According to this post over on the C7Y site (php|architect's community site), their php|tek 2008 conference has already reached the forty percent sold mark on seats for the event.

Seat sales for our php|tek 2008 conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and 23rd, are starting to pick up, and over 40% of all available spots have already been reserved.

You can signup on their conference website as well as get all of the details on the four day event including the speaker schedule, hotel and travel information - even a Boss Help section to help with convincing your local PHB.

The Builder.au website has a new article about Zend's new struggles to find their business model in an open source world.

Open-source software company Zend Technologies, hoping to double its revenue this year, says it will narrow its focus to big business and Web 2.0-style start-ups, according to incoming CEO Harold Goldberg.

The article talks about the obvious routes (selling products to large facilities, governments, etc) but also in partnerships (IBM) and other yet to be discovered paths.

On the SearchOpenSource.com site today, there's this new article combining two popular things together to make one powerful and productive tool using the Amazon web services and the Zend Framework.

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.

As mentioned in This post on the PHP Magazine site, Bill Ackermann has been added to the Zend team as the new Vice President of Sales.

Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, has announced that Bill Ackermann has joined the company as Vice President of Sales. Ackermann has held senior sales positions at both emerging and mature enterprise software category leaders, including Oracle, Netscape and most recently, Metreo. At Zend, Ackermann will oversee North American and Global Alliance sales and join the executive management team.

Ackermann joins Zend at a time when the adoption of PHP by developers and enterprise organizations is rising, the company says. Zend delivers products and services for developing, deploying and managing enterprise-class PHP applications, selling them directly and in partnership with large established companies like IBM and Oracle.

Always good to have bit of new, energetic blood in an organization, especially when it comes to working in Sales.

According to a new press release today, Turbolinux has announced their partnership with Zend Japan, Ltd. to further "Internet Linux Deployment in the Asian markets" (through the purchase of a 90% share of their stock).

Under the terms of the contract negotiations concluded on March 30, Turbolinux acquired a ninety percent share (1,170 shares) of Zend Japan Ltd. from Open Source Japan, Ltd. Zend Japan will continue to serve as the exclusive distributor of Zend web application platform products in Japan.

"With Turbolinux, Zend Japan will closely plan and promote Turbolinux and Zend/PHP products and solutions and will be able to provide them in a comprehensive and stable format. In this dynamic alliance with Turbolinux and Zend Technologies, Zend Japan will offer products and service which cover the needs of Japanese market," added Mr. Suzuki.

Turbolinux will be using their sales and distribution channels to help further the reach of theirs and Zend's technologies. The negotiations for the whole deal were completed back on March 30th, but nothing was revealed until April 5th.

From the NewsForge site, there's this new tutorial that shares how you can develop some simple PHP scripts and, with the help of SQLite, "exploit" the Amazone Web Services.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me how my book, Pro OpenSSH, was selling on Amazon.com. I was tracking the sales by going to Amazon.com and viewing the book page to examine the sales rank. The only data displayed about history information was today's Sales Rank and Yesterday's Sales Rank, which isn't all that helpful. I decided to use PHP, SQLite, and the Amazon Web Services API to gather more useful data.

I thought it would be fun to track the sales rank over a period of time, then display a graph of the sales rank over time on a Web page.

He shows how, via the REST web service Amazon offers, he created a simple PHP5 script to grab the resulting XML, parse out the sales rank for his book, and drop it into a SQLite database. He chooses to go with the SimpleXML package for the parsing.

All of the code is laid out in the tutorial, including some to use the Image::Graph package in PEAR to render a simple line graph of the fetched information.

[digg it]

As pointed out on the Professional PHP Blog today, there's an interesting set of graphs on the book sales for different topics, including Ruby, Java, and yes, PHP.

O'Reilly radar has an interesting graph of 2004 versus 2005 book sales for a variety of languages. The big news is that Ruby books sales are up 1552% and Java book sales are down 4%. This would be consistent with my observations from Why isn't PHP the natural successor to Java. A small cadre of agile minded developers are giving Ruby a spin.

Meanwhile, there is no change in PHP book sales. Perhaps this suggests that Java is loosing to Ruby, but PHP is not? Or PHP is gaining from Perl, the other language with declining sales, just as fast as its loosing to Ruby? Perhaps you can't read anything much at all into these numbers.

And, of course, it's nice to see - as he also mentions - that PHP books are still outselling Ruby books by 3x. Of course, that's a double-edged sword, with Java books outselling PHP books by 2.5x.