Rich Zygler's Blog: Is Microsoft buying Facebook a good thing for PHP?
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Rich Zygler asks in one of his recent blog posts, if Microsoft purchasing a 240 million dollar chunk of Facebook is a good thing for the language it's written in - PHP.   Microsoft is buying a piece of Facebook. What do we all think this means for PHP since Facebook is one of the "web 2.0" leaders built on PHP? The way I see it, [there] are [six] options.   Among the possible outcomes he lists are things like Microsoft rewriting the site, Facebook continues as it is or (next to impossible) Microsoft sees the error of its ways and fully embraces open source.
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It's hard to determine what's more surprising about Microsoft Corp.'s investment in Facebook Inc.  -  the appraisal that valued a 3 1/2-year-old Internet hangout at $15 billion or the rare snub of online search leader Google Inc
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With all of the recent talk about business cases for PHP, Ben Ramsey wanted to get some of his thoughts on the matter out and into his blog in a new post.   I don't believe anyone has ever published any white papers on PHP, giving it a business case, and while we have companies like Zend, OmniTI, and eZ Systems providing support for PHP, I haven't seen any documentation from them like this. So, last Thursday when Stuart Herbert announced his Google Group for developing a business case for PHP, I took notice and joined.   Definitely good to hear encouraging words about a project that could ultimately help out the language as a whole break into an area where the growth has been the slowest.
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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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Microsoft's $240 million investment is much smaller than the rumored $750 million that Facebook sought. Why the difference? Epicenter's Terrence Russell analyzes the deal.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft may take a stake of up to $500 million in social network, which could push valuation toward the $10 billion mark.
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Microsoft Corp. has approached Facebook Inc. in recent weeks proposing an investment that would give Microsoft a 5% stake in the popular social-networking company, The Wall Street Journal reported.
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Microsoft Corp  is talking to  Facebook about buying a minority stake in the fast-growing  online social network that could value the company at $10  billion or more, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web  site on Monday.
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No, Facebook isn't a $15 billion company. Yes, Microsoft is smart.
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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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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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Microsoft Corp is talking to Facebook  about buying a minority stake in the fast-growing online social  network that could value the company at $10 billion or more,  the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Monday.
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On the heels of a rant posted by Matt Mullenweg (of Wordpress), Ed Finkler has posted some of his own thoughts and rebuttals to the points Matt made.   Among these points are comments about PHP5 features that "could be helping Wordpress users right now" including:   Parameterized SQL input to eliminate SQL injection attacks Filter extension to combat XSS, CSRF, etc. attacks Prepared statement/transaction support in PDO and MySQLi Improved OOP features and support (code quality, extensibility)   Ed pushes that it's not about the slow adoption of PHP5 in other places. Its about the slow adoption of it in Wordpress so far as it relates to Matt:   The thing is, support of PHP5-only features in WP would give it better speed and security right now. And especially in the case of security, Matt's reliance on what users say they want is a critical error: users don't ask about security until well after it becomes a serious issue. Wordpress has one of the worst security records of any PHP application, so I'll go out on a limb and say that it's a problem now. Even if WP users aren't talking about it, WP's core dev team should have addressed this already.
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Software dinosaur Microsoft paid millions for a tiny piece of trendy internet property Facebook. But the company needs something to make it hot again
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Microsoft Corp  is talking to Facebook about an investment in the company that could value the fast-growing social network at $10 billion or more, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Monday.
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On LinuxJournal today, there's a new article from Marco Tabini about the power of PHP as a multi-purpose language (and not just for web pages anymore).
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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.