Back from the conference
The annual PHP Quebec conference was held last week. As always, it was a lot of fun. As an organizer, I didn’t get to see much of the conference itself. Out of the 30 sessions on the scheddule, I only got to see around 3 of them. With an average of 4 hours of sleep per night, I couldn’t really sit in a conference room for hours and attempt to listen to the speakers. Since all the sessions have been recorded, I will get to listen to them when they become available for download.
The conference itself had a different feel than the ones in the previous years. We were used to have a track dedicated to business cases. The track was not really popular and this is the reason why we decided to cut it for this year, but it used to bring different people and perspectives. This year, it was replaced with a track focused on development methodologies, which ended up being quite popular.
Getting back to reality wasn’t so easy. I should have spent the day catching up on my school related work on Sunday. The exam period begins on Friday and all I could do is catch up on my emails, blog reading and sleeping. Might not have been the best choices, but I guess I couldn’t do anything more demanding.
The only session I attended to for the entire period was the session on DB2 Viper, which is the next release of IBM’s DB2 database. The room was not as crowded as it should have been. Most visitors probably expected it to be a product placement session. OK, part of it was about product placement. After all, IBM was the conference’s largest sponsor. Still, I found the product to be very interesting. Viper adds native support for XML in the database. If you’re not using XML in your regular work, this feature is completely useless. In fact, I see quite a lot of bad uses of this that could be made and I already imagine headlines on the daily WTF. Since a lot of my work is based around technical publications and extracting data from XML files is part of my day to day job, I see dozens of ways in which this technology could make my life easyer.
I think using XPath as part of an SQL query just feels great. A beta version should be released soon and the official release is planned around the end of August. I’m really looking forward to it. Even if DB2 is a commercial database, there is a free (as in free beer) version of it available, so there no real barrier to trying it. Except maybe convincing the Free Software community that using a commercial product does not make you an evil person. Anyway, Grant Hutchison made quite a good presentation of the features. The downside was that a few live demos failed. Seems like the in-development eclipse plug-ins were not ready. I’ll try to give more details about the whole Viper thing once I’ve actually trying some development on it.
Speaking of Eclipse. It seems like the IDE is getting some real support in the PHP world recently. With IBM developing tools for it’s own database, Zend participating in the development of the PHP IDE and MySQL working on some other database tools, the IDE is becoming quite strong for web development. If only the editor could be a little more vi-like. The tools are really interesting since they make all those little things that are boring to write, but the text editor itself does not feel very good for someone who worked with vim for multiple years.
Zend had quite a big presence at the conference. I know at least 3 presentations actually demonstrated the Zend Core product line. I guess having a fully supported platform is interesting for enterprise people. The product itself does not bring much new features other than the customer support. While it does allow to manage the activated modules from a web interface and contains quick links to the documentation, I don’t think those features will attract many people.
One of the things we noticed was that PHP5 was not used by so many people yet. Last year, it was still part of the new stuff. About only the speakers were using it. A year later, things did not improve much. It’s still not very accessible on shared web hosts and sys admins are very reluctant to placing it in production. Luckly enough, the platform itself improved a lot and was well presented at the conference. I just hope the conference motivated the developpers enough to make the switch and convince the sys admins to migrate. I think all the sessions were actually using PHP5 in the examples. The new language features do make code writing a lot simple. PHP was never hard, now the code looks plain simple.
Overall, the conference felt great and everything went very well. Special thanks to Yann Larrivée and Sylvain Mathon for all their efforts before the conference. I don’t think it would have been possible without them.