The biggest PHP community conference in Japan, PHP Conference 2008 was held on 21th July2008 (Sea Day, national holiday) at Kamata, Tokyo. There were 500 PHP engineers atendees.
Keynote began with Rui HIROKAWA, Japan PHP users group, who has been contributing a lot for PHP multibyte handling. He talked mainly about the PHP updates on PHP5.3, and future PHP6.
The following sessions in main room were given by big-name companies who heavily use PHP, Gurunabi (Groumet Navigation, the biggest online restaurant guide website), Rakuten (The largest online shopping mall) and Cybozu (No. 1 share groupware package vendor).
Although Rakuten hires Matz, Yukihiro MATSUMOTO, who wrote Ruby, PHP are still used widely in Rakuten, as they said.
Then two popular PHP influencers, halt and Hideyuki SHIMOOKA talked the Japan PHP users group retrospective and how to enhance your information-collecting ability.
The panel discussion, under the masochistic title “What language you must learn after PHP?”, had been getting a lot of attention on the web because of the splendid members,
- Yoshinori TAKESAKO, the Shibuya Perl Mongers leader (after Tatsuhiko MIYAGAWA)
- Masayoshi TAKAHASHI, Japan Ruby Associations, also known by Takahashi Method for presentation
- Atsushi SHIBATA, Python Japan User’s Group
- Yasuo HIGA, The Seasar Foundation, the creator of Java DI Container Seasar
- amachang, Shibuya.js Javascripter
Every single of them is known as the leading engineer in each programming language in Japan.
The last session was, as it has been taking root in programming language conferences in Japan, in “the lightening talk” style with around 10 PHP engineers.
