I missed Andi and Zeev's keynote this morning but got to see Rod Smith from IBM speaking about Web 2.0. Well, that was the title of his talk, but I'm not sure what was Web 2.0 about it. What I found interesting about Rod's talk was that he made the enterprise seem more enlightened than you might think. For example, when he talked about the tendency to add unnecessary complexity, he offered some reasonable explanations. Enterprise companies know complexity is bad, and they're trying to learn from the PHP community. We tend to get the job done in a more direct and pragmatic manner, and that approach has a lot of value. This is one of the many reasons behind IBM's interest in PHP.

I sat in on a few minutes of Neil Green's talk about PHP frameworks. His talk focused on characteristics of an enterprise PHP framework, and he offered some pretty solid opinions. I particularly liked that he stressed the importance of considering security as part of the design. (I'll speak about this framework later.)

At lunch, I ran into the NYPHP crew. There are 5 of us here (6 if you count Adam), which is a pretty good showing for a user group from the opposite coast.

After lunch, Marc spoke about "2005, a Web Odyssey." His talk was almost two different talks - the prepared content and the Q&A period. He spoke about trends in the industry and focused on the transition from languages written for machines to languages written for developers. He thinks Java marked the beginning of this transition and that PHP is now in the spotlight. When speaking about PHP's dominance in the web space, he pointed out that more web applications will be written in the next five years than have been written to date. Thus, those technologies that dominate in the next five years will win, and PHP looks poised to do just that. The Q&A period allowed Marc to showcase his personality a bit more as well as touch on just about every corner of the software industry.

I also sat in on most of Wez's PDO talk. I've seen parts of this before, so most of it was familiar. Wez does a particularly good job of highlighting core PDO features with small, focused code samples and clear explanations.

I briefly stopped by the exhibit hall (and PHP 10th anniversary party) before heading to the Ning party at Marc's house. I met a few people (like Diego) whom I had only worked with via phone and email. Marc has a nice place, and there was some good food and conversation.

Michael will be speaking about PHP at Yahoo tomorrow, and I'm interested in seeing that. There are also talks from NASA, Intel, eBay, and SAP, so it looks like a very business-oriented day for ZendCon.