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.

This is the first half of coverage of Day 1 of ZendCon 2007. The tutorials day is covered here - ZendCon Day 0.

The morning began with the opening keynote from Harold Goldberg, the CEO of Zend. He started with some initial thoughts and comments thanking the bloggers and reporters providing coverage and then dove into the thick of it. He gave some background on himself and what he's doing at Zend - he's only been there for nine months - and what is happening with PHP in general. I was impressed with what he did next. He gave an overview of various major PHP projects - most having nothing to do with Zend - and as he talked about the projects, he identified the involved developers in attendance and introduced them. After the drubbing that the tech guy got last year, I thought this showed a lot of consideration and credit. Nice job.

The second half of the keynote was given by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. They built upon the community announcement slides made at 2005 and talked about what Zend has done in that space since. DevZone, ZendFramework, and PDT (PHP Development Tools) for Eclipse are the biggest things here, but the new announcement is the Zend Studio for Eclipse*. It's interesting as its both a major vote of confidence and support for Eclipse but it also signals a shift in strategy for the ZendIDE... I don't know if it's being deprecated, but personally I wouldn't mind one bit.