Zend will be holding its annual conference in San Francisco this year. Zend/PHP Conference and Expo 2007 (or ZendCon for short) promises to bring together the best of the PHP community. Sessions will be attended, drinks will be shared, geeky questions posed (Do you know what interpolation is?), and life lessons learned.

I have submitted two abstracts for paper presentations, included below. They are both exciting topics that take mature development practices from other technology vendors and communities (primarily Adobe and Java), wrapping them up for the stabilizing PHP community.

AJAX Components written in PHP (submitted with Brett Harris)

Web 2.0 has made UI development more complicated. With these emerging techniques, developers lack a set of cohesive tools with which to develop these new applications. This results in ad-hoc solutions consisting of poorly written code and little documentation. Templating systems are accepted as the best way to separate user interfaces from business logic. Web 2.0 is moving us away from this traditional separation as more business logic moves to the client side. AJAX libraries provide the means for this redistribution, but have yet to be integrated with PHP templating systems. This session will discuss blending AJAX and PHP templates into reusable UI components, and the benefit of a componentized front-end. Audience members will be shown our approach towards building a cohesive toolset that simplifies development by standardizing the front-end resulting in easily maintained and documented code.

Test Driven SOA

SOA presents challenges for web services and their consuming applications. Developers relinquish control over crucial functionality when they depend on web services developed by someone else. In this session, I will discuss the use of test-driven practices and design patterns for developing service consuming applications. I will focus on the use of mock objects to mimic the behavior of actual services and explain how mock objects can be used to aid parallel development, functional testing, and debugging. Attendees will learn how to isolate external dependencies and how to simulate different behaviors of external services. These advantages will be demonstrated using an example release iteration of an application using mock objects.