my 2 cents

Last weekend I attended the PHPUnconference in Hamburg.

The concept of an unconference was new to me. One the one hand I found the approach relaxing, the amount of free time between the sessions was really great to come in contact with the other attendes. One the other hand the selforganisation costed plenty of time and also brought some confusions. This seems to be the natural drawback of an unconference.

In Particular the talks about software-quality from Sebastian Bergmann and Manuel Pichler where pretty interesting to me. A complete list of sessions and notes of them could be found in the PHPUnconferences wiki.

Here are my impressions I got from the various conversations there:

• The php web application world goes javascript for the user-interfaces. Although it was a PHP converence, you could talk with allmost anyone about the exciting world of javascript. Many people, who started with conservertive aproches and replaced server generated HTML on the client, are now in the process to switch to real javascript clients.
• The php web application world goes to mission critical places. Where in the beginning of the php area it had the smack of a hobbyist sphere of activity, php applications do more and more mission critical computing in various business areas.
• Php web application is not a synonym for open source code. In fact as a ambassador of a high quality mission critical open source web application, I felt like a bit of an exception there. The majority of attendees is into closed sourced ‘commercial only’ projects.
• A lot of java coders switch to php. As php is not in the academic scope yet, many newcomers in the web-scene start coding in java. After their first contact with php they love the language due to it’s flexibility. Even in the open source world, one might find this tendency according to ohloh.

Finaly many thanks to the orga team for the great unconference and the extraordinary catering.