Federico Cargnelutti

The conference was very similar to previous years. The only difference was the venue and the weather. Yes, it was sunny in London, can you believe it? I went there to see Andrei Zmievski, Stefan Koopmanschap and Chris Shiflett. Unfortunately, Andrei could not make it. However, I got to see lots of people from the community.

Stefan gave an entertaining presentation about Symfony and some of the myths surrounding it. He was funny, creative and showed a lot of enthusiasm. Well done Stefan!

Chris talked about security-centered design and did a Sherlock Holmes routine which was just spot on. It was an interesting talk, he chose the right images and videos, avoided jargon and even managed to involve the audience.

Stuart Herbert’s talk was not what I expected. A lot of attendees who hadn’t used a framework before, were intrigued and wanted to know more about Symfony, Zend, Cake, Rails, Grails, Django and other non-MVC frameworks. Instead, he focused more on the reasons why his company decided to use Symfony. Good talk, but the title “Living with Frameworks” was a bit misleading.

Scott MacVicar gave an overview about PHP 5.3. Scott carries a great deal of respect in the community, maybe that’s the reason why he was chosen to deliver this talk, he did a good job mentioning some of the PHP interpreter improvements, including “late static binding” and “namespaces”.

Things not mentioned in the conference where: open platforms, open protocols, open standards, cloud computing, Zend framework, mashup applications, deployment (Puppet/RPMs), Linux, Git/Bazaar, Design patterns, mobile application development, social networking, OpenID, OAuth, CI, unit testing, Ant and Hudson, just to name a few. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed.

Thanks to Marcus Baker for organising this event, and to all of the sponsors, MySQL/Sun, IBM (the ProjectZero team), Adobe, and Microsoft.  I hope next year’s conference will be even better.