Thursday @ ApacheCon EU 2005

Day 1 for me on ApacheCon. I actually arrived yesterday afternoon, but spent most of the time chatting with people and was also quite happy to see John, Marcus and Derick again after some time. I only attended the last few minutes of John's Migration talk, but saw all of Christian Stocker's XML talk. It was very interesting and showed some of the nice stuff PHP 5.1 is bringing in this area. The slides should also serve as a preliminary documentation. The XmlReader concept which was inspired by .NET performs really well with large documents, as Christian presented with some test statistics. Pity that only about 15 people were there, but obiously most of the attendees still fought the effects of last night's party ...
After a long lunch break (good food, long queues), Marcus Boerger talked about some very advanced PDO stuff which made me really looking forward to a stable PHP 5.1. Then, Chris Shiflett did his obligatory "PHP Security Briefing" and still got very amazed looks by the audience (at least until the orchestra next door started their rehearsals, no kidding). This proves that we still have to try to educate developers the nitty-gritty of secure coding. Finally, Derick spoke about date and time handling, where I learned quite a lot about timezones in general (did you know that Nepal uses three quarters of an hour offsets for DST?!). Finally, my PHP Web Services talk concluded the day. After upgrading to PEAR::SOAP 0.9.1 this morning (and then finding out that all samples with it were now broken), I prepared two more
demos with live version switching but ran out of time. Got interesting questions afterwards, and I think it went well.
That's all about it for now; tomorrow will bring some more very promising talks, so stay tuned.