I am always suprised at the bitterness of flamewars on open source mailinglists, IRC chats and blog posts. Often these flamewars spring from cultural differences, language barriers, little mistakes or oversights. Sometimes they also spring from the assumption that someone does not know the given system well enough or did not bother to read the documentation. Rarely do they spring from proper technical arguments and even then it seems odd to start using the rather aggressive tone which result in the flamewar label.

I have been looking a bit at c# 3.0's LINQ feature. Essentially it provides with c# with an SQL syntax to do what SQL does on DBMS, XML, Array and many other forms of data. What is interesting that the syntax also allows you to define not only what data you want but also the structure you want it in. Furthermore using reflection on the data source and generally the fact that you are no longer passing just a string to your datasource (SQL or XQuery) it is now possible to do compile time checking.

I am sitting in the closing keynote by Marco this very moment. The conference so far as been alot of fun. My 2 new talks went really well (though I really needed an additional 30mins for my SQL talk to cover everything I wanted), but my old LiveUser talk felt not so smooth. I hope that people still learned a bit, especially as the QA part went better. Next time I will review the slides a bit more beforehand to get myself a bit more into the topic again.

Just wanted to remind people in the Berlin area that there will be a special PHP UG Berlin meeting on september 12th as part of a roadshow. We will have a bunch of guests from Zend, eZ Publish and MySQL doing some very interesting presentations:

Its been a while since we had a nice flameware about the relevance of either project. Looking at the stats packages for PEAR and PECL (unfortunately not properly separated atm), we see that 15 million downloads has been passed. Back in february we have not reached 10 million yet. Of those 15 million it seems about 2 million have been produced by PECL, leaving 13 million to PEAR. As such it seems that PEAR alone is likely pulling in more than half a million downloads per month. Suffice it to say I think these are the number of a successful project. PECL also seems to be looking quite well, given that it has alot less packages and also considering that not that many people have the ability to integrate their extensions into their host setup.