Opening Keynote - The Joint

If the mentalist's act was shorter, the keynote may not have run over. Personally, I would rather have gone right into the PHP portion.

The opening general session was fun. However, since we had already seen demos of Z-Ray and Z-Ray Live at past conferences I would've liked to see more time spent explaining Expressive.

Tough break on the internet problems, but watching Zeev throw those elephpants was fun in the meantime. :)

Was surprised to see the mentalist act, which took some time away from the keynote and threw off the day's schedule ... Content, however, was great!

I think it was a great keynote. It was a good surprise to bring in the mentalist in to spice things up. However, I do believe that all should have been left to Wed and just concentrated in the ZendCon intro.

Next year we definitely need to get Zeev an elePHPant cannon.

The mentalist was a great addition and made for a really unique conference opener!

The mentalist being in the keynote was an inspired touch and made me make sure I attended the event. There was not enough new stuff here for me; I don't need to see z-ray again but overall geed me up nicely for coming conference.

Bit of reliance on network connection meant the keynote stalled a bit awkwardly. Mentalist was great. Nice to learn that Z-Ray will be made available outside Zend Server though!

Loved the php7 insight, best of the zendcons I've attended!
I want to see the elephant launch on a gag reel though!

Although I understand and respect the commercial agenda of Zend, I did believe the community didn't get enough credit for what is happening with PHP 7.

Sure, Zend plays a part in that, but the keynote made the audience believe that is was Zend and Zend only who's responsible for the development of PHP 7. Would have appreciated a more neutral stance there.

I also felt like HHVM was treated like a competitor, whereas in reality both PHP and HHVM are open source projects.

On a positive note: I do agree that these are exciting times for anyone involved with PHP and I appreciate the emphasis that was put on the community crossover with Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla & Magento

Hi. I have been programming in PHP many years but must confess to not being not quite up-to-date with latest developments.

But that's what I came to the conference for - and the keynote was pitch perfect explaining what happened with the research into JIT, refactoring the data structures & PHPNG/PHP7.

And then the progression with Zray and Zend Framework 3 with the emphasis on simplicity, reusability and performance and components.

Thanks - I enjoyed it.