September User Group:: Building the PHP-stack for the enterprise

PHP has become ubiquitous when it comes to personal blogs, content management systems, ecommerce sites and more. Take any list of Web 2.0¹ sites and you’ll find that more than 50% have PHP as back-end technology. What is less known is that PHP is also making significant inroads in the enterprise.  Join BostonPHP, IBM and Zend as we discuss where Enterprise PHP (and OSS) is going and how it's going to get there.  This promises to be a great evening with plenty of "horsepower" to answer your questions:

• Mark de Visser - Zend's CMO: In his presentation Mark de Visser will cover case studies of Enterprise PHP, and will discuss what drives the adoption and what still needs to be accomplished. He will cover the role of Zend and other commercial vendors in the PHP ecosystem, and will present a roadmap for the coming year of Zend’s main PHP products and services.

• David Boloker - IBM's CTO of Emerging Internet Technology: IBM's QEDWiki (written in PHP 5) began as a research project in 2004 to enable Line of Business professionals to remix Enterprise data in various ways using a graphical assembly tool. QEDWiki is part of a larger solution that creates catalog feeds as well feeds from things like Excel spreadsheets, SQL, XML documents, SAP/PeopleSoft/Siebel information and RSS/Atom feeds.  Upon creation the feeds can be transformed and remixed using another tool that filters, annotates, merges, publishes and transforms them.   Finally, the newly created feeds can be used by QED to create mashups.   In his presentation, David will review the business drivers behind this idea as well do some extensive demonstrations of this technology.

¹The term web 2.0 was coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2003 to describe a plethora of new Web technologies that would be emerging as the World Wide Web evolved yet again as it had from the Publishing Web to the e-Business Web and now, to the world of Web 2.0.    Tim went on to describe what he saw as related to user interface experiences, social networking, multi-media and standards.   In the center of all of this were scripting languages that included Php, Pearl, Ruby and Python.