i'm sitting in andi gutman's presentation at oscon about building rich internet applications in php.  my expectations will be that this will be talking about ajax and flex (given the nature of the conference).

andi's first talking about the nature of ajax for rich applications in php.  what is cool is that he mentioned the micorosft ajax client library and the codeplex php kit in the talk so far.  he said he likes talking about it because it demonstrates the nature of ajax standards. 

he also talked initially about simplexml as a mechanism for communicating with ajax services.  i used simplexml myself in the learn2asp.net series for php that i helped out with.  i found the microsoft ajax implementation easier to consume even if there might be one more task of implementing the interface.

andi's now showing a chat application build in ajax/php.  it's a basic chat application, but then integrates yahoo keywords services, highlighting keywords in the chat text.  then clicking on the text integrates with flickr to get pictures based on that keyword -- providing an end-to-end seamless service. 

so how was the sample built?  zend framework.  andi walks through the zend framework architecture, highlighting areas of json serialization, etc.  he's talking now about using the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern for developing the chat application and how the zend framework uses this (i.e., routing is one simple example, mapping URI requests to actions).

hmm...this really is more of an MVC using zend framework talk so far...interesting, but not what i expected so far.

one cool function for ajax developers: Zend_Json::encode($yourArray), oooh, even better: Zend_Json::fromXML($response->getBody())

so what will be in zend framework vNext?

• much faster release cycles (monthly to bi-monthly mini releases; 4 times a year minor releases)
• ajax-enabled form components in v1.1
• ajax support in eclipse-based dev tools (javascript editing/debugging, syntax highlighting, toolkit support, code completion)
• zend component model (server php component architecture; ajax client toolkit, client-side messaging; tooling in dev tools/ides for components)

andi's giving a security talk regarding php next...think i'm headed to somewhere else though.  zend framework looks very useful for php developers.  i'd love to start seeing the mvc implementation of the zend framework run through the fastcgi implementation for IIS and see what php developers think of that!

this year, microsoft is a premier sponsor for oscon alongside intel and zimki.  i'm grateful that microsoft is a sponsor and excited about some of the things we'll be talking about this week.  open source conferences certainly are a different beast compared to microsoft big-dog conferences like PDC/TechEd/etc.  sure there are the little things like the halls being constantly filled with sugar and caffeine...not here at oscon (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

sigh, here's my biggest beef with o'reilly conferences...abusing the keynote.  on two levels.  on the first level is a little bit of obessiveness of accuracy on my part.  to that end let's examine the word keynote (and use the open source wikipedia to help us).  from wikipedia:

...the keynote address or keynote speech is delivered to set the underlying tone and summarize the core message or most important revelation of the event.

okay, given that here's the first beef: there is only one keynote.  sure, yeah, call me anal, etc. -- who cares...just call it a general session.

second beef: it wasn't even a keynote!  the keynote to me should do exactly what the definition states: set the underlying tone and summarize the core message.  this morning's did neither for me.  first there were 4 different talks during the keynote.  first some banter from conference planners, then o'reilly himself talking about web 2.0 and business models, then intel and multi-core parallelism, then transactional memory for concurrency, then an interview with shuttleworth, then Q&A (which IMO never works in a large setting, the ones at MIX proved that for me even more).  okay, so as an attendee, what 'vibe' am i supposed to get?  web 2.0, multi-core, concurrency, all of them?  i think this just takes away from getting attendees excited about the core messaging.

pick one thing, pick a great speaker and get me pumped about the week.  sure you can trickle in multi-core, concurrency, etc. but don't keep switching people out -- i left feeling completely disheveled about what the core message of the open source world is right now -- but i know who the sponsors are of oscon ;-)  okay, i'm off my soapbox now.

anyhow, i really don't have anything to report from the morning keynote.  it did nothing for me.  tim o'reilly demonstrated that the open source world is bigger than we all think, citing the internet itself as a system of contributors.  he also pointed out that there are a hugely successful areas of the web that aren't open source but have massive contributors (google map mashups as an example).  i felt that tim had more to say about open source business models, but his 15 minutes (yep 15 minutes) were up so he had to depart.

oscon is also trying to donate some dough to charities...much like railsconf did earlier this year (railsconf raised US $35K toward charities).  it was hard to hear the website to donate as nathan has an australian(?) accent -- i think it was ossx.org/r but go find yourself an aussie and ask them to say "ossx" over an echoing loudspeaker and see if you can discern it ;-).  i like this idea of contributing to charities though.  nathan said it well when he said the oss communities donate their time to projects, why not some money to other projects that need help (good cause open source that doesn't have code he said).

on to some sessions: going to check out RIA in PHP, 'who gets to decide what open source means' and we'll see what else throughout the day.

i'm also armed with my video camera and going to try to do my best to get some interviews -- will i be successful?  well, i am the underdog at this conference and it might be difficult to get people to agree.  anyone you think i should talk with in the open source community?

after a few inquiries i thought i'd just put together a very simple, very quick demonstration of preparing an existing silverlight 1.0 application for release candidate.  i've posted previously about the preview sdk and breaking changes and this screencast walks through taking two simple samples from the silverlight.net site and prepping them for the release candidate.  you can view the screencast here.

now, i know that every person's silverlight application may vary, but there will be common things you have to do.  this first screencast shows those very common things that likely everyone will have to change.  i'll post up some more conversions of more involved samples shortly.  but for now, this should answer the 'what do i do first?' questions some may have.

these are silverlight 1.0 samples, using visual studio 2005 as the development environment.

HELP: i'm still trying to figure out the best way to deliver media to subscribers (i've posted the screencast on my *cast feed as well), so i've also made an iPod version (m4v) available to anyone.  if anyone has good ideas on enabling a single feed to please everyone without bogging individuals down with formats they don't want/can't use, please let me know -- i'm a noob.

i want to help everyone be successful in preparing your samples/projects for silverlight release candidate.  i keep my contact lines pretty open.  my email and instant messenger information is listed on the contact page of my blog, which i've updated.  i've also added a 'call me' button on the site so that if you want to directly reach out to me, you can.  it connects to me, my cell -- not an office or main line.  call anytime (i can't promise i'll answer at 3am though ;-)).

i needed to check something online with my bank so i fired up my browser and checked.  then it dawned on me that i remember when ie7 came out that my bank (wells fargo) *immediately* (like literally within a few hours) started blocking it and put up a message saying specifically that my browser wasn't supported because it was beta.

thinking a bit i fired up safari 3 beta...son-of-a-*  double standard.  looks like i wasn't the only one who thought so...i saw these guys standing on the side of the road today as well...

shame on you wells fargo, shame on you...

yesterday i just posted about excitement around the ironruby discussion at oscon.  well, more excitement today!

john lam just announced the first drop of the ironruby sourcecode!  the source is licensed under the microsoft permissive license (BSD-style).  also the team has announced that they will be accepting source code contributions for the ironruby libraries!  this is phenomenal.  there will be a lot of work to make that happen and the intention is to get ironruby on to rubyforge by end of august.

john also announced that in some some micro-benchmark tests, ironruby is testing significantly faster than ruby 1.8.6 in some areas and on par in others.  john will be at oscon as previously mentioned demonstrating some ironruby code, talking about the dynamic language runtime, working with ironruby in silverlight, etc.

check out his full post here.