The PHPBenelux conference has officially announced their list of speakers for their 2012 event (January 27th and 28th in Antwerp):

We are happy and proud to announce the speaker line-up for the 2012 edition of the PHPBenelux Conference. We already released our tutorials on November 16th, but this is the real deal. Speaker bio's, talk abstracts and schedule will be added later. Please note that this list is subject to change.

Sessions for this year's event include:

• Tobias Schlitt: Writing testable code
• Sebastian Marek: Magic Behind the Numbers - Software Metrics In Practice
• Nick Belhomme: PHP traits, treat or threat?
• Jordi Boggiano: Redis - Your advanced in-memory key-value store
• Stephan Hochdörfer: The state of DI in PHP
• Craig Kitterman: Enterprise Class Cloud for the Average Joe

Tickets are still at their Early Bird prices (but only until December 16th!) and you can get a pass for both the tutorial day and main conference day for just 260 Euro. If you just want to attend the conference, that ticket is only 135 Euro. You can order them here. If you want to attend one of the tutorials, you'll need to specify that by ordering the related ticket.

As is mentioned on Michelangelo van Dam's blog, the PHPBenelux conference for 2012 has been announced and tickets are now on sale.

The PHPBenelux team only announced the names of tutorial speakers, but with names like Ivo Jansch, Torsten Rhinne, Fabien Potencier and Matthew Weier O'Phinney you know it's going to rock! And that's tutorials only. It's all happening on January 27 and 28, so make sure you block those days in your calendar, because the center of Europe is going to buzz PHP like it never had before!

The tickets can be purchased here for the Early Bird rates (until December 16th) of 260 Euro for the full event (conference+tutorials) and 135 Euro for just the conference.

The Dutch PHP Conference has officially announced that they've opened the ticket sales for this year's event (happening in May).

At the moment, we're selling tickets with an early bird discount - that's € 325 for a 2-day conference ticket, € 325 for the tutorial day or € 595 for both. Don't wait too long to get your ticket because early bird sales will end on April 1st. After the early bird, ticket prices will be € 375 for a 2-day conference ticket, € 375 for the tutorial day or € 695 for the full conference pass.

If you'd like to order your tickets for the event, head over to their registration page and pick up as many tickets as you need. Be sure and get them before that April 1st deadline (no fools here) to get these discounted rates.

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.