Novell's de Icaza: Project not Mono-tonous
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The leader of the movement to port .Net to Linux is happy with the progress thus far, and he's a Silverlight fan.
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(InfoWorld) - Developers of Moonlight, a Linux client version of Microsoft's new Silverlight multimedia technology, are closing in on feature-completeness, a leader of the project said on Monday. A public alpha version of the open source Moonlight software is planned for September or October, said Miguel de Icaza, vice president for the developer platform at Novell and lead developer of Mono, a version of Microsoft's .Net Framework for Linux and Unix. Moonlight is dependent on Mono.Â Â  Tryouts of Moonlight will be offered to early adopters in a couple of weeks, said de Icaza. Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform browser plug-in software for video and multimedia. Currently in a prerelease stage itself, Silverlight is expected to compete with Adobe's popular Flash Player. Last week, Microsoft officials said a Linux client for Silverlight was a possibility but that Linux on the desktop paled in market share to Windows and Macintosh, where Silverlight is being supported by Microsoft. But de Icaza stressed the importance of having Linux clients support Silverlight as a means of accessing Web content. Linux needs to be a first-class citizen, de Icaza said. Moonlight also is being extended to work on desktops outside of a browser, de Icaza said. "It's a really powerful technology. In addition to supporting it on the Web, we're going to stick it on the desktop," de Icaza said. Developers have had Moonlight running with Novell's Banshee media player and F-Spot photo management software. The desktop implementation of Moonlight is similar in functionality to Microsoft's client-based counterpart to Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation, said de Icaza. At an event called a "hackathon," engineering groups have used Moonlight to improve existing applications, de Icaza said. They have been developing "desklets," which are small applications similar to Google Gadgets, leveraging Silverlight technology. De Icaza cited an appointment calendar as one example of a desklet. "Needless to say, we believe that Silverlight is a fantastic development platform, and its .Net-based version is incredibly interesting, and as Linux/Unix users we wanted to both get access to content produced with it and to use Linux as our developer platform for Silverlight-powered Web sites," de Icaza said on his blog. Word of plans for a Mono-based Silverlight Linux client arose around the time of Microsoft's formal introduction of Silverlight this spring. De Icaza said Monday morning he had just demonstrated Moonlight to some Microsoft representatives meeting with Novell.
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Padraic Brady has posted some of his comments on the newly included Zend_Layout and Zend_View_Enhanced components for the Zend_Framework:    These two (now much more polished!) components were both designed to solve the concerns a lot of developers were having in achieving truly complex, structured and modular Views using Zend_View.    Indeed there are months of blog postings, debates, experimental and not-so-experimental code, proposals, IRC sessions and countless emails pouring over how to accomplish the goals of these components. The end result is something I feel will serve Zend Framework users faithfully for months and years to come.    He thanks the developers (Matthew and Ralph) and notes that the inclusion of these two components is one of the largest advancements of the display layer for the Framework in a while.
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Novell this week spruced up a version of its Linux desktop aimed squarely at enterprise users.
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A Win/Mac developer recently asked me what I thought about his plan to create a binary of his application and sell it to interested Linux sound and music people. He asked with some trepidation, having already received a rather critical chorus of objection from some overly enthusiastic Linux users. This man's work is excellent and his software already runs nicely under Wine.read more
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P&aacute;draic Brady, looking ahead to the work he will be doing over the next few months, is proposing on his blog about a new Zend Framework component - Zend_Service_Currency.    I did a quick check on what PHP classes are available for the purpose. There's really not a whole lot out there. There's a PEAR class along the lines I need, but it's released under the PHP License and, not to be too argumentative, I prefer non-PEAR solutions where the end-user may have no access to update PEAR.   So since the project is planned to use the Zend Framework, I shot off a mail to the Framework's fw-general mailing list to see if it would be a worthwhile contribution.    He sees that someone else had already opened a proposal for the same idea and decided to join with that group to work up the module. He also links to his original proposal and gives a brief overview of the goals of the package.
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted his wrapup of this year's Dutch PHP Conference held in Amsterdam.   The chairs are all folded, the displays are back in their tubes and the speakers have all move on to their next big thing. Before the shadows of time fog our memory, let's take a look back over our shoulder at what was The Dutch PHP Conference.   Cal talks about the attendance (sold out!), a link to his keynote code in action and an overview of some of the talks presented.
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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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Novell has spent years battling Microsoft. Maybe this time it will work.
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In this new post to the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans talks about his meetup with Danny Kolke and Ahmad Baitalmal of Etelos where they recorded a great PHP-related conversation.   On the podcast we talked about Zend, PHP5 and Etelosâ EASE programming language. For those of you not familiar with Etelos, here is a quick blurb from their web site.   Cal gave his impression of what Etelos is creating and an opinion on the quality, stating that Etelos/EASE looks phenomenal. Especially of note is Cal's comments about not needing a computer science degree to get a website up and running with a database backend.
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I donât like self-proclaimed prophets. So, you'll rarely see me quoting them. I guess my aversion originates in so many presentations where the next [insert application or company here] âkillerâ will emerge if we invest some money. And yes, I admit I sat on the side of the table talking about a couple  of those killer apps myself.
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Company is working on flexible display technologies.
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On the ProDevTips.com website, there's a new tutorial (part one of a series) that walks the developer through the integration of the Zend Framework, some Ajax functionality and Smarty to create a feed reader.   In this series I will walk you through the code of a site that uses only Ajax and Scriptaculous to handle it's completely windowed interface. Making an interface like this is not really good design, it's only done here for the sake of teaching. It is kinda cool though. Especially if you have a big screen.   The source code is available for download and having it makes the installation and setup of the system much simpler. With it, you're only about fifteen steps away from getting the application up and running.
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Cal Evans has another update about the upcoming (Oct 8th through 11th) to the Zend Developer Zone today:   ZendCon is sneaking up on us fast. If you've not got your tickets yet, time is running out so you had better hurry. To whet your appetite, ere are a few blog posts or ZendCon mentions from speakers and attendees who will be there this year.   Included in his list are bloggers like Terry Chay, Brian DeShong and Mike Naberenzy and events like the Happy Hour 2.0 and the Unconference.
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In this new post to his blog today, Raphael Stolt shows how to combine the Zend Framework and Phing to create a simple, quick setup utility for future ZF projects.   After spending too much time on directory and view script shifting to align an 'older' Zend Framework application to the very useful ViewRenderer Action Helper of the follow-up releases I crafted a single Phing buildfile to stick to the recommended conventions and to have a nearly 'one-button' setup solution for any upcoming projects.    He'd found some other packages that did something similar, but wanted to do it with Phing. He includes the requirements (the software) features that the buildfile makes easy to include and some future improvements that could be made to the install to make things even easier. The buildfile is included and any path or configuration changes that might need to be made.    Phing is a "make" replacement that uses XML build files to define tasks in classes.
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InfoWorld - Novell this week spruced up a version of its Linux desktop aimed squarely at enterprise users.
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When I first saw rumblings in the trade press about Novell&#39;s new Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) distribution, I was confused at best.