PHP Quebec 2009

By Marcus Boerger, Software Engineering Team and PHP Core Developer

I recently attended PHP Quebec 2009. This was the seventh year of this gathering of PHP developers and though we had a new venue the conference was great as always. As one of my fellow speakers was ill, I jumped in to give the Writing PHP Extensions (PDF) talk along with Johannes Schluter. Even better, the talk on PHP - Worst Practices (PDF) was well received by the audience, with reactions to the material far more positive than I would have anticipated given that we've all engaged in these worst practices from time to time. You can also check out the slides from my third talk Objects for the Masses (PDF). On a more personal note, I was happy to hear and see that other presenters used the Google Chart API in their talks for examples.

The rest of the conference talks were luckily not completely focused on PHP 5.3. It turns out there's continued interest in the current stable platform, PHP 5.2. Folks are happy to give us core developers more time to add some new features, most notably closures , namespaces and Phar done right. Those who want to learn more about PHP 5.3 should check out Johannes' slides (PDF).