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.

I am still working on making the current LiveUser release cycles bug free. The bugs that are being spotted are getting increasingly rare and harder to encounter. Unfortunately no work on the caching has start as of yet. A bunch of people have expressed interest in helping. As always nothing has materialized to date. Aside from a minor php doc comment contribution there has also been no assistance on the documentation front. This includes MDB2. Oh well, I guess I need to be content with people finding bugs and reporting them. Anything beyond is too much to ask ... *sigh*

After having skipped a few recent conferences I will be back in action at this years php|works in toronto. It will be my first trip to canada but more importantly I will try my hand at a new flavor of talks. So far I have done several talks on database abstraction, but this time I am giving a talk on how to write proper fast, portable SQL. I do not claim to be a DBA guru, but I have done my fair share of reading on the topic, combined with several years of experience developing database driven applications I think I will be able to show a few new tricks to the audience. Maybe the audience can ever share some of their own!

Note: This post is in german because its a shameless plug for an online workshop I will be holding in german. So now is a good time to learn german I guess :-)