This conference continued the trend seen at other conferences in the last couple of years: the focus is less and less on the language itself. We saw very little code, and instead focused on the process of developing professional, enterprise-level PHP systems that the end-user finds easy and enjoyable to use. Matthijs van den Bos will be writing about the conference for our techPortal and will also be commenting on this characteristic; he'll be analysing the topics covered in more detail.

Aral Balkan opened the conference with a highly entertaining and thought-provoking keynote address entitled "The Art of User Experience: making beautiful, delightful, fun things". Our processes can be wonderful, our code elegant and fully tested, but at the end of the day someone has to be able to use what we have engineered and we should never lose sight of that.

Last year there was a lot of interest in NoSQL databases. This year, whilst referred to occasionally, they were not a major focus - instead there were a couple of sessions on getting better performance from relational databases. This fitted in with the general theme of improving performance and management of the application environment. There were significant talks on effective use of caching, and tools for environment setup, deployment and management.

One of the keynote talks was on the importance of web services and the benefits in making them central to system design. This was accompanied by talks to enable a greater understanding of developing them. They have moved from fringe to centre stage in recent years with the growth of development for multiple delivery platforms. (To find out more about web services our white paper on Service APIs is a good place to start.)

Best practices for our development process is a recurrent theme at these conferences and understanding Agile played a significant part, with a day-long tutorial on XP Principles and practices and other talks on Agile, Test or Design Driven Development and Quality.

Finally the fact that we are operating in a global environment was not forgotten with talks on character sets, internationalisation and the use of geolocation information and maps within PHP.

I'd like to thank all those whose vision and hard work made the event possible and so successful - it seemed to run like clockwork. Hopefully you and your team can attend next year; in the meantime we publish the talks as podcasts on techPortal through the year.