In good old Moerfelden for this years edition of the International PHP Conference, after having skipped last years event. As always I am looking forward to meeting a lot of old friends and getting to know a few new faces from the PHP world.

One thing I do not get. So there are bunch of guys promising the world. As we all know being good at promising the world is a sure way to rake in tons of cash on the stock market. Not only because there are enough stupid rich guys, but also because increasingly poor or lets say middle class people are stupid enough to believe that they know how the system works, or that their local bank representative actually cares about them. At any rate with the housing market plummeting, this happy bubble has burst.

So I do not quite get it. Where is the technical difference between the Enterprise and the Community Server of MySQL now that MySQL AB has effectively back paddled from their commitment made with the initial split? If the Community Server now does not get new shiny features and be stable like the Enterprise Server, where is the difference? Jeremy is asking the same question. Where is the new test bed for community contributions?

Derick recently released Xdebug 2, you know that thing that makes your coding life sooooo much easier. That thing which took hours and hours to develop. Here it is in all its shiny stable glory. So what did the author ask in return for releasing this goody as open source, already in its second incarnation? He asked for a little post card send to Norway. Thats it! Thats all he asked in return.

Whenever someone asks me why PHP is more "agile" than Java, I tell them that in PHP you can break most of the rules your comp sci course told you about and get away with it. Of course this means that you need PHP developers to constantly clean up their code. To paraphrase Jani: "Everytime you open a file you leave it a bit cleaner than it was before." This one is a fundamental mind set any good PHP programmer needs. Without it we will quickly feel all the pain our wise comp sci prof's wanted to spare us by telling all these rules that "shall never be broken".