It was therefore an honor and exciting to be given the opportunity of representing PHP as part of their industrial track. I gave a 25 minute presentation, focusing mainly on PHP's Web Services support and also talked about the XML Content Store work we're doing with IBM which is finding its way into the Zend Framework. The crowd was extremely well versed on XML and Web Services and I got some good questions.
As part of my track both BEA and Microsoft also presented some of their solutions. Erik Meijer from Microsoft presented a paper on LINQ which was very interesting. I've also posted my talk for those who are interested.
For lunch I caught up both with Hamid Pirahesh from IBM Research and with Erik Meijer. I had met Erik last about four years ago and I was surprised that I got somewhat the wrong impression of him back then. I had thought he was more of a purist language designer (e.g. C#/Java) but it was pretty cool to actually find out that he's a VB lover and that a lot of his thinking and the philosophy we followed when designing PHP are of similar nature. We both believe in ease-of-use and simplicity.
Hamid, Erik and I at lunch:
Now that dynamic languages are becoming first class citizens in the Enterprise, I believe we will be seeing more PHP coverage at such academic settings. Until next time...!
