International PHP 2005 Conference first impressions

The Frankfurt's International PHP5 Conference has started today with great success at all levels. In terms of organization, there has been a very serious planning here and it smells so at every corner. Great management, perfect timing and of course very good food overall! A very remarkable amount of big enterprises have also shown up, so there are stands from Oracle, O'reilly, Zend, MySQL, Yahoo... among lots of opensource projects with humbler origins. These enterprises have also brought some of their most recognized PHP developers with them, arguably being Zeev Surasky from Zend the main star.

Regarding the assistance, there are lots of people in here, mainly from Germany of course, they may be an 80% of the total of attendees. There is a great number of americans also (Oracle has brought an army). Our relative surprise has been to find that Albert and I are the only spanish attendees we've found so far... We cannot possibly think of the reason, as there is a lot of PHP development going on in Spain. As said, not a total unexpected situation because we lived similar circumstances at 2004's Plone Conference, but it never ceases to surprise us anyway. A trip of this characteristics is sure expensive for a self-employed developer, but for an enterprise should be easily affordable, and the benefits are clear for us. Maybe spanish organizations are still in the process of discovering what this opensource business is all about... these conferences are perfect for knowing what's going on in the opensource software world, business and technology meet quite armoningly.

We, as developers, are enjoying every minute of the conference, as we are attending to the state of the art of PHP development, and also talking with other technicians from different countries is always very pleasant and instructive. We will get back to Barcelona with a lot of new libraries and methodologies to try out, and batteries recharged for sure.