Web platform providers get developer rankings
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Blog: EBay takes the top spot as web services provider although Microsoft continues to have developer loyalty.
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Found this really cool search engine (Koders ) via ResearchBuzz:   "An article at Newsforge pointed me to Koders ( http://www.koders.com ) a search engine for finding programming code. Nifty. The front page allows you to specify keywords, sixteen languages (from..."  This is pretty dead on.  I had a similar idea about 3 years ago I was calling SourceEngine which for a while was my Alexandria  project under Jakarta.  Some of this technology morphed into Gump .  Heres one innovation which I don't think Koders has picked up yet; use source includes as indegree to compute a CodeRank.  There you go... I'm giving you guys that one for free!  This is the Google innovation but applied to source code ...
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Lukas Smith has posted some ominous thoughts about the future of the LAMP stack in the online development world - specifically asking if the popularity of the grouping could be what might ultimately cause its downfall.   The issue is that there is simply not enough top qualified talent that knows LAMP well enough to hire. Or maybe its just too hard to find them? It seems all the good guys are already hired. As a result companies end up looking for other technology, not because they actually believe that these technologies are any better or worth the license fees that these usually require to be paid up...   He suggests two things that could be possible lead-ins to the "demise" of LAMP - the fact that LAMP just isn't taught along side other languages in school and that, since PHP is only just now getting into the offices of the "major players", there hasn't been enough time to prove to them that PHP has worth in their business.   Be sure to check out some of the great comments on this one.
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Ziff Davis - Enterprise application vendors should be lauded for offering evaluation versions.
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com November 22, 2004, 7:29 AM PT. This priority retains its ranking at number five as more and more companies deploy Web services to share business logic, data and processes with each other and with clients.
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The results of the latest poll from the International PHP Magazine are in. The question this time asked which, of the options given, were your favorites in the Smyfony project's feature set. There was a clear winner above all of the others - the scaffolding that it makes so simple.   Some of the other options that were included but didn't get nearly as many votes were:  Simple templating and helpers Multilingualism and I18N support Object model and MVC separation Ajax support  Following at a distant second was the "Object model and MVC separation" choice (and to others, "Enterprise ready" and "Ajax support" nipping close at its heels).   Be sure to cast your vote in this week's poll that asks your opinion on some of the rules that the PHP Throwdown has set in place. Vote for the one that you think fits best with the spirit of the competition.
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Nick Halstead has posted the runners up in the PHP programming competition he conducted:   Finally we have a result, it has taken weeks of judging and lots of hard work. The scores are ready and today I will first announce the runners up from the Top 6. I will then tomorrow announce the 3rd place, then day after that second, you get the idea. The scoring was based upon a point system in which each judge had to rank the top 6 in order. The points from each judge were then compiled and the final scores calculated.   The project was to write a script that helped a user find the shortest "distance" between two words by replacing one letter at a time. The three that were the runners up were created by:   JB Maurice Fonk Rob Haynes   Come of the judges comments are also included in the post to get a feel for the thinking behind the rankings.
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An Eclipse IDE plug-in that would provide search capabilities specifically for developers is being readied by a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Case Study: Crate & BarrelWhat sold them on improving their network? A system that could cut management costs from the get-go. Find out more.
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Scores of vendors are now in the &quot;white-label&quot; social networking platform business, according to a running tally by a Forrester Research analyst.Instead of a proprietary platform like LinkedIn or Facebook,&#160;such companies offer a framework to enterprises or individuals wishing to build an online community tailored to their tastes and needs. The platforms are being used for everything from marketing and branding to internal enterprise use.It&#39;s hard not to let out a low whistle when you scan this post at analyst Jeremiah Owyang&#39;s blog.&quot;Yup, I&#39;m the analyst focused on this space, and not even I can keep up with the many vendors,&quot; Owyang said via e-mail.&quot;The flood in this market is due to low barriers to entry from easy-to-deploy software, an influx of venture money wanting to get in on the &#39;so-net&#39; action and media frenzy from existing social networks like Facebook, MySpace and others,&quot; he said.This particular bubble could soon contract, Owyang suggested. &quot;Like the [content management system] industry in the late &#39;90s, expect to see some major acquisitions from major [enterprise resource planning], media, and Web companies ... traditional CMS vendors are currently adding &#39;social features&#39; to their products -- most without success -- and will resort to acquiring vendors to fill their suites.&quot;Surviving companies will become marketing partners for enterprises, not just software providers, he predicted. &quot;Let&#39;s not discount technology completely, it can be an edge, but the ones that will stand out will have a full solution,&quot; he said.Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, said Owyang has a point.A successful social-networking site &quot;has very little to do with technology,&quot; he said, and &quot;more to do with how you program and nurture a successful community.&quot;The company wrote a white paper, &quot;Nine Steps to a Successful Online Community,&quot; that spends only a limited amount of time talking about technology.Like other companies, KickApps&#39; hosted platform is set up to let customers handle customizations. &quot;We need to have a scalable business on a self-service basis,&quot; Blum said. &quot;If we relied on going out and talking to every one of our customers, it wouldn&#39;t work. It doesn&#39;t scale.&quot;However, KickApps offers tools that run the gamut from a simple-to-use editor for adjusting look and feel, to more robust developer APIs. The company claims that about 14,000 sites have been built with its platform.In contrast to the relatively new KickApps, which started up in 2005, Sparta Social Networks is a veteran in the space, having formed in 1999.That seasoning will help the company as the category contracts, said its CEO, Jerry Sheer. &quot;We&#39;ve got eight years behind us. We understand the space more than these new players.&quot;The company is also banking on its J2EE-based platform, which is ideal for large enterprises, Sheer said.Sparta will apply advanced analytics and metrics to derive meaning from social networking data. &quot;We&#39;re going to do some very interesting things,&quot; Sheer said, adding that a social network is essentially a &quot;focus group on steroids.&quot;That strategy ties into a trend Owyang sees: companies offering &quot;insight, intelligence and data&quot; about online communities. There&#39;s yet another related category as well, the analyst notes: firms pushing Web collaboration offerings.From the wide range of choices, G-Unit Records picked Ning, a company formed by Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen. Ning targets both consumers and businesses with its hosted offering.Chris &quot;Broadway&quot; Romero, who oversees digital media at G-Unit Records, said Ning was the right platform for rap star 50 Cent&#39;s social networking site, citing its ability to &quot;stand in the background.&quot;&quot;Unless you&#39;re an administrator, you don&#39;t have to see their name too much,&quot; he said.Romero said Ning &quot;could run a little faster,&quot; but mused, &quot;Every time you add someone with the power of 50 Cent, it&#39;s going to bend the walls of any system out there.&quot;Seventy-five thousand people are members of the site, according to Romero. That growth was driven by person-to-person referrals, not traditional advertising, he said. &quot;It&#39;s definitely the way of the future,&quot; he said of social networking as a marketing tool. &quot;Everyone should do it.&quot;It may not matter much if enterprises find themselves with fewer offerings to choose from down the road, he suggested: &quot;It&#39;s more about the person&#39;s vision than the tools, most of the time.&quot;
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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com November 4, 2004, 10:28 AM PT. This priority retains its ranking at number five as more and more companies deploy Web services to share business logic, data and processes with each other and with clients.
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As mentioned on the PHPKitchen website today, there's some results for the current job stats for PHP developers in London:   Andrew sent over this interesting analysis of salary trends for PHP devs in London, was surprised such detailed info was available.  The only prob is the salary data is quite understated in my experience, advanced devs can easily find gigs for &pound;50-70k, but it's certainly true that agencies and often employers do very poor jobs differentiating between mediocre and ninja candidates.   Other details included in the report are things like average max and min salaries, the number of ads matching for PHP developers and a comparison of these to England's results overall.
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Boasting of a one-of-a-kind solution for the application development lifecycle, Bungee Labs is launching the public beta Tuesday of Bungee Connect, an on-demand platform for Web application development and deployment.Featured is a full gamut of tools and services to build and host applications. "Bungee Connect is a single platform for the development, testing, deployment, and hosting of rich Web applications," said Lyle Ball, Bungee Labs' vice president of marketing.With the platform, developers can collaborate to build Web applications leveraging multiple Web services and databases. Applications are deployed on Bungee Labs' multi-tenant grid infrastructure and can be SaaS-based or offered as stand-alone Web destinations. They are accessed via popular browsers.Rather than developers having to assemble disparate pieces such as IDE, an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) toolkit, and testing and collaboration tools, Bungee provides all these capabilities."Developers log onto Bungee Connect. It's in the cloud and it's a hosted environment," Ball said.Bungee describes its product as a platform-as-a-service system, in which the entire software development lifecycle can be supported on the same computing environment to reduce costs, risks, and time to market.?Because Bungee Connect is entirely based on-demand, users can build and deploy applications without installing or configuring servers and can connect to multiple Web services from within a single environment, said Brad Hintze, Bungee director of product marketing."I think it's got some very interesting benefits because it's managing to integrate development and deployment but in a service environment, so it allows for a developer to [have] access to tools," said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "It also at the same time gives them a place to deploy their applications without having to worry," about run-time choices and operational issues," he said.Bungee also provides a way to mash up with other Web services, Gardner said. Bungee is "on to something" that is a harbinger of things to come in creating a seamless relationship between development and deployment, he said.As part of its launch, Bungee is offering reference applications, including a calendar application, WideLens, which integrates Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce.com, Google Calendar, and other sources. These applications serve as examples of integration offered on Bungee Connect; source code for the applications can be imported into any Bungee Connect account, modified, and used in commercial endeavors.AJAX-enabled applications can be built and embedded within other Web applications, in SaaS solutions, or offered as a stand-alone Web destination.Interactivity is delivered via AJAX but developers themselves do not write any AJAX. They use the Bungee Logic programming language for building application logic while the UI is built using a drag-and-drop metaphor. Bungee Logic features a C-style syntax and acts like Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform, Hintze said."We automate AJAX interactivity," while developers focus on creating applications and value, Ball said.Development, collaboration and test deployment are free of charge on Bungee Connect; developers only pay when applications are used. Through a utility-based pricing model, businesses can expect to pay between $2 to $5 per user per month for a heavily used business productivity application or fractions of a cent per e-commerce transaction.Bungee's grid infrastructure provides data on application usage patterns. Applications are hosted free during the Bungee Connect Public Beta program. The public beta program is expected to continue until the end of 2008, whereupon Bungee would launch the general release of its service."And [then] the world is a different place," Ball said. Some 40 developers worked to deliver Bungee Connect, according to Bungee Labs.
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WebCenter Suite lets developers use Internet tools like wikis and search to improve applications' user interface.
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Industry giants AMD, Intel, Dell, Microsoft and Sun have thrown their weight behind a web services specification that could provide a common way for systems to access and exchange management information.
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InfoWorld - Scores of vendors are now in the "white-label" social networking platform business, according to a running tally by a Forrester Research analyst.
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com October 29, 2004, 10:41 AM PT. This priority retains its ranking at number five as more and more companies deploy Web Services to share business logic, data and processes with each other and with clients.