What Benchmark's investment in Ruby on Rails support should tell us
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Benchmark just invested in a support vendor.  Another one.  Is there a lesson in this?
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
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(InfoWorld) - VMware is making a free benchmarking tool available to IT professionals Monday to evaluate the performance of virtualization technology in their datacenters. Meanwhile, it seeks to assure competitors that the benchmarking standards will be fair to all of them. VMmark is available for a free download and can be used to determine how well virtualization software works with any of six typical datacenter workloads: file server, e-mail server, Web server, a standby server, an online transaction processing (OLTP) database, and a Java order entry system. VMmark runs on either Linux or Windows. VMware shared a prototype of VMmark in October 2006 with members of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), an industry group that establishes performance benchmarks so customers can evaluate products. At that time, SPEC had just formed a working group to develop benchmarks for virtualization software. It is still working on those benchmarks. Though helpful for comparing various products, benchmarks are controversial because of concerns that the results can be manipulated to make one vendor look better than another. SPEC and other industry benchmarking groups are organized to create fair benchmarks that will yield impartial results. VMware acknowledges the skepticism about its benchmarking tool being a fair way to compare VMware with other brands, so it strove to be impartial, said Andrea Eubanks, senior director of enterprise and technical marketing for VMware. VMware is represented on the 13-member SPEC work group that is developing the virtualization benchmark along with competitors such as SWsoft and Trigence. Major technology companies including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Intel are also represented. "We have created VMmark to be an open standard," said Eubanks. "In order to prevent misconceptions of what our intentions are. ... we presented our technology preview to SPEC so they could use it as the basis of the open-standards benchmark. We want to improve our product, we don't want to cook our benchmarks." VMware is introducing VMmark while the SPEC panel is still developing its standards. "The process to becoming a standard is a quite long one," said Eubanks. But VMware has not always been as impartial as it claims to be, said John Bara, vice president of marketing for XenSource, a VMware competitor. Bara says VMware released a white paper earlier this year comparing VMware's ESX Server hypervisor to XenSource's Open Source Xen hypervisor on a Windows operating system and the results showed VMware performed better. Bara says the comparison was not fair because Open Source Xen is optimized to run best on Linux, not Windows. XenSource's Xen Enterprise product is optimized to run Windows and would be a more balanced comparison to VMware's ESX. "We cooperate with VMware in a lot of areas, but we went back to them and said 'foul,'" said Bara. To VMware's credit, he said, it redid the test and accepted the revised benchmark that showed VMware ESX and Xen Enterprise with nearly comparable performance. Also Monday, XenSource entered into an OEM agreement with Symantec Corp. to embed Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation virtualized storage management software into Xen Source's XenEnterprise virtualization hypervisor.
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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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Matt Wade has posted a quick item to APress' Inside Open Source blog today mentioning an update to an item he'd previously mentioned - issues with the Zend_Cache module.   One of my complaints was the Zend_Cache did not accept lifetimes on a per object basis, but rather the lifetime was at an application level. I just received notice in my inbox that the issue has been fixed! The change is currently in svn, and should be in the 0.80 preview release. Thanks go to Fabien for the fix.   You can download this latest version of the Framework (0.7.0) from the Zend Framework website.
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Are Internet users about to suffer from beta-testing burnout?
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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."
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Marco Tabini (of php|architect) has posted some thoughts to his blog about the PHP4 end-of-life announcement and its relations to the current push to go PHP5 - mainly how it relates to hosting providers.   I'm sure that a large number are owners of small hosting firms - which, by far, provide the vast majority of PHP-powered websites that Netcraft carefully tracks for us - that sell cheap shared hosting. [...] If you provide shared-hosting plans, it's likely that your servers are still running PHP 4. Upgrading to PHP 5 is a logistical nightmare for two reasons: first, you don't necessarily know that you'll be able to properly set up and secure your systems; second, you don't know that your customers' applications will keep on running.   Both reasons can cause very different kinds of hassles for the hoster, especially when it comes to their customers. As Marco puts it "hell hath no fury like a customer scorned". When things are going smoothly, everything's good, but the second that you try to explain that the update is what's good for them, all they see are things breaking and freak out.   He suggests only one real solution - make the move and tell the customers now that things are changing. Help them all you can (with information about updated software and resources) but ultimately it's up to them to make the change.
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Sandro Zic recently gave a presentation on Java and PHP, and posted his slides here. I didn't attend his talk, so I don't have all the facts, but I would like to comment on one of his slides [...]. First, a minor point. Limited or no OOP has rarely stopped any software from being enterprise-ready. Most modern operating systems continue to be written in C, and the large Cobol programs running on mainframes that manage your bank accounts and insurance do not use OOP. [...] Let's address some of his other criticisms: Virtually no multi-threading, Lack of maintenance tools, and Immature frameworks.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Splitbrain.org: Add comments to any PHP scriptRyan Malesevich's Blog: Separate Trackbacks from Comments RevisitedDeveloperTutorials.com: Inserting An Array Into A DatabaseSymfony Blog: The Definitive Guide to Symfony and symfony 1.0 RC1 releasedSoledad Pendaes' Blog: PHP will never have a (real) Rails-like frameworkJSLabs Blog:  A web server in PHPRobert Swarthout's Blog: PHP frontend to Subversion (SVN)Christopher Jones' Blog: OCI8 1.2.3 Patch is Available on PECLDotVoid.com: Parsing the user agent string using PHPPaul Jones' Blog: Solar 0.26.0 Released, and New WebsitePierre-Alain Joye's Blog: Zip 1.8.5, small bug fixes releaseZend Developer Zone: Zend Monthly Newsletter - JanuaryMike Potter's Blog: Flash, Flex and PHP Just Got A Huge BoostJonathan Snook's Blog: Review: PHP SolutionsOracle Technology Network: Creating an Ajax Process Using PHP and Oracle
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In a matchup between VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, our reviewer says they're both capable products and that the differences is "on the margin." Making the right choice is all about deciding what's most important to your infrastructure.
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Zed rails, Bray dizzy The launch of a low-cost Ruby on Rails integrated development environment from SapphireSteel Software based on Microsoft's Visual Studio comes at a turning point for both the Ruby language and its associated Rails framework. But quite what the turning point will be is open to question.â¦
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Comparing Asta Funding to Portfolio Recovery Associates.
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In response to a previous article from the Symfony blog, Paul Jones has pulled together some thoughts to some of the comments they made.   As the author of a relatively popular benchmarking article, I feel compelled to respond to this bit of misguided analysis from the Symfony camp about benchmarks.   Paul talks about the "straw-man arguments" presented in the Symfony article, including some references to Paul's previous benchmarks. He's even broken it down into a point-by-point response to make each point clear.
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Russ asks: Where's the OpenSocial container API? I love Russ because he cuts through all the BS and gets right to the core, most basic question, and he doesn't care who he pisses off. That's my kind of developer. You can't lie to the compiler, when the bits hit the road, you gotta know what garbage goes in and what garbage comes out.  (Ahh programmer's humor!) In other words, suppose I wanted to compete with Google, MySpace, Plaxo and LinkedIn, well, where's the spec that shows me how to do that? Well, of course I don't know, they aren't communicating with riffraff like me, but I have some experience with this kind of stuff, so I can hazard a guess. If they publish a spec,all kinds of projects will likely get started to enable the API in (just for the sake of argument): Drupal, WordPress, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Scripting News (why not add widgets to a random blog), CNN, The New York Times, well you get the idea. There might be lots of implementations very quickly. And that would be it for changes. It would be frozen de facto, they'd have to live with what they have, which given how quickly it was thrown together, probably isn't very good. Not the kind of stuff you'd like to support for the next decade or two. Or maybe they would break everyone, something guaranteed to make them a lot of enemies, much the way Microsoft did, and they were good at migration of APIs.  Google is good at doing AJAXy web UIs, they make users happy, but they're not very good at APIs. This one is a loser, for sure. That's the answer to Russ's question. It's probably not malice that keeps them from releasing details to everyone outside their club, it's pragmatism. They have to try to hold on to it to keep it from becoming even more of a mess than it already is. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. I've been wrong many times before.
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The Piethon benchmark contest is beginning to loom, and the language list discusses how scalars should be interpolated and subscripted.
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Payless ShoeSource beats analyst estimates, but is its stock too expensive?