ZendCon07 is about to kick off

Yesterday about 300 people showed up to attend the tutorials. Last night there were parties, dinners, and lots of good laughter and serious talk as well. We will have about 750 people at the show in total, up 50% from last year.

The room is filling up, press releases are about to hit, Twitter channel set up, the room is filling up. The first news broke already - hey getting all these things out at the same time is hard to do!

Mark

PDT 1.0 Webinar

If you’re not sure what PDT is, you’ve heard so many people talking about it as the next development environment for PHP, and you want to know what this is all about, then here is your chance.

On October 2nd at 9am PDT (Pacific Daylight Time not PHP Development Tools :)) I will be conduction a Webinar about PDT.

This Webinar will include a short history about the PHP Development Tools framework project, some statistical information (downloads, committers, bugs) and a demonstration of the project. The demonstration includes the different perspectives (PHP and PHP Debug) and the different views under each perspective. We will go through the creation of a PHP project, a PHP file and a debug session, where we will illustrate the debug features. During the presentation we will also see the relations to the WTP project which the PHP project is based on.

You can register and read further information about it here: http://live.eclipse.org/node/352

See you there.

P.s. You didn’t hear it from me, but some very exciting news are planned to be announced in Zend Conference. Stay tuned.

Yossi Leon.

Zend/PHP - i5/OS September Update: Zend Conference, PHP Training options, more…

Thank you for you continued support. The topics for this month’s update are below.

Topics:
1. Zend Conference: Oct 9th - 11th, Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport
2. Zend Conference — Reserving a spot in the System i-specific sessions
3. Zend Training Options
4. Upcoming PHP Presentations Live
5. Recent System i-Specific Articles Mentioning Zend/PHP

Read the rest of this entry »

PDT 1.0 is coming out next week…

Hi All,

I’m very excited that after almost two years of work on the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) framework project, next week we are going to launch its first release (1.0).

Many people (more than 200) contributed to this project, mainly by testing its functionality and providing valuable feedbacks. It’s amazing how much power the PHP community holds brining up such open source projects with great stability and functionality.

It’s amazing that at the early stages of this project we didn’t know much about Eclipse platform and how the Eclipse.org system works and today we have 40K downloads a month of a project that was not released yet. We did some mistakes on the way which helped us learn and understand about the Eclipse regulations and infrastructure.

Stay tuned, next week it’s happening, PDT will introduce the new standardization of PHP development tools.

You can download PDT from:

www.zend.com/pdt/ (includes an integrated Debugger)

Or

www.eclipse.org/pdt/

I would like to thank all the developers, contributors and Eclipse members who made this happen.

Yossi Leon

PDT Project Leader

What development tools Zend provides?

If you didn’t participate in the webinar i’ve been conducting last month, you can click on the link below and get an understanding what Zend offers today in terms of development tools.

Some of the discussed issues:

- How to improve productivity and code quality using Zend Studio

- How to distribute PHP applications while retaining full control of your intellectual property

- How to extend your PHP development environment

Webinar: http://www.zend.com/webinar/download?product=platform&name=devtools-20070815-overview.flv

If you guys are interested in PHP development tools (of course you are) and you’re not sure what’s the right tool for you, come to Zend Conference and visit my talk about development tools.

See you there.

The End

Well today is the day of a few endings: End of the month and sort of End of the Summer Season.

There is always a feverish pace to the last day of the month to try and get all the last minute sales deals closed to show respectable numbers for the month. This is especially difficult today with virtually half of our customers on vacation and the others on “vacation mode.”

With the end of the summer “silly” season, I look for things to wake up next week as we go into the traditional high season and back to more productive work schedules. Surprisingly August was a bit more active than expected with a feeling that us and php might be making a bigger splash in the UK. Several very large enterprises and financial institutions have shown an interest in talking with us and we hope to do see some progress there. Some of the rather large PR we have been doing has got to pay off sometime.

One of the larger institutions that approached us did evidence the ongoing tug of war that goes in behind the scenes when trying to bring in php and open source apps in general. Some of the MS guys allege that php is inherently unsafe according to a number of articles and white papers they have read. My Google search for these articles pulls up nothing but some old php holes from a few years ago and the infamous summer of coding and lots of great articles on how to write secure php code. Not to mention the big php and Facebook brouhaha a couple of weeks ago which turned out to be nothing. We’re waiting for these guys to show us some of these articles but doubt if it is anything earth shattering. Back to the battlelines to prove that php is a viable, safe and secure option for enterprise applications.

Here’s to cooler and busy days ahead.

Q3 Sales and Summer Heat

Well here it is August 1 and the first third of Q3 is under the belt. Ended nicely with some larger deals coming in at the last minute. August is always a challenge as half of Europe is on vacation and the other half is in vacation mode.

Recently ran across an interesting White Paper entitled the Open Source Barometer and published by Alfresco, the open source ECM application. We’re always looking for justifications for the large gap in open source adoption between the UK and the rest of Europe and this article alludes to:

“…The research also showed that the U.K. lags behind in the adoption of open source suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy.” This very much mirrors are experience at Zend with working with the various European countries. Virtually everywhere except the UK, there are huge open source initiatives driven by the respective governments. They are few in the UK and despite a lot of talk, we see very little new initiatives. On the bright side, we do see some larger php projects driven by regional educational organizations using open source applications in e-learning and remote learning projects. These initiatives are to be encouraged.

Another interesting trend as cited in the White Paper refers to a trend we also see in that “there is an increasing trend for organizations to adopt a mixed stack, combining both open source and proprietary software.” This enables organizations to pick and choose among the best solutions available for the particular project. Thus we often see php projects being developed on Windows machines and then deployed on Linux servers using Apache, and maybe even using Oracle or MS databases. Essentially that is our model at Zend since our Studio and Platform are proprietary applications and used with open source php, Apache, MySql, various Linux distributions, etc.

May the Gods of Summer bring fortune to us in August.

Live from Oscon

The party last night at Oscon worked out great! We expected about 75 people and got 300! The restaurant had to scramble to bring on enough food and drinks. As promised it was fun and there were tons of great people to meet. Even R0ml remarked that all expectations were exceeded.

During the day yesterday we went to Tim O’Reilly’s executive briefing. It brought mostly the expected fare from technologists in open source and SaaS companies, with one interesting exception: the ‘chat’ of Tim and Eben Moglen. Eben used this event to re-invigorate the debate about software freedom by attacking Tim O’Reilly, who he claims has wasted his time cozying up with the new powerhouse companies of the Web 2.0 generation and getting rich, while failing to use his influence for the bigger issue of software / knowledge freedom.

Eben called it an “invitation to join a conversation” but never seemed to be interested to have any conversation. Tim probed Eben about the SaaS loophole in GPL3, but Eben turned it back on Tim, who demonstrated that picking a fight with a brilliant lawyer is pointless - he threw his hands up in the air and asked the audience to step in.

Did Eben succeed in restarting the conversation? My take is that he didn’t, I never figured out what he wants. Sure his mission is important, but does that mean we should no longer meet and talk about web services, Web 2.0, business models, etc.? Is this like Al Gore coming to Oscon to berate us that we are not at work finding solutions for global warming? From blog entries by other attendees like Zack Urlocker, Chris Marino, Robert Kaye and Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, it seems he did not make many new friends for his cause.

Interestingly, Tim O’Reilly will always promote new technology directions with great passion, and always turns out to have significant commercial investments in these technologies, whether through his conferences, books or board seats. Does he invest in what he believes in, or does he believe in what he invests in? Until he clarifies that, he is quite vulnerable to attacks like Eben Moglen’s.

This morning Andi gave presentations about Rich Internet Applications and Security of Web Applications. Both were well attended and well received. Cal will post their notes and source code to DevZone as soon as he gets a chance.

Now I am attending a session by Chris DiBona about the use of open source at Google. As Harold Goldberg points out, the attendees to Oscon are all busy typing on their laptops while attending conference sessions - an interesting way of being social, similar to the kids hanging out together at the malls with their iPods blasting in their ears. I am telling him that this is the generation that is all great at multi-tasking.

P.S. (7/27/2007), more coverage about the Moglen - O’Reilly exchange in The Register,

PHP4 EoL - How will Users React?

Infoworld wonders how the response will be to the, in my view, much overdue announcement that PHP 4 will be retired. In a way open source communities are no different from commercial corporations, they need to focus on what has impact and minimize deploying resources to activities that make less of a difference. We will look back upon this decision as one that helped us maintain the health of the PHP ecosystem.

In Zend’s customer base we have seen the switch from PHP 4 to PHP 5 happen about a year ago. Commercial use of PHP is based on PHP 5 in large majority of cases we see nowadays. Now that the leading open source projects like Drupal and PHPMyAdmin are switching, there really is not much reason left to continue to support PHP 4. There are also very many hosting companies available who can provide hosted servers that run PHP 5.

Companies looking to justify the migration cost should consider the improved performance characteristics and the improved security of PHP 5 among others.

Zend has made PHP 5 (in fact PHP 5.2 or better) a requirement for its recently released Zend Framework, which I think will be seen as the killer application for PHP 5. PHP 5 plus Zend Framework is the perfect platform to base your next generation of modern web applications on.

Zend is already helping many companies that are switching from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and will continue doing so in the coming year.

(PS 7/16/2007: News.com ran a story on the announcement. It is pretty balanced, but it is clear that the debate will not go away any day soon.)

Zend Conference 2007

We are making good progress with the plans for the Zend Conference 2007. We have more content this year than ever before, as we have gone from to format of 33 sessions to one of 48 sessions. As the confirmations from speakers come in, the information about the program will be posted in the coming days.

In addition to that we will have an ‘Open Space’ room that can be used for sessions that are not on the main schedule. The room will have three clusters of whiteboard, monitor and chairs, that can be used by groups of 5-20 attendees and will operate during the day and evenings, except during keynotes. We still need to decide on the scheduling mechanism during the conference, but to get you started we have opened a “Birds of a Feather” page on the conference wiki.

The first idea has already been posted by Keith Casey. It is still early days for registrations, so keep an eye on the wiki to see how the number of proposals will grow when we’ll get closer to the conference.