Friday, November 12, 2010

ZendCon 2010 - What a time!

ZendCon 2010 has come and gone. If you were there you saw some pretty cool things. If you were not there, why?

The IBM i track was well represented by some truly awesome speakers. Alison Butterill, Susan Gantner, Alan Seiden and Sam Pinkhasov all contributed to the usual cadre of PHP community speakers to make the overall experience well rounded and useful!

Each year I look forward to the IBM i evening customer networking event. This year we were able to hold it in one of the rooms at the hotel and this is a perfect opportunity to round up the IBM i customers in a central location where they can do the most important thing they can do at this event: COMMUNICATE. I think they all enjoyed it as we had to kick a few folks out of the room after last call. I think education is important but hearing what other IBM i customers are doing with PHP is of great value to everyone.

How about that ElePHPant!

One of the things I love to do with IBM customers is review any new features they are looking for in the Zend solution suite. This is important because we need to hear what you are up to and what you need to make the solution better for your organization. Just about everyone who has adopted Zend Server for IBM i would extol the virtues of better performance and a single Apache server. That came directly from the community. A highlight of Sam’s session had to do with a new toolkit that is being developed. We don’t have all the details yet, but it looks like it will add functionality and performance improvements over the existing i5 functions. More to come VERY soon!

The IBM i sessions are listed below and the slides should be available on JoinedIn for ZendCon2010 soon. Anyone looking for the handouts from the IBM i sessions, please check this out!
Web Services with PHP, Zend Framework and IBM i by Alan Seiden
PHP and IBM i by Alison Butteril
The MySQL - DB2 for i Connection by Susan Gantner
PHP for Batch Jobs on IBM i by Alan Seiden
What's New in Zend Server for IBM i by Sam Pinkhasov
Expanding IBM i Applications to the IFS Easily with PHP by Mike Pavlak



Start thinking about ZendCon 2011 now. I think you be just jazzed about joining us!