PHP Next Generation RIA Superhero : Tech Session, Day 1

After finally figuring out what floor the conference was located (there were no signs to direct people… very helpful), I headed to the first session. I noticed that I would have to keep on my toes since the number of available seats to each tiny room were significantly less than the number of attendees. It was a difficult choice, but I decided to kick the first day off with something I’m familiar with. The speaker was Andi Gutmans, CTO and co-founder of Zend Technologies.

He showed us a demo of an application that they built using the Zend Framework and Dojo – a javascript library. The demo utilized MVC architecture, lightppd(web server that allows for a higher number of persistent connections), JSON, and a proof of concept COMET server built with PHP. The app was just a simple web form that used an auto-complete field, except it showed an example of the server “pushing” data to the client as opposed to the user explicitly requesting the data. As with most of the other presenters today, there was some propaganda to sell his product – the Zend Framework, but for the most part he was pretty straight forward.