07/19/2000, 8:45am to 10:15am in Serra I & II Open Source and the Personal Computer Revolution Presented by Andy Hertzfeld The personal computer revolution was initially driven by enthusiasts, propelled by their idealism and passion . My talk will compare the early days of the personal computer industry with the current situation of the open source movement. It will focus on my experiences at Apple, describing some of the key people at Apple and how their personalities worked their way into their products, especially dwelling on the development of the Macintosh computer. The talk will discuss the structural problems that ensnared the personal computer industry in the 1980s and articulate how the open source movement can help to resolve them. Finally, it will look at the challenges that lie ahead for the open source movement, emphasizing the crucial issue of usability, discussing what the community can do to make open source software easier to use for mainstream users.

07/19/2000, 10:45am to 12:15pm in Redwood I - II PHP 4 internals Presented by Andi Gutmans This talk will give you a brief overview of the reasons why PHP is designed as it is, and its goals in answering the needs of Web developers. PHP 4.0 represented a change in how the code was executed, allowing the entire script to be read and compiled before execution..The design goals in creating the PHP 4.0 scripting engine (Zend Engine) were: fast execution, modular structure, compatibility with PHP 3, independence from PHP, and extendibility through a comprehensive API. New features that will be reviewed briefly include reference counting, Web server independence, high performance API, independent output layer and UNIX build process. Further, the talk will discuss the inner workings of PHP, and how the different modules interact. We will cover the information flow through: Browser, Web Server, PHP Web Server Interface, Zend Engine, Web Server Disk, PHP Modules, and back through the Web Server Interface and to the Browser.

07/19/2000, 1:30pm to 3:00pm in Redwood I - II State of PHP Presented by Rasmus Lerdorf In this talk, Rasmus Lerdorf, one of the creators of PHP, gives an in-depth look at the PHP project and where it is headed. Integrating PHP and Java-based Web Server Technologies Presented by Sam Ruby There are a number of technologies competing for both mindshare and marketshare in the WebServer marketplace. This range of choice is normally good, but unfortunately each technology has its own strengths and so typically choosing one means that you are precluded from taking advantage of another. What's worse is that you can end up locked in to a given technology and find it difficult to move. This may be advantageous to the server vendor, but not necessarily to you. This talk covers the usage of various scripting languages in the context of a web server, and access from these to the Java world. Primary focus, including live demonstrations of running code, will be on the Java extensions recently added to PHP.

07/19/2000, 3:30pm to 5:00pm in Redwood I - II Meerkat, PHP & XML Presented by Rael Dornfest Meerkat: An Open Wire Service, is the O'Reilly Network's Web-based syndicated content reader. It's based on Rich Site Summary (RSS), an XML specification used for distributing news, product announcements, discussion threads, and other assorted content as channels. Meerkat is written in PHP, served up by an Apache Web server, and keeps its data in a MySQL database. This session's focus is the emergence of open services, XML's role therein, and some of the PHP XML functionality and third-party tools increasing PHP's visibility in the XML-based Weblication arena

07/20/2000, 8:45am to 10:15am in Serra I & II Open Source Challenges Presented by Tim O'Reilly The Coming Comfy Culture Presented by Gregory Benford In a unique and riveting Keynote, well known 'hard' science fiction author and physicist Gregory Benford asks the question "Where will cheap chips and servile software take us in a few decades? Building on his experience in constructing devices designed to communicate meaningfully across hundreds of decades (he was part of the team that developed markers for U.S. nuclear waste sites that must last 10,000 years) with his knowledge of technology, Benford looks at the future in terms of fundamental cultural shifts and what they mean. Our future digitized culture will not necessarily share our assumptions or visions. That future will enjoy an ever-attentive urban landscape, one tuned at every turn by ingratiating machines. Products will fare well if they can anticipate how well that culture will accept fine shadings of machine obedience and intrusion into personal lives. How comfy will we get before we object? Much depends upon how we see ourselves.

Session room assignments are subject to change.