About an hour ago, something I've been fighting for almost 2 years happened. The Scalar Type Hinting patch for PHP (the one I wrote almost a year ago) has been adjusted for PHP's trunk tree and committed by Derick. Thanks to Derick for taking the time (when I didn't) to prep the patch for trunk and make this happen ;-)

The slides from my talk at DevConf in Moscow are now up and can be downloaded here. Probably the biggest, or at the very minimum the 2nd biggest audience I've had a PHP Conference and the first time I had to give a PHP talk in Russian (with occasional slippage into English ;-p). Seemed to go pretty well.

Finally managed to upload my slides from my ConFoo PHP 5.3 == Awesome! talk. Slides Thanks for all the attendees, especially those who asked questions ;-)

To paraphrase Marco Tabini if you work with PHP you must be doing so in a pretty deep cave to have not heard of HipHop for PHP and the fervor around it the prior to its official announcement this morning by Facebook. I had a fortune to be part of the small group of PHP community people who were invited to take a peak at its technology prior to its official release in January. And I must admit it had been quite amusing to read some of the conjectures people were making about what it actually, given how off the mark most of their guesses were. So what is HipHop? In the tersest of terms HipHop is a tool that converts PHP code into C++ code that when combined with a PHP compatible engine and extensions (ports of some native PHP extensions Facebook uses) library also written in C++ can be compiled using GCC into a binary. This binary can then be ran on a command line or as a web server daemon that utilizes libevent. According to Facebook this can speed up applications by up to 50%, which is a prett...

I will be speaking again this year at PHP Quebec conference, which has now been renamed to Confoo and covers many more topics then just PHP, which should make things even more interesting. With over 100 talks things looks to be an amazing conference, my own talk with cover PHP 5.3 awesomeness ;-)