Friday, November 7. 2003
Well, I have returned from the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt, Germany a littler earlier than expected due to some miscommunication between the conference organizers and myself. Besides that small annoyance (I had to pay a rebooking fee for my flight), the conference was an extraoridnary experience. For the first time, I took a digital camera with me and have started a
Photo Gallery on my web site.
A lot of good things happened while at the conference, I personally did not attend many of the sessions (as in general I have seen most of them before) but a number of new developments in the PHP5 world were in progress. Specifically:
- PIMP - The next generation in PHP Graphics
I have known about this project for quite some time, but I have not mentioned it publically until now. This was because it's author (Pierre-Alain Joye) wanted to be the first to announce, and only do so when it was ready for the public to see. It is a replacement GD graphics library and PHP extension that promises to completely change the abilities of graphics from within your PHP scripts. It will include technologies like Vector Graphics, Filters, outlined fonts, and much, much more. He promises to be commiting the source into the wild within the week, after making some changes based on suggestions he gathered at the conference. You can see his slides (which are quite informative) Right here
- Pharrot gets a name
Sterling and Thies actually named their project we dubbed Pharrot (PHP running on Parrot) during the conference. It is officially called Pint now. I haven't heard much forward-movement from the last time I blogged about it coming back from PHP-CON, but something is happening!
- FFI In PHP
Wez Furlong managed to hack together a great little extension for PHP 5 that allows you to dynamically bind and call C functions directly from within PHP scripts. It is an interesting and potentially useful extension (especially on windows systems), but I am still of the opinion that it's also an incredibly dangerous extension Wez ;)
- PDO Advances
During the first half of the conference, I spent the majority of my time coding the MySQL bindings for the PDO (PHP Data Objects) extension started my Marcus. The code is almost ready, however Marcus still needs to work a glitch or two out of the framework before we'll be ready to commit. Soon, PDO will hopefully support MySQL v3+, Sqlite, etc. and there will be a common API for all of the Database extensions! Of course, PDO is available in PHP 5 only
- Tidy close to 1.0
I know I've been talking about this for awhile, but Tidy for PHP is indeed very close to it's first PHP 4.3.x and PHP 5.x stable release. This is largely due to the fact I was able to fix a number of bugs while in Frankfurt that I otherwise would not have had time to fix! Stay tuned, there are a lot of things happening on this front
As you can see both from my bullets and the photos, we all had a great time. There are more photos available on the
Official web site.
Since I know everyone is going to ask, the dancers were an event the conference put on one of the nights. It was a good time, but I question the judgement of using it as the main promotion of the post-conference. The event was great, but my mother went to the conference web site the next day and it seemed quite unprofessional IMO.
In short it was an excellent conference. There was a lot to learn by attending, even if you were a speaker. Thanks to the conference organizers for putting together a great show, and hopefully I'll return to Europe again soon for another!
