Q&A: OMG member talks up UML 2.0
614190
The Object Management Group (OMG) is in the process of voting on whether to approve Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.0, the latest version of this specification for model-driven development. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill talked about the subject with Brian Selic, IBM Distinguished Engineer and co-chairman of the OMG task force on UML 2.0.
542803
According to this quick post on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Zend Framework project has a new leader to take the place of Jayson Maynard when he left.    After a difficult search, we have found the seasoned veteran we need to track, manage, and coordinate our ever growing group of contributors and Zend liaisons, and our lengthy list of components and sub-projects on our published roadmap for ZF 1.0, and beyond.   Fortunately, we were introduced to Bill Karwin. Bill is up to this challenge, having performed similar project organization duties at several companies, including Borland and Lutris Technologies. He is also committed to the open-source community, and is a member of the MySQL Guild.    Cal has some other nice things to say about Bill, including a compliment on Bill's grasp on the Zend Framework project.
496780
Lorenzo Alberton has posted some updates about the PEAR packages that he maintains to his blog today including MDB_QueryTool, Mail_Queue2, MDB2, and Translation2.   Even if lately I've been coding way more in C/C++ than in PHP, I still keep an eye on PEAR developement: I reckon in the last month I've closed a bug a day, on average. And after my last call for help about my PEAR packages, I'm also pleased to announce that someone did indeed offer a hand. I'm happy to welcome not one, but two new developers!   Each of the items has links to their PEAR homepage and a few quick words on where the package stands (including developers involved or wanting to get involved). He also reminds developers out there that they can help out too if they want to jump in and get into PEAR.
249394
Jacob Santos makes some of his own comments about the recent PHP5 adoption talk that's been going around in the PHP community (spurred on by comments made by Matt of the Wordpress project).   Matt brings up some good points. What might be limiting PHP 5 adoption, could just be the lack of interest in developers. [...] Up until reading his rant, I've lived in a box where everyone I've talked to, used and enjoyed PHP 5 and its vast extensions. Developing in PHP 5.0 was uneventfully, but you learn to appreciate PHP 5 with the core inclusion of PDO with PHP 5.1. PHP 5 is not without annoyances. In the core developers attempts to "better" the language, they made changes that broke code that previously worked.   He looks at a few of the items for debate surrounding the move from PHP4 to PHP5 including the extensions that come bundled with PHP5, solving the register_globals issue, and a brief mention of the Standard PHP Library.
478220
Stefan Mischook has release three new parts of his "Building Objects in PHP" video series:   Part 1 - This is a hands-on video where I hope the viewer will actually write code along with me. I want to stress that this video (like everything else on this site,) targets beginners .. not old PHP hacks. Part 2 - In this video, we actually use the object we created in Part 1, in our PHP page. Part 3 - In this video, I clarify a point I was trying to make in part 2. In a nutshell, I talk about why it makes sense to keep any page rendering code (HTML and CSS) out of your business logic classes.   Lots of other videos (on different topics too) are also posted on Stefan's website.
283883
Read and Write ICO,BMP formats in 100% pure Java   Been a long time in the making, but I've finally gotten round to the final release for 0.7  The library appears to be stable, hence my decision to finalize the current release.  Thanks to Olivier Le Tiec for reporting a bug with irregular icons (width != height), together with the necessary bug fix.  Thanks for using image4j!
736650
Nice blog post via Slava  criticizing the quality of the Java runtime and hotspot compiler:  "The HotSpot source code is a bad joke We wasted an afternoon and had a good laugh on IRC today, looking over parts of the SCSL sources to HotSpot and the sun.* classes. I can't give too much detail or paste code samples because that would violate Sun's ... license, but here are some highlights:"  This is my favorite one:  "A lot of preprocessors are used. This includes a mix of awk, sed, shell scripts, and indeed, Scheme! Yes, the JVM source includes jscheme.jar, used to generate some CORBA classes. Considering that Sun talks about how bad preprocessors are, its hypocritical of them to use preproces ...
318761
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.
457664
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".
539271
Terry Chay, a popular speaker at many of the PHP conferences and photog to the geek chic crowd in San Francisco, will be speaking at the upcoming PHP Meetup for the SF PHP group. He'll be giving a talk titled "OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to OO Design".   How does the PHP developer in the trenches create powerful object-orientation code? By doing what the PHP's architects did, of course: cherry picking the most pragmatic of OOP principles and patterns! This talk is targeted at the PHP developer who has basic knowledge of PHP OOP syntax but wants to find out where OOP principles can fit into a program.   If you'd like to attend, head over to the meetup page for the event and let them know you're coming. It'll be happening at the CNet Network offices February 7th @ 7pm.
264964
As the Zend Developer Zone points out there's a new interview over on the PHPWomen.org website with Nancy Wichmann, one of the members of the PHP Women group, about some of her development experiences.   NancyW - a well known drupal developer, documentation contributor, module developer/maintainer apart from these a prestigious WOMEN in the world of opensource.   The interviewer asks a wide range of questions (with some interesting answers!) on topics ranging from her college major, how she got interested in Drupal out to things like her good/bad experiences in the open source world and some advice for those new to the community.
303820
On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has another of his interviews with the speakers at various PHP conferences, this time, it's with Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTi.   This is another in a series of interviews I've been conducting as I travel to different conferences. Most of the people I get the chance to interview are directly involved with PHP in some way. This interview is a bit different. Theo Schlossnagle is the founder of OmniTI, one of the premier PHP consulting companies in the world. OmniTI consults with companies all around the globe on issues ranging from architecture to security.   Cal asks questions about the background of OmniTI, how they find/retain programmers, Messaging Systems, Theo's book, scaling in general, and some of his thoughts on what PHP still has to overcome.
437702
Christopher Jones has a note on his blog today about the Orcale Develop Conference happening in San Francisco October 23rd through the 25th and some of the PHP involvement there.    First on my ToDo list is Oracle's user conference. PHP is well represented at Oracle Develop. This is a new part of the huge Oracle OpenWorld event running in San Francisco in a few weeks.   Registrations are still open for Oracle Develop. You can register separately or if you register for the full OpenWorld you get the Develop conference gratis, I was told.  Check the fine print on this.    Talks for the conference include:  Rasmus Lerdorf's "Getting Rich with PHP" "Hands-on Lab: Developing and Deploying Oracle and PHP" from a representative from Oracle and Christopher Jones giving a talk on "The PHP/Oracle Experience: Building for Scalability"    Check out the conference website for more information and to register today.
736397
Tycho:  After seeing Chore Wars mentioned yesterday, the opportunities for manipulating people seemed...  rich.  The possibilities for mashups based on this data are also rich - I wonder if it could be exposed, somehow.  When my charge is old enough to manipulate in this way, my crib is going to fucking sparkle.
743008
The Simple Object-Oriented Game Library is basically a simplification of SDL with some nifty features. SOOGL is used in a C++ course at MÃÂ¤lardalen University (http://www.mdh.se) and is mainly intended for beginners.   SOOGL is a small, simple and yet powerful C++ game library intended for beginners.     This is the fourth release by the SOOGL team.  Major changes since last version is that we have disabled debug of C-Runtime, since newbies seldom does this anyway. Some other minor bug-fixes have also been included.   Currently vista and visual studio9 is primary target. But we are currently testing XP and VS8. Linux support is yet to come, but if you have some experience, you can build the library from the source code.   Have fun and play around with the improved and more stable version of this funny library.  Just go on and download the library: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=165806
94499
Nefarious Designs continues their object-oriented PHP series with part four posted today, a look at some of the new features that PHP5 brings to the table.    After a welcome break, over the late summer public holiday here in England, here's the final part in my object-oriented PHP series. Sorry about the rather extended pause since "Part 3: Taking Relationships Further".   Having already looked at definition, relationships and taking those relationships further, I'm going to look at how PHP5's new Object Model introduces more advanced functionality.    In this latest part they look at clas constants, abstract classes, object interfaces, and magic methods (including overloading).
660667
Solar fans will be happy to see (as mentioned in the latest post from Paul Jones) that all of the previous (and future) posts he's been making as tutorials on certain parts of the framework have been integrated into the Solar manual.   The translation went pretty quickly, because I wrote the original blog entries using Solar_Markdown, which converted them to HTML for the blog. Then I did some quick edits and re-converted them using Solar_Markdown_Wiki (which is the markup format for all the class API and manual entries at the Solar website).   Posts adapted so far include the posts covering views and layouts, using HTTP and sending email from Solar.