Sun's $1B MySQL Buy May Be Its Entree Into Web 2.0 Software
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TechWeb - Acquisition lets vendor plug hole in product line and dig deeper into open source market.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Job Posting: National Auto Warranty Seeks MySQL DBAJob Posting: National Auto Warranty Seeks PHP Web App Developer (Wentzville, MO)DevShed: Creating a Login Script for a PHP Invoicing SystemZak Greant's Blog: The eZ partner program (response to Seth Gottlieb's Commercial O/S business post)php|architect: Application-level Logging with the Zend FrameworkPaul Reinheimer's Blog: Object-Oriented PHP, Concepts, Techniques, and CodeRyan Malesevich's Blog: Fight Spam Comments with Bad Behavior and AkismetZend Developer Zone: SQLite: Lean, Mean DB MachineBuilderau.com.au: Cache PHP scripts with APC modulePro-PHP Podcast: Interview With Cal EvansSitePoint PHP Blog: PHP extension for Cairo graphics libraryTechnobabbler.com: making a radar loop with PHPDevShed: Working with MySQL Result Sets and the Decorator Pattern in PHPJob Posting: exhibit-E Seeks Interactive Developer (New York, NY)Jacob Santos' Blog: Patterns for PHP: Page Controller Draft
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Blog: MySQL is relentlessly pushing its way toward an IPO, as BusinessWeek reports, which makes the entire open source ecosystem that much more valuable.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Firefox 1.0 appears to have sparked new activity in the Web browser market.
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Software giant's deal with Sun has raised some questions.
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The open-source database company plans to launch a test version of MySQL 5.0 later this month.
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Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion -- but how did a company that started so small come to be worth so much? That's a story that began in the early days of the World Wide Web, when people were struggling to keep track of the new world of multimedia it offered them.In those days people viewed the Web through NCSA Mosaic, a browser that helped popularize the Web; they could check the level of coffee in the Trojan Room coffee machine at Cambridge University using the first Web cam on the Internet, and they could read the headlines on the NandO Times, one of the first "new media" operations.Yahoo first appeared on the Internet in 1994 when Jerry Yang and David Filo were still at Stanford University -- something that was immediately obvious from the site's first address: http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/. It wasn't until later in 1994 that the easier-to-type http://www.yahoo.com came along, but even then it redirected to the Stanford server.But back in 1994 people weren't that concerned about clunky addresses. They'd been living with the text-based Internet for years and the Web with all of its richness had people hooked. Yahoo stepped in to solve an early problem: how could users keep track of the fast expanding World Wide Web.What Yang and Filo built was revolutionary for the time: a hierarchical index of the Web divided into subjects like "computers," "government" and "society and culture." (The service lives on today as the Yahoo Directory)Love at first sightFrom the early days it was clear that users loved Yahoo."David Filo and Jerry Yang should be given a Medal of Honor, then locked in a room and never allowed to get lives: they are already doing an excellent job of categorizing the Web with Yahoo's Hostlist," wrote one user in response to a Sept. 1994 Usenet posting asking for a directory of Web sites.Word of the service spread through the Internet, often from enthusiastic users passing on details of the resource, but sometimes with a little promotion by Yang and Filo themselves."We have a pretty comprehensive listing at the Yahoo Database," wrote Yang on Usenet in Sept. 1994. "It's an attempt to be organized by subject (although not very well) -- but we are working on it. Searchable too," he wrote.All the time Yang and Filo continued to live everyday lives, unaware they would become billionaires in less than a decade. A look at old Usenet postings reveals Yang campaigning for fair funding for college students while Filo was trying to trade World Cup tickets online.As 1995 began, Yahoo was serving up 200,000 pages per day from its index of about 25,000 Web sites, and was about to hit the big time. During that year Yang published a book about Yahoo and earned an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. Both cofounders appeared on a PBS Frontline TV documentary about the Internet called "High Stakes in Cyberspace.""What Yahoo does is make your wasting your time easier. It wants you to get where you want to go to waste time faster so you don't have to waste time wasting time," is how Yang explained Yahoo in the documentary, according to a transcript of the show.The publicity came just as thousands of people started piling onto the Web and new sites were popping up faster and faster. As a result by the middle of June 1996 Yahoo had jumped to 9 million pages per day and in the third quarter of that year traffic for the three-month period hit 1 billion page views.Investment in the popular and fast growing site wasn't far behind its rising popularity. In April 1995 Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo with two rounds of venture funding just as Yang and Filo decided to put their studies on hold and start running Yahoo full time."We [hadn't] done anything on our research in the last few months," Filo told CIO magazine in a June 1995 interview. "We had to decide which thing to pursue, and we're not really interested in what our PhDs were in."An initial public offering and international expansion was next on the cards, and by the end of 1996 Yahoo had sites in the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan, and had launched the Yahooligans service for kids.Early competitionYahoo wasn't without competition back in those days. WebCrawler was getting popular and Lycos was also making a name for itself, but none of the search engines at the time fully satisfied people. So it was common to switch allegiances whenever a better service came along. In 1996 many Internet users did just that when sites like Inktomi and Digital Equipment's Altavista launched.But Yahoo managed to endure the competition, possibly because its directory often was a better place to find links that the early search engines.Microsoft was making a late start on the Internet, launching MSN as a dial-up Internet access service in the U.S. in 1995. It wasn't until a few years later that MSN was relaunched as a portal and still more years until Microsoft put its full weight behind developing Internet-based products and services.Like Yahoo, Google also grew out of Stanford University but didn't start to achieve recognition until the end of the decade. Within a few years, however, it had grown to become the leader in online search.Today Yahoo is one of the most powerful online media brands in the world. It has more than 500 million users in numerous countries and its name is recognizable to billions of people.
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Major storage vendors are looking to add hosted offerings, mostly by acquisition so far, to take advantage of Web 2.0 users willing to store data off-site.
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With an eye toward both consumer and enterprise needs, Sun Microsystems is reworking the plug-in architecture of Java in an upcoming update to Java Platform Standard Edition (SE) 6, company officials said Wednesday evening.Overall, Sun officials at a briefing in San Francisco stressed the company's new emphasis on not just the enterprise space but consumer systems as well, with the company extending Java and rich experiences to various devices.With the plug-in platform, a ground-up rewrite is under way, said Ken Russell, from the Java SE deployment team. "This will change how your poker game in [a] Web browser is run as well as your corporate app," Russell said.The new architecture is planned for inclusion in the upcoming beta of what is now being referred to as Java SE 6 Update N, due in December."Really, the defining feature of it is that it runs the applets in a separate process than the Web browser," Russell said.Features of the plug-in plan include improved scripting support and reliability. More powerful applications can be supported than in the past. Users will be able to tune an applet to run in a particular version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE); this will enable developers to target one JRE without having to change the behavior of any other applet. Testing also will be simplified.In addition, better backing will be offered for Windows Vista, including capabilities for signed applets. Support will be offered for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 browsers as well as for Firefox 3 alpha builds and the Firefox 2 browser. Platforms capable of running the plug-in include Solaris, Windows and Linux.Current plans call for the plug-in technology to be turned on via a switch in the Java control panel.Sun also delved into other features planned for Java SE 6 Update N."Update N is about fixing the consumer experience," with a more solid browser plug-in experience and a better installation experience, said Chet Haase, Java SE client architect. Sun also wants to better enable Java for rich Internet applications.A faster startup for Java is also planned. This is important in the Web ad and lightweight game space, Haase said. Also planned is inclusion of technology from a project called Quickstarter, which preloads disk cache to bolster performance of lightweight applications. Faster graphics is planned as well, as is Nimbus, which provides a new look and feel for Java Swing client systems.Haase also noted Sun's plan for the Java Kernel, which enables downloading just the parts of Java that are needed to run an application. While that application is running, the rest of the platform is downloaded.James Gosling, chief technology officer for the Sun client software group, reviewed plans for JavaFX, which is Sun's platform for building rich, consistent user experiences for a wide variety of devices and systems."JavaFX really is a marketing term that is sort of an umbrella for a set of activities," Gosling said. The platform covers consumer-facing technologies and features a services layer based on Java and a database, a presentation layer with HTTPD, and an edge device component, covering desktops to phones to TVs."This edge part of the universe -- this is what JavaFX is all about," said Gosling.Featured in JavaFX is JavaFX Mobile, which is a software stack for mobile phones; Java SE 6 Update N, also known as the consumer JRE; the JavaFX Script scripting language, and JavaFX designer and developer tools."[JavaFX Script is] a scripting language sort of in the sense of PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor] and Python and all the rest of them. But while those are focused at generating HTML from the presentation layer outward, JavaFX Script is really all about rich user interactions," Gosling said.
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Oracle has starting shipping a suite of tools for linking Web 2.0 apps with data sources and business processes.
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion ??? helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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TechWeb - Sun's recent decision to open-source some elements of Java is pretty exciting -- but a few years overdue, says &lt;i&gt;InformationWeek&lt;/i&gt; columnist Eric A. Hall
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Despite having revenues of around $70 million to $85 million, MySQL commanded an impressive $1 billion price tag in today's acquisition by database giant Oracle.
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IT has never been able to prove it's true value to the business, and as such it is treated as a cost center, which is the first thing to get cut in poorly run companies. But with Web 2.0 booming, all the assumptions that you hold about IT should be put on notice: change is in the air. Web 2.0 companies have had to grow their own technology for economic functionality. Free means crap right? Wrong. How many of you keep Yahoo! Mail running on your BlackBerry's along with Exchange because you know Exchange will be down sooner or later?
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InfoWorld - MySQL at the end of January is expected to release a beta version of its MySQL 5.0 open source database, which is to feature enterprise-level functionality such as stored procedures and triggers, according to a company representative.
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(InfoWorld) - Developers at open-source player MySQL are hard at work on a project code-named "Merlin", which isÂ designed to make it easier for customers to manage and maintain the company's database software, a source close to MySQL says. Merlin is a server-based database monitoring and advisory service which continually scans a user's database network for any likely system crashes, bottlenecks or security vulnerabilities, the source said. Under development at MySQL for 22 months, Merlin is due to debut late in the fourth quarter of this calendar year or early in the first quarter of 2007. It's unclear whether Merlin contains any third-party software or if MySQL developers have modeled the offering on any existing database monitoring and advisory service. The aim of Merlin is to simplify MySQL database administration for both small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and enterprises. While SMBs often can't afford to employ database administrators (DBAs) to look after their MySQL implementations, larger firms are running into difficulties trying to find sufficient DBAs with specific MySQL skills. Customer demand was a strong factor in the vendor deciding to create Merlin, the source added. In an interview Friday, Marten Mickos, chief executive officer at MySQL, declined to comment on the project. However, he said that one of his company's main focuses in the coming year will be to provide tools and other offerings to make life easier for MySQL DBAs. "Our first wave of users in the '90s were not database developers," Mickos said. "In the twenty-first century, we've been enabling database developers. Now, we're thinking of ways to help DBAs and take care of them." Merlin acts as a "virtual DBA" or "a constant MySQL consultant," the source said, alerting users to potential system issues before they become critical and offering fixes, tips and tuning options to improve the performance of the MySQL database. So far, Merlin has 50-plus database rules that it can check and provide advice on, with the expectation that both MySQL and its customers will build more customized rules in future. Merlin, now being beta-tested at 24 customer sites, will be rolled into the MySQL Network subscription service, the source said.
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Code-tastic whispers MySQL and Google have quietly tied up a coding deal seen as an integral part of the open source database firm's software roadmap for the next few years.â¦