Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Use-cases for PHP and Pdf needed

Zend Framework features a really cool component called Zend_Pdf; its development is led by Alexander Veremyev.
We are currently trying to better understand the use-cases around how PHP developers are using Pdf files on the Web in order to figure out what the requirements are for future enhancements to our Pdf component.

Are you reading pre-formatted templates for invoices and just filling them in? Are you password protecting files depending on who downloads them?

Also, if there are just some discrete features you'd like to see please let us know too.

Please send feedback to the fw-formats mailing list. Even if you're currently not using Zend Framework we'd be very interested to hear about your use-cases. Thanks!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

AjaxWorld West coming up!

AjaxWorld West is coming up in September. I spoke at the East coast event and I highly recommend people interested in the next-generation of Web applications to attend this conference. It's got a good mix of open-source, community and commercial RIA material and is a good venue to get up to speed with some of the latest developments in RIAs such as push technologies, offline RIAs or just plain old user-interface.
I will be giving a talk there on RIAs with PHP and Zend Framework. Joining me for this session will be Brad Cottel our Zend Framework evangelist who's done his fair share of C/C++, Fortran and Rails development (and now getting into PHP and Zend Framework).

See you there!

Monday, August 06, 2007

Zend/PHP Conference 2007

It's that time again, time for our annual Zend/PHP conference and Expo (ZendCon). This will be our third year and the biggest one yet. We have a great lineup of speakers and what we think is a good mix of business and technical oriented sessions. There will be names that you know like Wez Furlong, Sara Goleman, Terry Chay and Marcus Boerger, along with some new names like Thorsten Rinne, Stefan Priebsch and our very own Massimiliano Cavicchioli.

I'm really excited out our keynote speakers this year. The first one we have announced is Joel Spolsky of http://joelonsoftware.com. Joel will be talking at ZendCon on building good software, a subject he knows just a little about (he's got a great blog btw).

In addition to great technical session from well known PHP community members, we will also have business oriented content featuring companies like Nokia, Toyota and HP. These are sessions showing how these companies deploy PHP in the Enterprise.

We are just starting to compile our Birds of a Feather sessions for this year. If you are attending and have an idea, head over to the Wiki page and post it.

Finally, this year we have added a Community Lounge. During the day, we will have space and materials available for unconference sessions, during the evenings the room host will provide gaming systems to play with. It will be a place to hang, catch up with friends, or discuss an idea that we didn't get to cover in the main conference program. Look for more announcements about the Community Lounge coming soon.

This year is going to be our biggest and best yet and I know you don't want to miss it. For more information on ZendCon check out these webpage:

http://zendcon.com/registration_fees.php
http://zendcon.com/wiki
http://zendcon.com/speakers_list.php

If you have any question/suggestions feel free to drop me a note and I'll pass it on to the right people at Zend.

See you in October!