I’m just about to fly home after spending the week at ZendCon in Santa Clara, California.  It was my first trip to ZendCon and was glad to get the chance to interact with other PHP developers and other industry leaders.  Nearly 700 attendees, including other PHP developers, managers and other professionals were on hand for the four day event.  The hot topic for the conference seemed to center around the Zend Framework.

I had evaluated the Zend Framework about a year and a half ago, just shortly after it’s version 1.0 release.  At that time, I was disappointed with the performance of the MySQL adaptor in the framework and decided not to use it as my MVC framework.  But now Zend Framework has had some time to mature and I am again looking at using it for all my future development.  Since it is very modular, I can choose which components to use and which components I can extend on my own.  The other tool I plan on using is Zend Studio for Eclipse.  I don’t currently use an IDE, and I think it is time that I start using one.

All in all, it was definitely a worthwhile convention.  I hope to return for ZendCon 2009.