ZendCon, Eclipse and the Cloud

This is a wrap-up for another excellent #zendcon that took PHP one step forward this year into the enterprise world and the mainstream.

It began with several announcements about Zend Server 5.0 beta that now provides more enterprise-ready features such as code tracking tools and job queue services. It continued with an announcement of a new edition for Zend Studio 7.1 beta that is based on Eclipse PDT 2.2 with remote server and task focus programming tools integrated with the Mylyn PHP bridge. It was also the time Zend stated that it is going to invest more on making standard to interact with "the cloud" (MS, IBM, Rackspace, Nirvanix and Go-grid) with its new Simplecloud API.

Interesting points that I wanted to share:
1. Stephen O’Grady moderated a panel about the various Zend Cloud initiatives entitled Developing on the Cloud you can read his summary here.

2. This conference everyone were using Eclipse tools, it is just wonderful to see that Eclipse solutions are well adopted by the PHP community that was at first controversial about moving to Eclipse. People were also amazed by the built-in tools Eclipse provides that can be leverage by all developers such as streamline of development process features and Application life-cycle management tools.

3. Another nice conversation made with two Jetbrains developers that were really enthusiastic about their open source product that will deliver a PHP plugin really soon. I talked to them about the latest announcements (open sourcing InteliJ platform and IDE). It seems that unlike the Eclipse community Jetbrains really wants to focus on platform for development tools and will do their best to keep this goals for now. I was really impressed by the deep knowledge they have about language modeling and the methods they use internally for indexing and caching that is totally different from approaches I know in Eclipse. It will be very nice if the Eclipse community will take some time to learn some techniques from their open source project

4. Some pictures from the keynote:







So long ZendCon09!