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.