This is the coverage of the first day of the 2007 DCPHP Conference. The Conference wrapped last week, so this is a bit more delayed than usual... Day 2 coverage will be online tomorrow.

The Opening Keynote was from Chris Shiftlett of OmniTI talking about Security 2.0. One of the things that was obvious was the high technical level of the crowd. The core concepts and concerns that he covered seemed like they were pretty well known and understood. Definitely a good sign. Some of the tips and tricks he demonstrated to test and combat the things were new and generated a number of questions and comments.

I skipped the first session of the day to tweak my presentation.

The next session was from Paul M Jones of OmniTI on Framework and Application Benchmarking (slides available here). He raised some solid points on the performance and ability of some of the popular frameworks and how to estimate the highest throughput of a given system. The single thing that I appreciated the most is that he made his entire methodology and the resulting data available. So if you don't believe his numbers, check them out yourself. The single best part is that none of the concepts were exclusive to PHP, so even if you're working with other technologies (like Rails), you can still apply the information.

I never thought "plush toys" would be a tag on this site...

At the DCPHP Conference this year, we had a new entrant to the arena of ideas: The ElePHPant.

The PHP elephant is the culmination of a dream of a gentleman by the name of Damien Seguy*. After years of pitching, convincing, and pleading with the development community to pick up his idea, he finally found a group crazy dedicated enough to help make it happen.

When the elePHPants appeared at DCPHP this past week, they were an immediate hit. The few that were set up on the registration were posed and re-posed on a regular basis. Finally, once the happy hour began on Wednesday evening, the elePHPants began migrating from Damien to their proud new owners. By the end of Thursday, every elePHPant had a new home... including one right next to my printer.

If you'd ever wanted an elephant but don't have the budget, contact Damien for this more... cost effective solution. Pictures are available here.