ZendCon Session Report - Keynote - State of the Union
The keynote was delayed for a bit due to microphone problems, and there were a few ongiong issues (e.g. lack of a remote contro for the slide presentation). Most of the presentation was given by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, the co-founders of Zend.

Once it actually got going, the keynote session started off talking about Web 2.0 CRMs - Joomla, SugarCRM (which has some drag-and-drop configuration), MediaWiki.

PHP is appareny really popular on HotScripts - about three times the number of PHP scripts than any other category - 13,000 vs. 4,400 for perl.

According to zend, about 74% of PHP development is done with PHP5. Which is good, IMO, because in comparison, PHP4 is really limited - both with its object support and fewer number of builtin functions.

Andi mentions that the PHP/Java Bridge that's part of Zend Platform is one of the items he thinks is driving PHP 5 adoption. (Update 7:51 pm: I had earlier suggested that this was related to the php-java-bridge project on SourceForge, but this is not the case. Zend's product is closed-source and proprietary.)

Andrei Zmievski talked briefly about PHP 6's upcoming unicode support, which he started work on in March 2005. Unicode in PHP 6 will have a configuration option to allow PHP to continue running as it is now with regard to strings, so there won't be backwards compatibility issues. He expects a preview release of PHP 6 by the end of the year.

The Zend Framework has had 200k downloads since it was released a few months ago. It consists of 100,000 lines of code. v0.2 was released yesterday. It claims to have new JSON support, as well as an "enhanced" Lucene-compatible search API. I'm currently using the php-java-bridge to use the Java version of Lucene, because when I lastl ooked at the PHP offering, it was fairly out of date. So this might be worth looking at again. Later, during the Q&A, Andi mentioned that the Framework is still under development and is not recommended for production use.

Zeev demoed a PHP Framework API to Google Calendar, and then showed off the Zend Studio IDE, but the demo that I think was supposed to show the IDE's debugging features didn't actually work.

Zeev also showed off PHP debuging in the Eclipse IDE. The first public preview version of this is supposed to be released in December.

Zeev then showed off a beta of Zend Studio 5.5. It looks like it has some pretty nifty code completion support. It's also supposed to have integration with java - probably some built-in version of the php-java-bridge I mentioned earlier. It has code-completion support for Java as well. I think we're going to start seeing a lot more integration of PHP and Java in the future, especally if the development tools make it easier to use than it already is.

Zeev also showed off the monitoring tools provided by Zend Platform. When errors occur during PHP execution, the monitoring tools actually record all the relevant data necessary to do debugging. It even integrates with the Studio to allow you to debug errors after the fact. Zend Platform is apparently free for use for development purposes. Too bad their website is down right now, or I'd give it a try now.

Zend Platform also has a built-in cron-like facility. I suppose it's useful to have a GUi interface for entering this stuff, but it seems like extra overhead unless it can do something cron can't.

Zeev also showed off Zend Platform 3.0's BIRT report creation tools. The interesting thing here is that the reports can be exported to PDF. I wonder what they're using to do that...

Mårten Mickos from MySQL briefly evangelized MySQL and their support for Zend Core. New features MySQL is planning to add in the MySQL client include client-side caching of data and prepared statements.

Zend is also announcing a new managed hosted PHP 5 system, ZendBox, to be available in November.

Andi is stealing Steve Jobs' trademark "one mor thing", by announcing a partnership with Microsoft that is aimed at improving PHP's performance, reliability, application compatibility, and interopability on Windows. A guy from Microsoft then came up to present. Someone else called him out on the fact that he was using a MacBook Pro to run Windows for the presentation.

The Microsoft collaboration, part of which has created a new FastCGI component for IIS, has resulted in a significant (almost double) increase in PHP's performance on IIS.

This is also my first chance to se the new Windows Aero interface. The translucent window title bars are really distracting, and I think it really detracts from the readability of window titles. Makes me glad that Apple dropped the transparency in inactive Mac window titlebars.

Andi re-iterated that the optimizations for Windows will be in the public version of PHP, and that the "community" version of PHP wil remain the main version of PHP - pointing out that this won't be like how Mono's implementation of .NET is perpetually behind the Microsoft .NET implementation.