

Now if I could just figure out those sweet vim plugins he was using…

Session 1
Seeing as the Zend Framework certification exam is being offered to conference attendees for free I figured since I am here that I would try to add to my ZCE certification. To do that I figured I’d sit in on the Zend Framework Certification Refresher course being presented by Rob Allen.

I am pretty sure I was in over my head from the start of this class. One of the first things that Rob said was that this class was not a tutorial on Zend Framework but a refresher for those that are using it regularly. For almost every component that was covered he asked the question “Who has used this?” and sadly I could not raise my hand for hardly any of them. Still, on the practice questions I did alright because much of the Zend Framework is common enough that you can expect certain behavior from it. That seemed to get me some pretty good mileage.

Of course there were lots of things that I had never seen, either. Parts of Zend_Log (and the writers, the formatters and the filters), parts of Zend_Db (the table data gateway and the row data gateway), Zend_Auth (the returns from Zend_Auth::authenticate()) and a host of other items from the framework are fodder for me reading up on.

Still, I think I can pass the exam if I don’t overthink the questions being asked. Of course, that means lots and lots of reading tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow evening and Wednesday morning.

Other happenings (and mishappenings)
When my coworker and I got to the conference and registered that we were there we noticed something missing from our registration packet. All early registrants who attended a previous ZendCon were supposed to receive a netbook for the conference. Ours was not there. Throughout the day we checked back in with the front desk, per their instruction, and found out at the end of the day that we would be getting ours tomorrow. That was a small bummer, though it had a happy ending so I am pretty stoked about that.

Something else I noticed this year was the lack of power in the rooms. Last year there was no shortage of power plugs to plug my laptop into. This year, in the first session, only the people that sat next to the walls close to an outlet could plug in. The second session was a little better in that my room had two power strips. Still, both of those were on one side of the room so if you sat on the other side of the room for the three hour session there was a decent chance that you were going to be running out of power before the end of the session.

Wireless internet this year was way better than last year for me (albeit a lot slower). Connecting to it was a snap and once I was able to power up my laptop I was able to stay connected to the internet pretty much the entire rest of the day.

Lunch was really good this year. For a boxed lunch the food was really, really good. As were the dining accommodations. My coworker and I were able to meet some new folks (a fellow from Seattle, John from Vermont and another fellow from Slovenia) as we talked about the ZCE, differences between PHP and Java and this year’s conference versus last year’s.

Ending the day this year was a little sad for me. Not because the day was over and I had to wait an entire half a day to mingle with my peers again. No, it was because of the $18 I spent on parking at the Convention Center. What. The. Hell? There was no validation either. And to top it off, the stupid ticket reader didn’t work so we had to drive around the entire garage until we found a guy that could help us.

Still, given the day as it went, I am very happy with ZendCon this year. I cannot wait until it gets into full swing tomorrow. And I really can’t wait for some of the uncons that were just posted late tonight.