Zend Studio Workshop - Building Apps from A to Z

This was nothing like what I thought it would be based on the description. I was under the impression that this would be explaining how to use Zend Studio effectively to create an application. The actual tutorial was more of an explanation of how ZF2 works. Admittedly, most of the people attending seemed to have little to no experience with ZF2, which may have affected the speaker's focus. I don't believe that was really the case, though. The speaker also was jumping around between a prepared project and a new one that was generated on the fly. In order to hit all the points in the tutorial, he was unable to stop long enough to allow people to try and keep up in their own Zend Studio instance. This was especially frustrating because the tutorial began with a request to download Zend Studio, which implied that this would be more interaction.

It is easy to criticize without suggesting improvements, so I will give my thoughts as to how I would have run this tutorial.

1. Before the tutorial, I would have prepared the project itself on github. I would have prepared all my commits and released them as I was explaining concepts. Perhaps I'd set them up as pull requests and accept them as we moved through the code. This would allow the audience to continually update and would allow them to be more involved with the project.

2. Also before the tutorial, I would have recommended something like Vagrant be installed before beginning this tutorial. I would have had a virtual image prepped and ready with Zend Server installed and set up. This would have allowed me to explain how to develop using a remote machine with Zend Server. Later, we'd use another image as our "production" server, which would allow us to show how packaging and deployment to Zend Server would work.

3. I would make the tutorial slightly more interactive. I would explain how to do something, then later when I tried to do it again, I would ask to see if anyone could tell me what I needed to do. This would help reinforce what's being taught.

Overall, I think that this workshop had a lot of promise. The delivery just didn't live up to what I was hoping for. Zend Studio is a great and powerful tool, and there is a lot that you can teach that can help make building applications with it much easier. I was hoping to get more insight into ways that I can leverage it instead of building projects with other editors.