1. Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML and Javascript in AIR by Edward Finkler
2. End-to-end web testing with Selenium by Stefan Priebsch
3. I need more servers! what do I do? (Scaling a php application) by Maurice Kherlakian

The talk on AIR was interesting, probably not of huge help for work, but it is something I am getting more interested in, so figured it would not hurt to learn more about it. Learning more about Selenium was great too, especially since this is another one of the technologies that I’m keen to try out at work, integrated with PHPUnit and and possibly PHPUnderControl.
The closing keynote, was by the American Cancer Society, talking about their latest project, Sharing Hope, an online social media site (built using the Zend Framework) where cancer survivors can post their stories of hope and inspiration.
Once the conference was over, I walked to the Intel Museum, which was pretty cool and an ideal way to say good bye to Santa Clara. Tomorrow, its back to San Francisco for a day and a bit before I get on my flight back to Sydney!

1. Architecting for PHP5 – Why “Runs on PHP5″ is not “Written for PHP5″ by Elizabeth M Smith
2. Lesser Known Security Problems in PHP Applications by Stefan Esser
3. State of AJAX, the keynote by Ben Galbraith
4. Security-Centered Design: Don’t Just Plan for Security; Design For It by Chris Shiflett
5. Quickstart to Continious Integration by Sebastian Bergmann
6. High Performance PHP & MySQL scaling techniques by Eli white

The keynote by Ben was undoubtedly the highlight of the day. The presentation was incredible and I am sure most people like me were disappointed when he ran out of time. I would have been happy had he continued for a little longer.
the talk was about the future of web apps, specifically using technologies like Google gears to bring web applications to the desktop.
It was great listening to Sebastian Bergmann, the author of PHPUnit, talk about continuous integration in PHP using PHPUnderControl. This interestingly was something that we were looking at using at work, so it was nice to learn a bit more about this. Eli White’s second presentation was excellent as well, although this time there was no Hoff

The day ended with a small party thrown by Yahoo!, I hung around for a bit, tried solving an impossible Yahoodoku puzzle and got a to drink a Yahoo-tini (plus keep the purple glow when placed in water ice cube).

1. Of Haystacks and Needles by Derick Rethans
2. Tiery Eyed by Kevin Schroeder
3. PECL Picks – Extensions to make your life better by Elizabeth M Smith
4. The Knight Rider Methodology To Software Development by Eli White
5. State & Ajax – How to Maintain Browser and Application State in an Asynchronous World by Paul Reinheimer
6. (In)secure Ajax-y Websites with PHP by Christian Wenz

The talks by and large were pretty good although a few of them were a bit more beginner level than I expected. I do however have to specifically point out the talks given by Eli White and Christian Wenz.
True to the title, The knight rider methodology talk showcased a lot of interesting tools that a good PHP developer should consider adding to his arsenal along with clips from the Knight Rider, complete with 80′s hair, 80′s fashion and The Hoff!
Christian Wenz had one of my favorite talks of the conference, covering the various insecurities that PHP developers overlook when making AJAX rich websites. He covered the popular SQL injection and cross site scripting as well as the more interesting (to me) Javascript and XML attacks.
I’m glad I fought through the jetlag just because of that talk

1. PHP Developer Best Practices
2. SQL Query Tuning: The Legend of Drunken Query Master

Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Mike Naberezny took the first session, and the talk did cover a lot of best and suggested practices, most of which I was happy to see we were (my company) already practicing, like having a separated dev, staging and production server, unit testing, having and maintaining coding standards etc.

The second talk was by Jay Pipes on tuning MySQL and was the best of the day. I knew some of the stuff, but it was good to get a refresher. There were some revelations though, like for example

in a table INT(1) and INT take the same space! The (1) is just a zerofill, it makes no difference to the size.

When storing IP addresses in a table, it is better to use a big int field and convert IP’s to numbers and vice versa using INET_ATON and INET_NTOA.

All in all a pretty good day

I realise that they(Google) will be making sure that google and google related sites render very well, and their talk of getting it to multithread make things sound interesting, but how well will it perform when it comes to the more important (to me atleast) topics of web standards, also, how will this affect Google’s relationship with Firefox?

Chrome on Wiki.

For example, if I am writing an email and want to embed maps, reviews etc, instead of going to various sites and getting the relevant links, I can use ubiquity to get and embed the information it into my email. The video below explains things a lot better, and you can also go to Mozilla Labs to install the prototype (which works with Firefox naturally). It looks very promising for something still in its infancy.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I do not think that adding basic variable support to CSS is harmful, infact I still strongly believe that this would actually make css easier to write and maintain in the long run. Also the learning curve would be as good as non existant.