I spent Thursday and Friday in Zurich, Switzerland visiting my friends Marcus and Caitlin and attending the Google Open Source Jam. On Thursday, I arrived in the early afternoon in Zurich. Getting to Zurich from Siegburg is easy and takes less than five hours as there is a direct ICE connection to Basel and from there it is just one more stop with an IC or TGV train. My first stop was the new Google office building where Marcus works. A couple of hours later we made our way from there to the old Google office building where the Open Source Jam took place. The Open Source Jam was a place for short presentations (see below for my presentation on SVN_Bug_Miner), good discussions, and a great opportunity to meet people I already know (Johannes Schlüter, Marcus Börger, and Georg Richter of the PHP and MySQL projects, Simone Cortesi of the PHP Documentation Team, Michael Hanselmann and René Nussbaumer of the Gentoo Linux project) and people I had not met before (Neil Dunn of the Hamcrest and JMock projects and Bram Moolenaar of vim fame).

Marcus, Georg, Johannes, and I discussed the future of the PHP Data Objects (PDO) in general and the "CLA Situation" in particular. Of the commercial database vendors involved (IBM, Microsoft, MySQL, and Oracle), only MySQL made a public statement so far with regard to this ("MySQL is not pushing for CLAs to be used for PHP core components"). It might be the default mode of operation for the three other vendors to require CLAs, but it is most certainly not the way PHP grew and the PHP Development Team works. And besides: in all of this discussion on the future of PDO I think an important aspect is missing: other (Open Source) database vendors such as PostgreSQL or SQLite have not been invited to participate in the discussions. After his presentation on Hamcrest, Neil Dunn and I talked about porting this library of matchers for building test expressions to PHP. The current PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint and PHPUnit_Framework_ComparisonFailure classes already incorporate ideas from Hamcrest and refactoring them for PHPUnit 4 is already on the roadmap so I might as well port and use Hamcrest. This is something I want to look into ASAP. In any case, it was great meeting Neil and talking to him. On Friday, Caitlin, Johannes, and I took a walk through Zurich where we, among other things, went to the Zürichsee, had a nice lunch, and shopped at Confiserie Sprüngli. The latter is a must for a "chocolate person" such as myself.