The Sunshine PHP Conference has announced their opening keynote speaker for this year's conference (in Miami, Florida February 8th and 9th) - Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP language.

SunshinePHP Developer Conference is proud to announce the opening keynote speaker Rasmus Lerdorf. In February 2013 when it is cold in most places around the world, it is still sunny and beautiful in Florida. So come down to Miami for a few days and enjoy sun, community, and learn all in one great conference.

Tickets for the event are already on sale with an Early Bird price (pre-November 30th) of $159.95 USD. If you're more inclined towards speaking at the event, their Call for Papers is only open until December 1st so hurry and get those submission in!

Engine Yard has released the audio from a recent (webcast) panel discussion they did about the Future of PHP with members of the PHP community (a part of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series).

Elizabeth Naramore talks with David Soria Parra, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Stas Malyshev for a panel discussion about Internals. Our panel of experts will share their thoughts and predictions about the existing PHP landscape, and what is to come.

It's about 30 minutes long and they talk about PHP 5.4, compiling PHP, performance issues, the slow rate of adoption in newer releases, memory usage and some of the general strengths and weaknesses of the language. Elizabeth also asks each person on the panel about things they've each seen done wrong on the project and something they'd like to see in its future.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

In case you weren't able to make it (or missed the live stream) Rasmus Lerdorf gave a presentation last night at Etsy as a part of their "Code as Craft" series. They recorded the session and you can watch it here.

He talks about a few things:

• the history of the PHP language
• the state of PHP currently
• what's coming up in 2012
• and touches some on the upcoming PHP 5.4 features.

You can find more about their "Code as Craft" series (and other videos) on the Etsy page.

The South Florida PHP User Group has announced their December 2011 meeting - happening on the 14th at 7pm - with a look at how far PHP has come in 2011 and some of the things coming up. Rasmus Lerdorf will be presenting.

For our "FREE" (yes, all of our meetups are free) December meetup we have a special guest, Rasmus Lerdorf, visiting to talk about "PHP in 2011". Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP, will talk to us and give his perspective on the prospects of his brainchild. "PHP in 2011": A look at the state of PHP in 2011 and how it fits into the current technology stack followed by an overview of what you should and shouldn't be doing along with a summary of new and upcoming features in PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4. This will be a 90 minute talk with an extensive Q&A session will follow.

To RSVP for the event (held at Nova Southeastern University), head to their Meetup page. There's already about 40 people signed up, so be sure and get your name in quickly to reserve your spot!

If you're a PHP user group leader (or member for that matter) and would like to have your group's upcoming meetups posted here, send us the information! We love to share!

On the WebHostingHero blog today there's a new post going back to the roots of the PHP language and some of the original contributors like Rasmus Lerdorf, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans.

When PHP began in 1995, it represented a fork on common object oriented programming languages. Designed to help provide scripting for the web, the language took on a life of its own as it became one of the primary web development standards. Today, PHP is used by millions worldwide and powers a majority of sites.

They talk about how some of the original developers are active in helping to better the languages (directly and indirectly) and how the advocacy of the community has helped it grow even stronger over the years. There's also mini-spotlights on each of the three mentioned above.

Happy birthday to one of the web's most popular web scripting languages! As Johannes Schluter mentions in a new post to his blog, PHP turned 15 years od on June 8th - the day Rasmus first announced PHP 1.0.

I can't remember when I first went online. Out from the local BBS systems into the wide open net. It must have been around the same time. But soon I figured out that I needed my own homepage, so I created one, using black fonts on a green (#00ff00) background. I was proud. [...] My brother, who setup our Linux box at home but didn't know much about Apache, had the pragmatic solution: PHP worked. So what did I do? - Learn PHP. And I loved it.

Over fifteen years old now and still going strong, PHP has become one of the top five popular languages and his proven itself again and again in both web applications and in the sites of larger companies to be a reliable, robust solution and one that's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Here's a few other sites with thoughts on this milestone for PHP:

• SitePoint - PHP is Fifteen Today!

Even before they've release the source for their much hyped HipHop PHP tool, Facebook has slipped another tool in under the radar and have already released it in github - XHP.

On the official announcement they describe what the tool is and what it can do for you:

XHP is a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language to both make your front-end code easier to understand and help you avoid cross-site scripting attacks. XHP does this by making PHP understand XML document fragments, similar to what E4X does for ECMAScript (JavaScript). While PHP is typically used to write front-end code, by itself it isn't a very good language for generating HTML (as evidenced by the popularity of templating engines like Smarty). XHP is something between a programmatic UI library and a full templating system

Rasmus Lerdorf took the opportunity to play with this new tool and run some benchmarks on its performance in a more real situation than the form example Facebook gave:

The real question here is what is this runtime xml validation going to cost you. [...] Note that to build XHP you will need flex 2.5.35 which most distros won't have installed by default. Grab the flex tarball and ./configure && make install it. Then you are ready to go.

He created a simple class (a "singleton") and ran some benchmarks against it with Siege. I won't share the results of those benchmarks here, though - you'll need to visit Rasmus' site for those (but here's a hint, the future's not bright).

On the TechRadar site, there's a new article posted with an interview with Rasmus Lerdorf about how and why PHP has become such a huge success in the online development world.

Rasmus Lerdorf is undoubtedly the most famous Greenlandic geek alive. [...] Linux Format magazine caught up with him to find out more about his position in the PHP camp today and the decisions he made early on that made the project a whopping success.

Topics mentioned in the interview include his current involvement in the project, his role in any "final decisions" about the language and its future, what languages inspired him and his opinions on a few others that occupy some of the same space as PHP.

Tim Anderson has posted some of his thoughts on a subject has has been a bit sensitive in the past - Zend's status as it comes to the PHP language.

I had a brief chat with Rasmus Lerdorf who is speaking later. I asked him about Zend, which presents itself as the PHP company (that is actually the slogan on its web site). Is it really? Lerdorf says Zend has no special status. While acknowledging its contribution, he says there are 1300 PHP committers, and only 6 work for Zend. He emphasizes that PHP is a community project and that decisions are made by consensus, influenced by who is actually willing to write the code, not by Zend or any company.

They also spoke a bit about the PHP Development Tools for the Eclipse IDE and where the strong marketing push is in the PHP community.

Paul Jones has taken a look at some performance statistics that Rasmus Lerdorf shared in a recent presentation from some of his tests.

It was with some interest, then, that I viewed Rasmus Lerdorf's slides on the subject of performance benchmarking. I'm beginning to think there's something unexpected or unexamined in his testing methodology.

Paul compares some of his statistics (gathered from his testing) to those of Rasmus and finds a few places where things don't quite match up - specifically in the default overhead that seems to be a part of Rasmus' stats. Paul goes on to look at EC2 as a cause to the problems but ends up without much of a confirmed answer.