Suraski shares some of his thoughts

As I previously wrote, I’ll try to summarise here the core points of his talk.

I can’t report everything he said but, rereading the notes I took, I think that two key points are the use of JSON and Zend Framework (New BSD License).

[C] refers to me and [X] refers to someone else.

[C] What are the new features that the upcoming PHP 6 will offer that you are most interested in?

He said that the main new features were the native Unicode support (of course), the new way to work with data (binary or text) and, for the upcoming PHP 5, the web services extension.

[C] What are the distributed software versioning tools that you are most interested in? Does your company plan to support some of them?

If I remember correctly, he said that they were working on a Zend “component” that would support the versioning tools supported by Eclipse.

[C] Excluding web services, do you see any promising new ideas in the field of web based distributed computing?

He found that the question was interesting and listed, among other things, virtual servers and their applications, web services themselves and ReST. About virtual servers, he stressed how easy it was to “move” them saving their state: when I stopped him by saying “Like a core dump in the old days…” he said “Exactly, exactly!”.

[X] Some time ago PHP and Python were competing to be “the language for the web”. Now many people think that Ruby and the RoR framework are “the new boy in town”: how do you see the comparison between PHP and RoR?

He said that RoR was a good framework and it did its job well. He said that obviously he liked PHP and its C-like syntax. He said also something about an upcoming component that helped to generate AJAX code only within PHP calls.

[X] What do you think about Delphi for PHP?

He said that he hadn’t tried it by himself but he thought that it was a good thing (excluding the fact that it was Windows-only).

[X] (A question I don’t remember)

He said something about QEDWiki.

[X] A general question: which business and technical models do you see in the future of the web? Web2.0? Semantic web? Service oriented architectures?

Talking about the business part of the question, he cited Google/YouTube, and in general, the services you could create with new technologies that you could use off-the-shelf.

[C] In 1999 you were nominated for the FSF Award for the advancement of free software. Who do you think might win this year? Or who would you like to see winning the prize?

He said he didn’t want “to make a problem with other people” so he didn’t want to say a name. He said he liked those who try to write the best possible software without the GNU religious approach.

After his talk, while I was shaking his hand, he said “good questions”. :)