Last week I attended the International PHP Conference 2008 in Mainz in Germany. The conference was well prepared and I would like to say thanks to organizers. There was just one thing, which could be better. It was raining for all my stay, but this nobody can influence:).

As I expected, almost nobody from the attendees knew the PHP support in NetBeans or NetBeans itself. PHP support in NetBeans is still new and the first version of the PHP support will be released with NetBeans 6.5, probably next week. Because our tool is still new for PHP developer, no surprise for me. I met probably less people than I have fingers, who knew NetBeans. Sun was one of the Gold sponsors and during opening ceremony the audience was asked whether there is someone who knows the PHP support in NetBeans. I think that there was  6 people who put up hand.

On Wednesday I had one session, where I did demonstration of features that are available in NetBeans for PHP IDE. I demonstrate not only the PHP specific features, but also database support on MySQL database, JavaScript editor and debugger etc. I think that the presentation had success, because some people came and told me that they were surprissed, what NetBeans can offer to PHP developers.  During whole conference I did many demos in our booth. It was nice to see that people are trying NetBeans on corridors. Some of them came to visit me more times and asked me how to do this or this. At Wednesday's midnight I was still siting with a few people around a table and we were discussing their problems and also we opened their projects in NetBeans and trying to configure debugger etc.

I met during the conference few well known people in the PHP community. I talked with Johannes Schlüter, who is PHP 5.3 release manager. We talked mainly about when PHP 5.3 will be release and about obstacles, which prevent to release it now, like the namespace delimiter story. I have talked with Sebastian Bergmann about PHP Unit support. Sebastian is the author of PHP Unit. I met Wolfram Kriesing, who is well known in Dojo comunity and we talked about integration Dojo in NetBeans etc. I met many PHP developers and it was very useful for me to talk with them.

At the end I have good feeling from the conference. At the beginning of the conference very few people knew about NetBeans and when I leaved Mainz many people have tried NetBeans and expressed good feeling from the support. The time will show whether NetBeans will be used with PHP developers.