Hello again,

Yesterday I attended the phpGG Frontend Special  , phpGG first great conference and I must say it was very good organized. I had to be on the road for more than four hours but it was worth every second of it.

Like on most conferences you were welcomed with your preferable drink, for the record mine is orange juice. I saw a lot of net workers drinking milk. 🙂 After some networking/ chitchatting  the presentations began right on time.

The presentations were professionally introduced by Stefan Koopmanschap and Kana Yeh and were all on the topic of front end.

The first presentation was from Bram Veenhof about MS Silverlight. It was interesting but not really PHP oriented.

The second one speaker was a charismatic speaker with great humor and very much knowledge about the Adobe Flex and Air platforms, Mihai Corlan.

He was able to grab my interest with live demos and coding examples. In a matter of minutes he had a working application using Flex and PHP. Awesome. I really see this technology used in one of my next CMS projects. He explained about datagrids and how flex uses them to interact with a Mysql Database through PHP on a different or same server.

After so much interesting information it was time for a lunch break and I spoke with Mihai and he explained first hand the new technology behind the Text Layout Framework in Flex 3.2 or AIR 1.5. It looks great, I urge you to check it out if you are interested in anything Flash, Flex or Air related.

After a sandwich or two it was time to have presentations introducing some user groups.  Juliette Reinders Folmer introduced  PHP Women ,  Sander van Lambalgen introduced Fronteers and of course the group phpGG, frontend special organizer itself, was introduced by Stefan. He even threw in some surprise gifts. Including several elephpants, ZCE study guides and even two tickets to the upcoming PHP Conference in London.

Now my favorite presentation took of. Ibuildings own Javascript evangelist Boy Baukema. He talked about of course Javascript and what made it interesting for me was the fact that he made comparisons between upcoming new features in PHP 5.3 and already existing features in Javascript like Lambda functions and Closure. I will post a link towards the presentation soon.

Robert Jan Verkade founder of Eend.nl  talked about why PHP developers should be nice to frontend and visa versa. Personally I do not have any bad experiences on this subject but I can imagine a lot of developers do. He said communication is key. Isn’t this so true for all parts of life! But if communication is faulty on your work floor he spoke about some key principles what you can do to minimize conflicts.

And that is a wrap.  I would like to thank all the speakers and the organization phpGG for  making my Saturday a very good one. I hope to see more of these days organized in the future. If not for the great presentations, than for the wonderful networking you can do. It is always fun to see new and familiar faces.
I hope to be able to post links to the presentations somewhere this week. In the meantime you can checkout Flickr, there are some pictures definitely going to be posted there under the tag: phpggfs

Warm winter greetings from Belgium,
Nick Belhomme
Your PHP5 Zend Certified Engineer

[UPDATE]

Ok as promised  here are the slides:
* Flex and AIR for PHP programmers by Mihai Corlan

*  Javascript: 8 Reasons every PHP developer should love it by Boy Baukema

* phpWomen