Report from the International PHP Conference 2009, Barcelona

How many techies does it take to build an elephant tower?

Result :–

This elephant is, of course, the mascot of PHP. Attending the International PHP Conference in Barcelona, I was surrounded by these lovely cuddly toys. As you can well imagine, the conference, organized by the PHP Barcelona User Group, was not for the soft-hearted but for the top PHP programmers/developers. Altogether there were 350 attendees coming from as far as India to listen to some brilliant talks.

Once again Rasmus Lerdorf was invited. He gave a brief history of PHP and talked about good security when using PHP. He was rather critical of the use of frameworks and design patterns – saying that the developer should always be in charge of his/her code. (Since the website does not show Rasmus’ talk, I gathered that information from talking to people who attended his talk. Hope I got it right!)

Other talks of interest included:

. The State of Quality Assurance Tools for PHP by Sebastian Bergmann
. Symfony 2.0, a Sneak Peak by Fabien Potencier

And many more.

Interested in PHP? Look out for PHP Barcelona 2010 as I am sure this conference will go from strength to strength.