Hello.World

There was a rumor floating around a few weeks ago that suggested Oracle was looking at purchasing Zend. Articles such as this one on BusinessWeek talked about Oracle being in the market to purchase several Open Source companies - JBoss, Zend and Sleepcat Software were mentioned. Since then it has gone quiet, and I have just ignored it as just a rumor. However I am now beginning to wonder. Why? Several reasons…

First of all, Zend promised the first release of the Zend Framework by the end of February - which didn't happen. The forums for the Collaboration project are full of people asking what is going on, with Zend plainly ignoring everyone. The forums are also full of spam, indicating a lack of interest from the Zend team. Or is it? Perhaps it is a sign that Zend have much bigger things to think about - such as an Oracle take-over?

I found it quite interesting that a few days ago Zend placed a link on the PHP Collaboration home page pointing to an article announcing Oracle's purchase of HotSip and Sleepycat - and again highlighting Oracles interest in Zend. What is that link doing there I wonder?

Hmmm … time will tell.

There have been some very exciting developments from IBM over the last few weeks. Here are four areas of major interest to me:

AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) Project

In January 2006 IBM announced the ATF Project. The goal is to extend the Eclipse platform to allow for extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for building IDEs (integrated development environments) for the many different AJAX runtime offerings such as Dojo, OpenRico, and Zimbra. These tools will contain features for developing, deploying, debugging and testing AJAX applications, which is not so easy to do using development tools of today.

The tools built upon these frameworks will include some very exciting features:

• Enhanced JavaScript editing such as edit-time syntax checking;
• An embedded Mozilla web browser;
• An embedded DOM (Document Object Model) browser;
• An embedded JavaScript debugger.

Open Ajax Initiative

On February 1st IBM and other industry leaders announced the "Open AJAX" initiative to promote the adoption of AJAX technology. This project is going to see collaboration between BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra.

The goal? To promote Ajax's promise of universal compatibility with any computer device, application, desktop or operating system, and easy incorporation into new and existing software programs.

DB2 Express-C

On January 30th IBM introduced a free version of its DB2 database. DB2 Express-C is the same database as IBM's commercial offerings but the company places limits on what kind of hardware it can run on. It can be deployed on systems with two processor cores or up to two dual-core chips on AMD or Intel-based servers. The memory limit is 4GB but there are no limits on the size of database or number of users.

This move really follows the footsteps of Microsoft with SQL Server Express, and Oracle with Oracle 10g Express Edition.

Already the LAMP-based community is showing interest in using DB2. For example ActiveGrid has just released an edition of its front-end development tool and server software to work with DB2 Express-C. DB2 offers some exciting functionality not found in PostGres or MySQL, such as the ability to combine PHP with DB2's native XML capabilities.

PHP Collaboration Project

This is now old news, but late last year IBM joined forces with Oracle, MySQL, Intel, Actuate, ADP, FileMaker, Schematic, StepUp Commerce, OmniTI, 100days.de, SugarCRM, bebe.com, and Marco Tabini (publisher of PHP Architect Magazine) in the PHP Collaboration Project. The initial objectives of the project are:

• Zend PHP Framework: A Web application framework which will standardize the way PHP applications are built. The framework will accelerate and improve the development and deployment of mission-critical PHP Web applications
• Engagement with the Eclipse Foundation: Zend is joining the IBM founded Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer. Zend is now proposing to lead a project focused on PHP within Eclipse

I for one am enjoying seeing IBM partnering with other companies and projects to help formalise the future of AJAX and a PHP Framework / toolset. I haven't decided about DB2 yet for my everyday projects - but I will be taking a look for sure.

I found an interesting article on PHP and XUL being used to power LeMonde.fr - a leading information website in France. It is an excellent example of PHP and XUL being used at Enterprise level - and a nice case study to read about if you use these tools.

The site receives around 68,000 subscriptions monthly and an average of 70,000,000 (million) page views. Not bad. The entire website is powered by PHP, and they use XUL/PHP combined to power their Content Management System. The following statements highlight the benefits from using these technologies:

The system is now powerful, using 4 Linux servers at 20% cpu while it was using 4 Sun servers at 70% cpu before. Development time has been divided by 2 and number of bugs by 3, in addition to the excellent documentation and support available in both XUL and PHP Communities.

You can read the full article here.

This week I discovered three very useful tools built in AJAX. Here they are for my own future reference - and maybe you will enjoy these as well:

WizLite - this very nifty tool allows users to collaboratively highlight important passages on a page on the Internet. Users can attach notes to their selections. Wizlite is activated by a bookmarklet or Firefox toolbar extension.
Rex-V - a regular expression evaluator. Evaluates PHP PCRE, PHP Posix and JavaScript regular expressions. It also includes quick reference help which is very useful.
phpFunctions - an AJAX interface to quickly look up a function and then load the details from php.net.

Are there any similar tools out there that you would like to share?

Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. So … how long have you been programming? How would you rank your ability? Check out this interesting post to see one authors view of how to rank yourself or others. Could be interesting to think about if you employ programmers as well…

In a recent Webcast, Zend showed off the syntax for their upcoming implementation of ActiveRecord. However the syntax shown is simply not possible in PHP5 - which has lead to a number of questions and comments from the community. Check out this post from Jeff Moore for some interesting reading…

The PHP development team just announced the release of PHP 5.1.2. This release combines small feature enhancements with over 85 bug fixes and addresses three security issues.

The feature enhancements include the following notables:

• Hash extension was added to core and is now enabled by default. This extension provides support for most common hashing algorithms without reliance on 3rd party libraries.
• XMLWriter was added and enabled by default.
• New OCI8 extension that includes numerous fixes.
• PNG compression support added to the GD extension.
• Added –enable-gcov configure option to enable C-level code coverage.
• getNamespaces() and getDocNamespaces() methods added to SimpleXML extension.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.1.2, see the ChangeLog.

As the upcoming Zend Framework is going to implement AJAX functionality I really hope that they will integrate the prototype.js library. I realise that this is also used by Ruby on Rails which Zend is trying to avoid giving the impression they are ripping off. However it is a fantastic library and it would be great to see it become almost a standard. It can be relied on as it is being actively developed and is involved in major frameworks at this stage. In addition there are number of JS scripts and projects already implementing prototype.js. So … here's hoping!

Programmers often complain about PHP's inconsistant naming conventions. And sometimes there is simply too much to remember (eg date formatting, regular expression syntax). Fortunately David Child took the time to create a PHP "cheat sheet" for us to refer to. The PHP Cheat Sheet is designed to be printed on an A4 sheet of paper and live by a developers desk. If you use PHP it is worth a look.

Going by recent talk in the PHP community a lot of developers are getting on the framework bandwagon. From my reading there seems to be 2 reasons for this renewed enthusiasm:

1. The release of PHP 5.0 and 5.1 with better OO support
2. The increasing popularity of Rails, a web framework for the Ruby language

This is an important time for the community - especially those developers who want to ensure they are using the best tools for the job. The most recent PHP frameworks to generate enthusiasm are the upcoming Zend Framework and the recent announcement of the eZ Components framework which is available in beta version right now. It will pay to keep an eye on these two frameworks over the next few months.

Here are some links to get you up to speed…

Zend Framework

• Zend Collaboration Project
• Overview by Wez Furlong
• php|architect Webcast (uses Flash)

ez Components

• ez Systems Product Page
• ez Components: New Competition for the Zend Framework