I am back from OSCON 2005, where I presented a talk about the work we're doing on the Unicode support in PHP. The slides are available here. Mine was not the only talk regarding Unicode at the conference: Dan Kogai gave a presenation on Perl 5.8 and Unicode, and in my opinion, PHP 5.5/6 or whatever it ends up being will have a much better integrated runtime support in this area, not to mention an awesome set of i18n functions thanks to ICU. The goal is to make PHP as good as or better than any other Web development language out there when it comes to Unicode support, and so far that pretty much means Java. I am confident that that goal will be achieved.

This conference was, by any account, an excellent one: great talks, good networking, seeing Portland for the first time, and of course a chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones.