The Zend Developer Zone site has posted an reminder about the Call for Papers for ZendCon 2017 happening October 23rd through 26th in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For the five of you who are living under a rock and haven’t heard, the dates for ZendCon 2017 have been announced and the ZendCon 2017 Call for Papers is open. [...] Join us in Vegas this October and be a part of one of the largest gatherings of the PHP community. Submit your talk to ZendCon 2017 today. (Submit at least 2 more tomorrow too!)

The post also shares a summary of the speaker's package provided for those selected to present at the event including a full conference pass, round-trip airfare and two hotel nights. The Call for Papers ends on April 14th - just one week from today - so get over there and submit those presentation ideas before time runs out!

Zend has officially announced the opening of the Call for Papers for their 2017 event happening in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 23rd through 26th at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.

We’re pleased to announce the ZendCon 2017 Conference, the most anticipated event of the year combining the best of PHP and open source. ZendCon is where community and enterprise developers from around the world gather to share and learn the latest hot trends and technologies in today's professional PHP and open source development.

[We are] now accepting talks on any topic or technology related to PHP, the enterprise web stack, frameworks, security, API design & management, IBM i, DevOps, people & processes, and much more.

The CFP is open until April 14th (11:59pm UTC) and, if your submissions are accepted, you will be provided with a speaker package that includes a conference pass, airfare and hotel nights depending on the type of session you're presenting. You can find out more about the conference and the CFP on the Call for Papers site. Get those submissions in early and often - the deadline will come up sooner than your expect!

The ZendCon conference has just announced the opening of the Call for Papers for their 2016 event. The conference will once again be happening at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada in October (18th-21st).

We’re pleased to announce the ZendCon 2016 PHP Conference, the most anticipated PHP centric event of the year, where community and enterprise PHP developers from around the world gather to share and learn the latest hot trends and technologies in today's professional PHP development.

We know speakers are key to the success of a conference and hope you will submit a talk. In appreciation for the efforts provided, our speakers package ensures they will not need to worry about anything other than delivering the best talks.

They're not just looking for PHP topics either. They'll consider a wide range of topics including PHP frameworks, devops, source control, continuous delivery and many more. The Call for Papers ends May 31st, 2016 so be sure to get those submissions in early (and often) before time runs out.

The 2016 edition of the Sunshine PHP conference, happening in Miami, Florida between February 4th and 6th, has officially opened their Call for Papers for their upcoming event.

We’re pleased to announce our conference, SunshinePHP is one of the best PHP conferences where community members from around the world come together to learn and share information about the latest trends and technologies in professional PHP development.

The speaker package for their 2016 event includes an all-access pass to the conference itself, airfare/travel to the event, two hotel nights and lunch provided on regular conference days. They're accepting submissions until midnight (EST) on September 30th and highly advise submitting more than one session idea. They also have a few suggested topics they'd like to see at this year's event including:

• Virtualization and environments
• Development principles
• User Experience/Usability
• Continuous Integration
• Debugging
• Teamwork and/or Developer Management
• Professional development

It may be a PHP-centric conference but they're looking for a wide range of other topics to round it out too. If you have an idea for a session you'd like to present, be sure to submit as soon as possible!

The ConFoo conference has officially announced the opening of their Call for Papers for the 2016 edition of their conference.

We are looking for the best speakers, willing to share their experience and their skills with developers and managers. The 2016 conference will cover [a wide range of] aspects of Web development. [...] You may present in English or in French. If you can present in either language, simply add a note when submitting. Presentations are 35 minutes + 10 minutes for questions.

Topics they're looking for include everything from PHP to mobile development and several other languages (including .NET, Java and Python). The conference will take place in February of 2016 (24th through 26th) in the Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal, Canada. Be sure to get your submissions in soon as the call for papers will close on September 20th, less than a month away. You can find out more about the conference, the call for papers and what they'll provide for their speakers on the Call for Papers page of the site.

Zend has announce the official opening of the Call for Papers for ZendCon 2015, their annual PHP and technology conference. Instead of their usual venue in California, though, they'll be holding the event in Las Vegas, Nevada from October 19th through the 22nd.

We’re pleased to announce the ZendCon 2015 PHP Conference, the most anticipated PHP centric event of the year, where community and enterprise PHP developers from around the world gather to share and learn the latest hot trends and technologies in today's professional PHP development.

We know speakers are key to the success of a conference and hope you will submit a talk. In appreciation for the efforts provided, our speakers package ensures they will not need to worry about anything other than delivering the best talks.

While ZendCon is put on by Zend (a company largely focused on PHP) they accept talks on more than just PHP-related topics. You can find out more about the conference in previous years (and some of the topics that were accepted) on the main conference site. The Call for Papers ends on May 15th so be sure to get those submissions in early and often!

Based on some of the responses to his previous open letter to the PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group), Anthony Ferrara has posted a follow-up explaining some of his points made and the caching proposal in a bit more detail.

A few days ago, I wrote An Open Letter to PHP-FIG. Largely the feedback on it was positive, but not all. So I feel like I do have a few more things to say. What follows is a collection of followups to specific points of contention raised about my post. I'm going to ignore the politics and any non-technical discussion here.

He points out that while the previous post wasn't completely about the cache proposal (it was used as a "literary device") there was some confusion on it. He walks through the "unnecessary complexity" he sees with it, citing code examples, and makes points about performance, memory usage handling stampede protection and the creation of standard ways to avoid it. He ends the post with a look at group invalidation handling and two ways it could be accomplished, either via namespacing or through tagging the items and using that as a reference point for the invalidation.

The Confoo conference has officially announced the opening of their Call for Papers for their 2015 event (happening in mid-February). The conference is multi-disciplinary and covers a wide range of topics including: .NET, PHP, Databases, Mobile, UX and Security.

We are looking for the best speakers, willing to share their experience and their skills with developers and managers. [...] You may present in English or in French. If you can present in either language, simply add a note when submitting. Presentations are 35 minutes + 10 minutes for questions.

The call for papers will only be open until September 2nd (less than a month) so be sure to submit early and submit often. It's recommended that you submit more than one session too. You can find out more about the conference - or just pick up tickets of your own - on the main conference website.

On NetTuts.com today they continue their look at the SOLID development principles with the next letter in the sequence - O for Open/Closed Principle. The first part of the series, covering "S" (the Single Responsibility Principle) can be found here.

The Open/Closed Principle, OCP in short, is credited to Bertrand Mayer, a French programmer, who first published it in his book Object-Oriented Software Construction in 1988. The principle rose in popularity in the early 2000s when it became one of the SOLID principles defined by Robert C. Martin in his book Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices and later republished in the C# version of the book Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#. What we are basically talking about here is to design our modules, classes and functions in a way that when a new functionality is needed, we should not modify our existing code but rather write new code that will be used by existing code.

They start with a look at OCP in the overall SOLID context and an example of an obvious violation of the principle. Some example code is provided showing a "Progress" class that's bound to at "File" implementation, not abstracted. They offer three different options for solving the issue:

• Take Advantage of the Dynamic Nature of PHP
• Use the Strategy Design Pattern
• Use the Template Method Design Pattern

Each of the above comes with example code and some with illustrations of the structure they create.

The [php]tek conference has officially announced their Call for Papers for their upcoming (in 2014) conference:

Today we are opening up the Call for Papers for php[tek] 2014. We are looking forward to reviewing all of the amazing submissions we expect to get this year. Last year we had over 400 submissions, can we break the record this year?

Head over to the Call for Papers page to see details on the few changes we are making this year, and also check out our Speaker’s Package (which is the same as last year).

The Call for Papers is only open until January 10th (UTC) so be thinking of those topics and get them submitted!