Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned
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A grueling experiment in citizen journalism comes to an end. Now it's time to assess what was done, and how it can be done better next time.
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Will broad, long beta tests mean fast adoption? Others are doubtful.
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Analysis Fragmentation and US indifference
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Matthew Turland, like many in the PHP community these days, has been pondering PHP6 and what it might mean to both the developers and to the language itself:   Be that as it may, as a user with about five years under his belt as of now who has seen all qualities of PHP code ranging from pristine to pedantic, a thought or two has crossed my mind on the subject of the latest upcoming incarnation of the language.   Specifically, he talks about some of the hot topics like namespaces, the mysqlnd driver, Unicode support, and named parameters. Overall, though, his comments are positive, looking toward a brighter future for PHP with this upcoming edition.
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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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Are the C programming language and its object-oriented offspring - C++, C#, Objective-C - still well-suited to the requirements of multithreaded, network-oriented computing environments today? That's the question on the minds of engineers at Microsoft Research, whose latest programming language is today being officially moved off the back burner.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast today - this time, it's hosted by Cal Evans himself and talks about ways to kill a software project.   We use the analogy "train wreck" for so many things including software development projects gone horribly wrong. I've managed my share of development projects both successful and failures in the past 20 years. Along the I've learned a lot about what it takes to succeed and what it take to fail when building software. Many good books out there will show you how to succeed few have dared to tackle the subject of how to fail. So today I'm going to step out on a limb and do just that.   You can either subscribe to the feed and have the show brought to your front door or you can choose one of two alternate methods - listen right on the page in the embedded player or just download the show on its own and sit back and enjoy some great PHP content.
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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A researcher has posted proof-of-concept code for a zero-day flaw within Mac OS X dealing with its handling of disk image (.dmg) files. The issue causes a memory corruption vulnerability that could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code.
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In my last blog post, I mentioned the work on rubinius (then at a 0.7 release and now at 0.8) and JRuby.  I also promised I&#8217;d follow up on them.  Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s been going on so far.
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Pierre-Alain Joye takes a look at building Cairo (a vector-based graphics library for PHP) on a Windows system.    While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.   My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake instal    He describes the process he went through to try to get things up and running, but is still having a few issues and has required a few tweaks to get it working. He also links to two resources: a ZIP of the development libraries and a ZIP ready to use package.
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In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".   I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.   His list consists of:  You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan Combat Database Abuse Do You Really Need A Database Anyway? Scale Horizontally Refactor To Scale Vertically  For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.
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Computers have always sucked at translation. How one firm is cracking the language code. By Evan Ratliff from Wired magazine.
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Matthew O'Phinney had the chance to present the Zend Framework during a meeting he attended of his local PHP user group (BostonPHP) as a part of a series their doing.   Horde was also represented as part of the evening's fare. It was the first time I've attended a UG, so I got the double whammy of that and being a presenter. Oh, make it a triple whammy -- Boston is a 3+ hour drive from the Burlington, VT area I now call home.   He mentions a talk that Chuck Hagenbuch (of the Horde project) gave on the current state of the project and a bit about his presentation (including some portions that pointed out problems with the Zend_Db component). You can check out this and the rest of the contents of his presentation here [pdf] and here [mp3 podcast].
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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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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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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