Well, I made it through the conference in one piece (except for the head cold I picked up from my oldest daughter, and has spread to my wife as well). I also noticed I'm getting lots of love on the web from Cal Evans over at DevZone and some nice posts from the folks over at PHPDeveloper.org. I wasn't looking for this kind of exposure but it sure is nice.

So I as wrap up my day with some organzing of future projects and taking another stab at using Eclipse and the Zend PHP plugin for it (I'd love to use Komodo but can't afford to pay for a copy of it) I have some thoughts on what I saw and the people I talked to.

By far, the most informative session for me was the one Ilia Alshanetsky gave on migrating to PHP 5.2 from PHP 4 or PHP 5.0/5.1. That will be used as ammunition in a discussion with my boss about what version of PHP to use when we start doing are site reorganization for the forum sites. I also enjoyed some cool chats with John Coggeshall about Zend Framework and his ZFApp tool which he has asked me to help him do some work on (once he gets a repository for it created). He was gracious enough to let me take a look at it before he gave his talk today and it's a very interesting tool. I look forward to getting a chance to analyze his code and figure out how the heck he did it all. ;)

I also got to meet some people that I had been following online but never gotten to meet before: Cal, John, Sebastian Bergman (we had an interesting little chat about efforts to integrate Selenium with PHPUnit3 and a tool under development called SmartFrog), Paul M. Jones (of Solar and Savant fame). The big upshoot to this conference was that I got a chance to give a talk that was well received, so I'm definitely going to submit this same proposal to other PHP conferences since the talk should have a decent shelf-life. Anyhow, that's it for me about php|works.