This post is long overdue, but I was finally able to sit down and type out my thoughts about the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo and the International PHP Conference.

First up is his look at the Zend conference - largely a good experience. He specifically mentions the talk from Rob Richards, the "Extending PHP" tutorial session (with Sara and Marcus), and the infamous misunderstanding about his laptop bag (which was resolved shortly after the conference had concluded).

His experience with the International PHP Conference went equally well, despite the location of the event being slightly more out of the way than some liked. He comments on the excellent conference materials provided, the types of attendees, and some of the talks he attended - Aaron Wormus' "Mastering enterprise-level PHP tools PEAR, PhpDocumentor and testing" and Sata Golemon's "Navigating Streams" being among them. If you like to check them out, he's also posted some photos of the conference and a night out around the town he took.

It has been more than two weeks since ZendCon, yet I can't seem to manage to find the time to recap the event. (Work has been keeping me busy.) This will be brief.

In the post, he talks about the attendees, his security talk, the community deck of cards, Wez Furlong's talk, and more. Check out his post for more info on the conference and what all went on.

With a weekend to kill and only a laptop to amuse myself, I sat down to put my feelings, my emotions, my raw soul into something that would express the impact the conference left on me. Unfortunately, what came out was something a bit less moving than I anticipated but none the less, it was fun to make and it's slightly amusing to watch.

So, check out the video, makes a few comments and relive a great week for all who attended. (And yes, I'm in there somewhere...)

As I write this, it's Sunday. I'm sitting here in the lobby of the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. [...] Now that I've had a chance to relax and gather my thoughts, let's glance back over the shoulder before packing up for the next conference.

For each day, he gives the highlights, both of the people he met and of the talks/tutorials attended. There's even a few special announcements included that happened during the week - like about the new ZendBox the company will be offering. After-hours activities were mentioned as well, including the "Pirate Party" IBM threw the last night of the conference.

• Scott Mattocks
• John Herren
• Sara Golemon
• auroraeosrose
• Richard Thomas
• Christopher Weldon
• Graham Charters
• Chris Cornutt
• Eli White

Cal has also been nice enough to post the full listing of the cards over on his Flickr account. The cards include:

The four queens - Sara Golemon, Laura Thomson, Dhwani Vahia, and Joyce Park
• The two jokers - Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski
• The four kings - Rasmus Lerdorf, Wez Furlong, Marcus Boerger, and Rob Richards
• The aces - Zend Products: the Framework, Platform, the Certification, and Zend Studio

Today we announced a partnership with Microsoft. The goal of this technical collaboration is to make PHP on Windows a first class citizen. It has always been our goal to make PHP run well on any platform, and this initiative reinforces that. Both companies have also observed huge interest both from the community and our respective customers bases in good PHP support on Windows, and therefore, collaborating on making this happen is a no-brainer for both.

He mentions that it's not the first time that Zend and Microsoft have collaborated, but that this new effort will go far and above the previous effort. He goes on to talk about what the partnership means for both companies and the steps that are being made to get the functionality stable and out to the community.

We will run a live report from the conference on www.zend.com, and through our blogs, devzone, flickr and del.icio.us. All of you who are at the conference and are creating content about it in any form, please use the tag "zendconference2006". All of you who are not at the conference, check in regularly at zend.com, Zend's blog, Zend Developer Zone, Technorati, Flickr, and/or Del.icio.us.

Cal also comments that you can also tag things with "upcomming:event=111293" on Flickr to let the upconing.org website to catch it and associate it with the event.

Since QEDWiki is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while I can't help but feel that his session at ZendCon is going to be cool too. I since I love cool, I decided to give Stuart a call to see if I could get a sneak preview.

There's only the two questions but the answers are interesting. Cal asks about some of the contents of Stuart's talk (the sneak peak) and some about the interoperability between PHP and J2EE that's on the way.

Sebastian Bergmann works at eZ systems. In his spare time he wrote and maintains the PHPUnit project. (He's worked on other project but since that's what he's talking about at ZendCon, that's what we'll talk about)

The interview is only a few questions long, but it's interesting to see how Sebastian's talk will be heading. There'll be talk of PHPUnit 3 (still in beta), mock objects, and its integration with CruiseControl. Check out the post for more of the questions.