I’m in the company of celebrities in the world of PHP.
I just finished listening to a talk by Andrei Zmievski on Unicode character support in the upcoming PHP 6. Though I don’t know much about supporting multiple character sets (I’ve had not reason just yet to internatiionalize my code), I do know the problem/difficulty that PHP has with internationalization. Andrei did a very good job of explaining not only what the problems are in the current 5.1.x release, but also how PHP 6 is going to address these items specifically. Without going into any detail here, I can safely say that our jobs are going to be much easier.
The next talk is by Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of PHP. Why is this a big deal? PHP is not only an easy dynamic language to learn, but it’s also currently the most popular, and fastest growing, language on the web (according to sourceforge and other code repositories). His talk is going to be on large-scale PHP. Not quite where I’m at … YET, but these kinds of things are great because they tend to be very concerned with optimization and scaling.
Oh yeah – Christian Wenz and Chris Shiflett are also at these talks. Reminder: Talk to Chris and Christian about securing files w/ Denying access to directories and files via Apache, but reading through PHP if user has appropriate privs. Oh yeah – and the book, maybe.