Matthew Weier O'Phinny has a new post to his site today sharing the video and slides from his "Beautiful Code" talk from this year's ZendCon conference.

Unusually for me, I did not speak on a Zend Framework topic, and had only one regular slot (I also co-presented a Design Patterns tutorial with my team). That slot, however, became one of my favorite talks I've delivered: "Designing Beautiful Software". I've given this talk a couple times before, but I completely rewrote it for this conference in order to better convey my core message: beautiful software is maintainable and extensible; writing software is a craft.

You can find the slides for his presentation on his site as well.

If you weren't able to attend this year's ZendCon conference and wanted to see Bradley Holt's talk about entity relationships and document databases, you're in luck - he's posted both the video and slides to his site. Here's his summary of the session:

Unlike relational databases, document databases like CouchDB and MongoDB do not directly support entity relationships. This talk will explore patterns of modeling one-to-many and many-to-many entity relationships in a document database. These patterns include using an embedded JSON array, relating documents using identifiers, using a list of keys, and using relationship documents. This talk will explore how these entity relationship patterns equate to how entities are joined in a relational database. We'll take a look at the relevant differences between document databases and relational databases. For example, document databases do not have tables, each document can have its own schema, there is no built-in concept of relationships between documents, views/indexes are queried directly instead of being used to optimize more generalized queries, a column within a result set can contain a mix of logical data types, and there is typically no support for transactions across document boundaries.

He also includes links to two of the tools he mentions in the talk - Doctrine CouchDB and the Doctrine MongoDB ORM.

If you weren't able to make it to this year's ZendCon conference (happening right now in Santa Clara, CA) you can at least get a little taste of it though their live video stream of the keynotes.

There's five sessions they'll be sharing via the stream starting today and running through the 25th:

• Opening Keynote - Andi Gutmans (Zend)
• Open Source Cloud Technologies - Jimmy Guerrero (Red Hat, Inc.), Adrian Otto (Rackspace) and Peder Ulander (Citrix Systems)
• The Media Industry and Moving to PHP - Raghu Bala (Source Interlink), Brent Pearson (UBM Technology)
• PHP in the Cloud: Choice, Scale, Code, Simplify - Simone Brunozz (Amazon Web Services)
• Zend Framework 2 - Practical Experience from the Trenches - Matthew Weier O`Phinney (Zend Technologies), Shawn Stratton (Discovery Communications, Inc.), Evan Coury (SouthwestMedical.com) and Mike Willbanks (CaringBridge)

The Opening Keynote starts at 8:30am PDT, so keep your eyes here for that broadcast.

On Zend's DevZone site there's a new post about the Call for Creativity for this year's ZendCon PHP conference:

If you, or someone you know with connections to the developer community at large, have something to show, we would love to hear so we can showcase at this year’s ZendCon. We are looking for music, digital artwork or video media submissions (including fun videos) which will be played or displayed at various places around the conference, with attribution, of course. Physical media submissions are also welcome though we will be limiting that to local artists.

They include some of the guidelines for submitting your work (with an obvious preference on digital media) including the formatting and what sort of topics it should be relevant to. Prizes will be offered to the winners - a spotlight in a ZendCon newsletter and press releases as well as exposure via each category on Zend's social media properties.

If you'd like to send in your submission, you can use the form on this page and link to the media you've created.

The Call for Papers for this year's ZendCon Conference have officially opened! This year's event will be once again in Santa Clara, CA and will be from October 22nd through the 25th.

We are happy to announce that planning is underway for the 2012 Zend PHP Conference, to be held in Santa Clara, October 22-25, 2012. ZendCon 2012 will be the best conference yet and we would like to invite you to be a part of it! A conference is only as good as its speakers and we are looking for the best speakers to share their knowledge and expertise with the PHP community. Attendees will include developers, architects, development managers, decision makers, core PHP developers and community members.

Key themes they're looking for in this year's conference are "PHP in 2012", "Zend Framework 2" and "Development & The Cloud" as well as other topics including:

• Framework-based development
• Server and cloud-based infrastructure
• Databases, storage and data modeling
• Unsung Tools
• Agile processes and project management

The Call for Papers for this year's event ends May 21st, so be sure and get your submissions in soon!