The ZendCon UnCon planning is underway.. .the second batch of presentations have been chosen.  The goal is to have about 80% of the sessions chosen before we get there.  There will be a number of slots reserved for last minute ideas, discussions that stem out of a conference presentations, or adhoc hackathons.

With no further ado, here we go:

First, we have Rich UIs and Easy XHR with Dojo and Zend Framework from Matthew Weier O’Phinney.  As one of the lead guys on the Zend Framework and intimately familiar with Dojo, he's going to get into the guts and details of things most of us have been fighting with.  Bring your code, bring your questions, and bring a few tricks of your own.

This is coverage of Day 2 of ZendCon07. Previous days coverage are here - Day 0 Tutorials, Day 1 Part 1, Day 1 Part 2 - and my presentation given on Day 1 is available here. This post will likely be updated with photos once I dive into the Flickr steam.

The opening keynote of the day was from Lee Brimelow from Adobe demo'ing Flex and some other nifty toys. He showed off a few live demos and live applications that are out there including Google Finance and Buzzword. But more than anything, he focused on using Flex on the frontend to wrap a PHP backend and how they can play nicely together. Just a few years ago, the message seemed to be that Flash was The Way and we ended up with an entire generation of entirely Flash websites... and their creators went into hiding ala the humans in Terminator. Obviously since Adobe's purchase of Macromedia, something fundamental changed in their message and it's good to hear a more pragmatic approach.

This is the second half of coverage of Day 1 of ZendCon 2007. The tutorials day is covered here - ZendCon Day 0 and the ZendCon Day 1, Part 1.

The first real session of the day was from Terry Chay on "Finding Art in the Internet". In the opening, he warned us of his swearing, so I decided to keep an f-bomb count. And then be began quoting himself and showed definitive proof on how he killed Ruby. After a while he focused on some of the core of the presentation and dove into the differences between complexity versus complex and simplicity versus simple. The best phrase he dropped was the distinction between viral marketing and word of mouth marketing - a major argument at BarCampDC - "Viral marketing is when users using your system bring in more users. Anything else is Word of Mouth Marketing sh*t." and used differential equations to describe and demonstrate what happens with Viral Marketing... k > 0.

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.

All slides are Creative Commons licensed.... give me credit, modify as needed, you can't use them commercially.

If you caught my presentation at ZendCon 2007 (09 Oct 2007), you're probably here looking for my slides. You can download them from the Events page.

If you didn't catch my presentation and think it might be interesting to you... it will be, don't worry. Here's the synopsis:

Usually when we think of rebuilding an application, the first step is to start from a clean slate... losing the lessons we've learned before. Fortunately, we have an alternative. By using tools like the ZendFramework, Smarty, and your favorite Ajax library, you can bring even the most boring application up to date and implement completely new functionality quickly with minimal disruption.

Those in the US might have missed it but last week was a big announcement for the Zend Community: Zend Framework 1.0.0 production release*. In the press release, the Product Manger Bill Karwin notes the MVC framework, the database ORM layer (called Zend_Db), the Lucen-compatible search engine, and the fact that the whole thing is BSD licensed. First of all, congrats to all of them... but as always, I believe that they're underselling the framework.