After my colleague Cal reviewed DPC's tutorial day, it's now my turn to look back at the first real conference day of 2009's Dutch PHP Conference.

The day started with a nice movie made by Almer and Norman after which Cal officially opened the Dutch PHP Conference and introduced Andrei Zmievski to do the opening keynote. Andrei gave an outline of developments in PHP including the changes we are going to see in future versions. Closures, namespaces, better garbage collection and a few more things are coming to PHP5.3, but I think this isn't new to most people. I haven't really read a lot on PHP6 yet other than Unicode, so the addition of traits, C# style getters and setters and scalar/return value type hinting were new to me. I think this was a nice talk to be the opening keynote, because other than just being infomrative the talk also had the right amount of humor with some examples of frustrated people reporting "bugs" and a setting for y2k compliance. I wasn't active in PHP 10 years ago, but it made me laugh when I heard that the y2k_compliance setting basically did nothing other than stop people asking about it.