Second session I wanted to see was Gaylord Aulke about best practices and "the Zend way". Unfortunately he couldn't make it either and his session was cancelled. Speaking about best practices Since we find other sessions weren't that interesting we hung out for about an hour in the lobby and the surrounding area's. There are always many other developers around and its always nice to meet other people and hear their success stories.

Next session for me was a security talk from Stefan Esser. The talk was called "Lesser know security problems". I found it a very interesting talk and it had some good 'best practices' about things you usually won't hear in a security talk. The things he showed were actually from a real life situation and therefor very familiar to most of us. It was a good in depth session.

Right after lunch we got treated to a second keynote. The keynote was about "The state of AJAX" and was presented by Ben Galbraith - one of the ajaxian.com founders. It was actually a very good presentation. Since I am very much an Apple fan I quickly noticed that he was using his iphone as a remote for changing his slides. Clearly he was using something like keymote. Ben talked about the future of web-apps and their new technologies. AJAX / web 2.0 is like the beginning of a whole new way of doing web applications. With new technologies being developed like Google Gears developers are able to bring desktop applications to the browser. Already there are many examples available. Browsers like Firefox and Safari already support the <canvas> element which is part of the HTML5 draft specification and enables developers to develop UI's that require heavy graph rendering and even do gaming stuff. Another thing he talked about was fluid. It enables you to create a desktop application from a web-app. Very interesting to see how things evolve from AJAX to really desktop alike web-apps.

After the keynote I attended a so called "UnCon" session. The talk was called "Make frameworks suck less" presented by Terry Chay. People who've seen Terry Chay before knows he has a 'typical' way of presenting. I find his talks interesting and this time he did a really good job. He talked about the pareto principle and he was saying that if you have to maintain a website for a very long time the benefit of using a framework decreases opposed to short time projects where you need to quickly have something up and running. Meaning that in the long term you probably work more on the business logic and UI's and less on the things that frameworks will incorporate. Although he has a point I disagree with him. There are lots of things to consider when you are evaluating the use of a framework. Maintaining your own framework will eventually cost you more time than using one of the good frameworks out there. Nowadays there are so many good frameworks available with a strong community and that means you can extend your team with other community members helping to support and maintain the framework. Nonetheless is was a great session!

After Terry Chay's talk I went to a talk called "Continuous Integration" by Sebastian Bergmann. Sebastian is the Author of PHPUnit which you probably all know. The talk covered the use of PHPUnderControl. Continuous Integration is great when you have long term projects to maintain.

The closing session for this day was presented by Ivo. Of course I've seen a lot from him since I work for about 8 years with him. I've actually never seen his talk about "Enterprise PHP development". It was nice seeing him in action and it was a great session. If you're interested just buy his book

We closed the day with the Yahoo! party.

Looking back this was the best day on the conference for me.