Sun, Ruby, and Java: An Interesting Turn of Events
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Wow!  Sun has hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work on JRuby full time.  This is a pretty momentus event, and is already sending shockwaves around the Ruby world.
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An introduction to using refactoring, unit testing and ZenTest on existing code.
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New .mobi and .jobs, a shift in the ownership of .net
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"Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his post Rite, Rubinius, and Everything &mdash; I think he's right.  Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius.  He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon (see his post on it here).  W00t!
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An investor's guide to service-oriented architecture
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Tiny, sensor-driven devices exposed A brainchild of Sun Microsystems' research wing, the Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) platform code is now open to Java developers at large.â¦
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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Sara Golemon brings us some news from the front about PHP6 in her latest blog entry today.   While everyone else has been busily gearing up for the release of PHP 5.2 and the new features that are going to come with it, Andrei and his small band of merry babelonians (yours truly included) have been making inroads on preparing PHP6 for a preview release. In the past week we've managed to roughly double the number of builtin functions (those which are part of the main distribution) that have been reviewed for unicode safety, either flagging them as good or upgrading their functionality   She also talks about what kinds of functions this entailed and how far along they are total (around 22%). She also encourages anyone that wants to get involved to help to jump right in.
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A few more of the International PHP Conference slides have surfaced for your enjoyment:  Sandro Zic - A comparison of PEAR Installer, Phing, and ZZ/OSS Installer alan@akbkhome.com - PEAR and PHP 5 (blog entry)
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Christian Wenz has pointed out an older post from Larry Wall talking about the line between scripting and programming languages (mentioning specifically PHP).  From the article "":  I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. [...] If I had to pick one metaphor, it'd be easy onramps. And a slow lane. Maybe even with some optional fast lanes.   Larry goes through tons of different older languages commenting on their viability in the online community including: Javascript, LISP, Pascal, Python, Ruby and PHP. He then looks at the present and what sorts of things are happening in languages these days. This list includes things like early binding/late binding, eager typology/lazy typology, limited structures/rich structures, class-based/prototype-based and transaction/reaction/dynamic scope.
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DevShed ramps up another new series today with this new article giving developers a look at working with object-oriented programming through the eyes of design patterns. It's another excerpt from the George Schlossnagle book "Advanced PHP Programming".   This chapter provides an overview of the advanced OO features now available in PHP. Some of the examples developed here will be used throughout the rest of this book and will hopefully serve as a demonstration that certain problems really benefit from the OO approach.   The article lays down the foundation for the more complex information to come. It introduces object-oriented programming briefly, and talks about some of the handy features of it - like inheritance, static attributes and methods.
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While attending Gunter Kniesel's "Aspect-Oriented Software Development" lecture yesterday it occured to me that it might be possible to (ab)use PHP 5's __autoload(), __call(), __get(), and __set() interceptors to facilitate Aspect-Oriented Programming with PHP.
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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After being blasted by security researchers, Sun is changing the way it patches Java.
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Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interesting article over on the CIO magazine website that has some in the PHP community a bit up in arms about comments it makes towards the language.   The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.   Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:   Security and PHP Working with PHP and the shell Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)   These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Ian Selby's Blog: Uploading Large Files With PHPONLamp.com: Quick and Clean PHP FormsDotVoid.com: Reordering nested sets using PHP and JavascriptRob Allen's Blog: Zend Framework Book Coming SoonCommunity News: php|works Daily Summaries (Day 2)Community News: Sara Golemon & Christopher Jones - First Day Summaries of php|worksJob Posting: University of Wisconsin, Department of Medicine Seeks Web Developer (Madison, WI)Zend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 19: Glue Frameworks vs. Full Stack FrameworksStefan Mischook's Blog: Installing PHP and MySQL on the Mac with MAMPSecurityReason: Three Advisories for PHP 5.2.4 (dl, iconv_substr & setlocale)
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(InfoWorld) - Don't expect much to be added to Ruby On Rails this year. When David Heinemeier Hansson gives an update on version 2.0 of his Web application framework at its user conference in September, he's as likely to talk about what's coming out as what's going in. The goal is to keep Ruby on Rails fast, lightweight, and easy to use, characteristics that have helped it become a trendy alternative to Sun's Java and Microsoft's .Net and led to a raft of companies offering Rails development services for businesses. "We're going to pull out a fair number of elements, features that aren't a good fit for what people want to do most of the time, and make them plug-ins instead," HeinemeierÂ Hansson said in an interview. "If your application absolutely depends on them, you won't be stranded, you'll be able to get the plug-ins easily." Among the elements to go will be Action Web Service, for creating Web service APIs using SOAP, Heinemeier Hansson said. It's a way of steering developers towards using REST (representational state transfer), his preferred method for linking applications in Rails. "We don't want to turn into Java -- this pack rat that just holds onto any possession. We're not afraid to take out stuff that's not relevant or that we plain don't like," he said. There will be some additions -- the Rails team has some "pent up stuff" in the repository that it's keen to push out, he said. But the focus of Rails 2.0 is to "consolidate and sharpen" what's already there. Keeping the framework light and simple comes at a price, however, and many companies are jumping in to offer Ruby on Rails packages that bundle tools and plug-ins to make the framework more suitable for demanding business needs. Many of those products will be on show at RailsConf 2007 in Berlin in two weeks. Borland Software's CodeGear division is expected to release its Ruby on Rails Java IDE at the show, Heinemeier Hansson said. The product is based on the Eclipse platform and has been in beta since May. Sun will likely give an update on JRuby, an implementation of Ruby for Java environments. The vendor support helps quell jitters among corporate users that Ruby on Rails is not backed by a large company. If the prominent support of Oracle and IBM helped get Linux in the door at big enterprises, the support from Sun and IBM for Rails could do the same. Java and .Net have become "bloatware" as vendors add features for every possible business need, causing companies to look at alternatives, according to Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios, which offers software and services for Rails development. The rise of Rails is as much a matter of timing as anything, she said. "This bloatware stuff has just ground to a halt and the alpha geeks are veering away from anything they don't need to get their work done. At the same time, the IT business cycle is picking up, and people are willing to invest again in new things," she said. Her clients are telecom, media, and finance companies looking for a fast turnaround for new applications. Most are deploying in native Ruby environments, but it helps that Sun is supporting JRuby, she said, which lets companies deploy Rails applications on existing Java servers. Jonathan Siegel, founder of Rails consulting company ELC Technologies, said applications that would take eight to 10 months to develop in .Net can be up and running in four to six months using Ruby on Rails. Still, at three years old, Rails is a young platform and has limitations. One high-profile user, the Twitter social networking site, caused a stink earlier this year by complaining that Rails didn't scale well across multiple databases and that the underlying Ruby language is slow. The open-source community responded by developing a plug-in to address the scaling issue. Some also say that both Ruby and Ruby on Rails need a stronger hand to steer them to prevent multiple implementations leading to compatibility issues. "The major risk for the future and longevity of Ruby, and by association Rails, is whether or not the platform gets splintered," Mitchell said. Siegel said: "I believe Ruby on Rails will overcome a key milestone when the deployment teams at larger organizations feel at home with the deployment side of a Rails application. In my view, that's having a deployment procedure that's as easy to maintain and monitor as for a .Net or a J2EE application." Heinemeier Hansson is nonchalant about the demands. He developed Rails for his own use and not to make money, he says, and if enterprises want to use his framework, it is they who should adjust, not he. "We're not trying to bend Ruby on Rails to fit the enterprise, we're encouraging enterprises to bend to Ruby on Rails," he said. "Come if you like it, stay away if you don't."