I was thrilled to find out on Friday that the php|works conference had accepted my proposal to give a talk on "What PHP Can Learn From Rails." The conference runs from September 13th to September 15th of this year in Toronto, at the Holiday Inn Yorkdale (which is across the street from the largest shopping mall in the city). I attended last year's conference and had a great time. It's a local thing for me as I live just outside Toronto.

I'm approaching this topic with some trepidation because, well, the Ruby on Rails framework is a touchy subject amongst some PHP developers. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I use Rails as well. I like it. Is there anything wrong with liking Rails and liking PHP? I don't think so. Right now, PHP pays the bills but I certainly wouldn't say no if the right opportunity to use Rails and get paid for it comes up. PHP is a great language for doing rapid application development, and you certainly can't go wrong with Ruby on Rails if it fits what you need.

Anyway, the point of all this is not to bash PHP. It's to show other PHP developers some of the ideas that Rails has embraced and make them part of any PHP developer's toolbox. More on the presentation as I get it together. I'll be using coding examples from the Zend Framework in my presentation, which is something that I'm looking forward to as well since I'm on the verge of making my first submission to add a component to the framework, Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler (a joint submission between myself and my buddy Derek). They got my Contributor License Agreement today, which is needed to allow me to contribute things to the framework. By signing it I am saying that all the work is original and not copied.

The component itself is finished, and I am just making sure all the unit tests are passing before I create the submission in the project's wiki. The framework uses PHPUnit2, which is very similar to SimpleTest so I don't anticipate a major problem getting unit tests written for all methods.

So, if you're going to be going to php|works make sure you stop buy and say hello to me. I'll be the guy being tossed out of the conference for saying nice things about Rails. :)