Last Friday, I attended the annual PHP UK Conference, in London. I enjoyed a number of very interesting tech talks and was impressed with the quality of the event. There was a good mixed turn-out of corporate representatives and community members, from the UK and various other parts of the world. Everyone seemed in high spirits and was eager to chat and exchange ideas. I’ve included what I thought were some of the event highlights below:

• A great keynote by Aral Balkan, on the future of web development and RIAs. Aral highlighted that both hardware and software have become commoditized and that user experience is now the key differentiator for software products. His zany slide deck and manner made for quite an entertaining talk.


• Hearing about the work that the Microsoft Open Source Technology Centre has been doing with PHP and other open source technologies. Microsoft’s Hank Janssen, discussed the progress that has been made regarding PHP on Windows and mentioned that there would be some significant performance improvements for PHP, running on IIS with the fastCGI module. Microsoft was very well represented at the event and, even though there were a few gibes, seemed to have been well received by the community. (An XBOX 360 raffle certainly helped!)


• A practical demonstration of Flex and AIR working with PHP, by Mihai Corlan from Adobe. Mihai gave a short presentation on Flex and AIR and then kicked straight into an “extreme programming” practical example. He effortlessly implemented a Flex-based web interface, which communicated with a PHP script to readwrite to a database table, using the AMF3 remoting protocol. He made the process look very easy and topped it off by copying exactly the same code, straight into an AIR project, and compiling a desktop application, with one click.


• I had the opportunity to play with the Microsoft Surface for the first time. It’s a pretty awesome gadget and I can’t wait to see it in the wild. Apparently it should start appearing in Europe over the course of the year.


• Other interesting attendees included part of the team from the IBM WebSphere sMash project , some representatives from Zend, Sun/MySQL, JasperSoft and a few other UK-based PHP service providers. I also met and caught up with Brad Shuttleworth, an ex-KnowledgeTree Team member.