Swades: A step in the right direction
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'But it seems as though it is a step that may have come too soon.'
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David Pogue explores the time-saving qualities of macro software.
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Company unveils 'WidSets' for Java-enabled phones.
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SableVM is a robust, extremely portable, efficient, and specifications-compliant Java Virtual Machine that aims to be easy to maintain and to extend. It features a state-of-the-art and efficient interpreter engine. Its source code is very accessible and easy to understand. It also has many robustness features that have been the object of careful design.     SableVM is a clean-room implementation of the publicly available specifications.    In this version, we added an experimental generational garbage collector, we imported a new GNU Classpath snapshot, we added handling of Jar/Zip files on boot classpath, we added user-friendly failure messages for bootstrap problems, we added added a profiling switch, we made sablevm-classpath install its files in standard locations, we made jikes and gcc be less verbose by default, and we made several important bugfixes and improvements.  You can download the SableVM from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5523&release_id=281502
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DevShed has a new article posted that, while not specific to PHP, can be adapted easily to Develop an Object Oriented Credit Card Transaction Processor
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It's got the right stuff to be king of the software jungle.
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There is an interesting post on OnLamp.com that mentions the search for a good wiki system. Read the post to find out why the author thinks that the wiki world "needs the kind of vision that will make the product more accessible, more polished, less prone to abandonment or neglect...", and the several comments that follow.
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This book excerpt uses an example sales campaign to introduce the Java Data Mining application programming interface.  From data preparation to modeling to evalution and deployment, the short example gives a feel for the business problem and solution.
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Ross Mayfield has an interesting take on the Lenovo/IBM deal and bringing open source to the desktop in his blog... I believe their commoditization strategy is more than hardware.
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DevShed is wrapping up their look at the Strategy pattern with the last part of their series posted today - a look at validating a user's input via the pattern.   In the next few lines I'm going to demonstrate how to use the strategy pattern in a useful case, that is validating user-supplied input. Sound like an interesting experience, right?   They start by show how to build a "validation strategy selector" that uses a switch to hand off the request to the correct validation function. Naturally, this is followed by the creation of those validation classes and an example of their use. They wrap it all up with the complete code listing to make cut and paste coding easy.
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Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.   Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).   Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.   There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).
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For those of you anxiously anticipating the results of the PHP programming competition put on by The Programming and Management blog, Nick Halstead has posted an update to help keep you up to date.   The judging of the PHP competition is taking a lot longer than I first thought! I started with 40+ entries which I reduced down by trying them one by one (very slow!) some of them quickly stood out and I got the list down to 12 entries. [...] I then went through those top 12 and re-tested more thoroughly trying out further words/dictionaries plus quick checks for robustness and quality of presentation. This then left me with 6 entries which I would then email out to the other Judges.   The final judging of these last six is dependent on how each of the judges rank the applications overall. Nick also includes some of the comments made by the judges already about the applications they're reviewing.
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Safend, an international provider of endpoint i
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Can digital musicians, artists and other media creators free themselves from the tyranny of popular software design? Commentary by Momus.
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A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:    Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.    On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.    He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").   You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.
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'One is not advocating that you have to necessarily come back to the country to repay what it has done for you. But give your country a thought.' Ashutosh Gowariker discusses Swades.
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DevShed charges right ahead with its emphasis on design patterns in PHP with a new start of a new series today that looks at the Flyweight pattern.   Among the considerable variety of structural design patterns that can be implemented with PHP 4 (and PHP 5, by the way), there's one in particular that deserves special attention. It's easy to apply in the context of a given web application, and it offers remarkable functionality when it comes to preventing the unnecessary instantiation of different classes. This two-part series covers that pattern.   As they explain, the Flyweight pattern helps to keep your code light and simple by preventing the instantiation of unneeded objects and resources. They go with a HTML form example, illustrating how to prevent a submit button or an input button's class to be reinitialized every time a new form field is needed.