Archive for November, 2006
Interview with the co-founder of Zend Technologies
By Justin Silverton
Recently, there was an interview with the co-founder of zend technologies, Andi Gutmans.
Here are some interesting questions addressed:
“InfoWorld: Why do you think PHP is the most popular?
Gutmans: I think because of our very, very strong focus on the Web. We’ve always been the most efficient when it comes to developing Web applications. And also it’s a very, very easy language to pick up. So you don’t have to have to be a software engineer or a computer science graduate to use PHP. I often say that PHP is the Visual Basic of the Web. You can just be kind of an ad hoc developer, no real formal training, and be very, very efficient. ”
I’ve often wondered the same thing myself. Why is PHP so popular? Wikipedia states that it is currently the 3rd most popular language on the web. It might have to do with it’s ease of use. Because it’s type-less and has many web-related features built-in, a beginner can easily pick it up and start coding applications.
It also might have to do with the nature of the open source community. The fact that PHP is open source means that when you use it to build your applications, you aren’t at the mercy of any one corporation. The problem with utilizing proprietary technologies built by large corporations is that when they change the standards, you are forced to comply (and could possibly lose support). Open source means a community of support that could be around much longer than the the previous version.
“InfoWorld: What is your take on the Oracle announcement last week about supporting Red Hat Linux? Do you think this is a death knell for Red Hat?
Gutmans: I’m not sure. If Oracle succeeds, I don’t know if it’s a death knell. I think still a lot of vendors are going to prefer kind of the best-of-breed vendor for Linux. But [Red Hat] could lose some business, especially the Oracle business. [Red Had has] got some pricing pressure… There’s obviously another option, which is that Oracle is just trying to drive down the price [of Red Hat stock]. And maybe this is a one- to two-year plan to actually acquire Red Hat. ”
Oracle has shown the volatility of a business based on open source (Redhat’s stock price dropped shortly after the announcement of their interest in the distro). Since Redhat’s core business is based on something any company could do, a larger company (one with more resources and money) has a chance of beating them at their own game.
Redhat isn’t gone yet, however. They still have a lot going for them. Many of the features and additions found in the latest redhat distribution are created by the developers hired by the corporation, which will take awhile for oracle to replicate.
Top 5 php tools
By Justin Silverton
The following are five tools that are invaluable to any php developer:
1) Crimson Editor (Free)
Link: http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
This program is not only fast in loading time, but also small in size (so small that it can be copied in one floppy disk).
While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for programming languages such as HTML, C/C++, Perl, PHP and Java.
2) VS.php (Commercial, 30 day trial)
Link: http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php
VS.Php is a Php integrated development environment based on Visual Studio. With VS.Php you can design, develop, debug and deploy Php applications within the Visual Studio IDE. VS.Php key features are around providing rich Php and Smarty editing capabilities as well as its ability to debug Php scripts locally as well as remotely.
This is a very nice editor because it offers code completion for all php function names. There is also a stand-alone edition that can be installed in-case you do not own a copy of visual studio .net 2005.
3) ez_sql/ez_results - mysql wrapper library (Free)
Location: http://www.jvmultimedia.com/portal/
A great mysql library that features:
- Disk caching
- It is one php file that you include at the top of your script. Then, instead of using standard php database functions listed in the php manual, you use a much smaller (and easier) set of ezSQL functions
- It has excellent debug functions making it lightning-fast to see what’s going on in your SQL code
- Most ezSQL functions can return results as Objects, Associative Arrays, or Numerical Arrays
- Works with Smarty templating language
4) Smarty Template Engine (Free)
Location: http://smarty.php.net/
An excellent template engine for php.
One of Smartys primary design goals is to facilitate the separation of application code from presentation. Typically, the application code contains the business logic of your application, written and maintained in PHP code. This code is maintained by programmers. The presentation is the way your content is presented to the end user, which is written and maintained in template files. The templates are maintained by template designers.
5) mysql gui bundle 5.0 (Free)
Link: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
A suite of GUI tools that includes: MySQL Administrator, MySQL Query Browser, MySQL Migration Toolkit, and MySQL Workbench.
Update 11/05/06
Here is a list of some more tools that can be very helpful for php developers.
Editors
tsWebEditor: http://tswebeditor.net.tc/
Pnotepad: http://www.pnotepad.org/
Pspad: http://www.pspad.com/
notetab: http://www.notetab.com/
notepad++: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
conTEXT: http://www.context.cx/
php Designer: http://www.mpsoftware.dk/
Dev-PHP: http://devphp.sourceforge.net/
Mysql GUI clients
Navicat (commercial) : http://www.navicat.com/
phpmyadmin: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin/
Libraries
Propel: http://propel.phpdb.org/trac/wiki/Users/Introduction
Templates/Frameworks
phptal: http://phptal.motion-twin.com/
cakePHP: http://www.cakephp.org/
prado: http://www.xisc.com/
How to create an animated favicon
By Justin Silverton
What is a favicon?
A favicon (short for “favorites icon”), also known as a page icon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon, and many graphical web browsers —such as recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, iCab, AOL Explorer, Epiphany, Konqueror, and Flock—can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser’s URL bar, next to the site’s name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page’s title in a tabbed document interface.
Guidelines
The following are guidelines for displaying a favicon on your website:
- The
linkelements must be inside theheadelement (between the opening and closing head tag) in the HTML. - The image can usually be in any image format supported by the web browser, the major exception being IE, which only supports ico.
- The
.icofile format will be read correctly by all browsers that can display favicons. - Use the appropriate color depths (ICO: 16X16;4, 8, 24 bpp—i.e. 16, 256 and 16 million colors GIF: use 16×16 in 256 colors PNG: use 16×16 in either 256 colors or 24-bit).
- I have found that you do not have to place html on your website. You can just place a favicon.ico in the root directory of your website, but it may take longer to show up in some browers.
Creating an animated favicon
Animated favcons are easy to create. After following the guidelines from above, you just need to create an animated gif and rename it: favicon.ico. It is currently not supported in Internet Explorer.
Examples of sites that have animated favicons:
More information on favicon can be found Here
PHP 5.2.0 released
By Justin Silverton
PHP 5.2.0 has officially been released!
Here is a list of important changes/updates:
- array/HashTable copying has been optimized
- require_once() and include_once() have been optimizedby eliminating fopen(3) on
second usage. - Optimized request shutdown sequence. Restoring ini directives now iterates
only over modified directives instead of all. - Improved crypt() on win32 to be about 10 times faster and to have friendlier
license. - Improved performance of the implode() function on associated arrays.
- Improved performance of str_replace() when doing 1 char to 1 char or 1 char
to many chars replacement. - Optimized access to FastCGI environment variables by using HashTable
instead of linear search. - Fixed bug #39034 (curl_exec() with return transfer returns TRUE on empty
files). - Fixed bug #38377 (session_destroy() gives warning after
session_regenerate_id()).
Many Other issues have been fixed with this new release.
Download is available here
The future of PHP
By Justin Silverton
It has been announced by Zend Technologies Co-Founder Andi Gutmans that the latest version of PHP (5.2) will be released This Thursday (November 2nd).
Some new features that will be included:
- significant performance improvements
- Security extensions
- better AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) backing with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) extensions
“What [the security extension] really focuses on is allowing developers to write secure apps in a much easier fashion by providing tools to do so,”
Gutmans said. PHP 6.0 focuses on internationalization and Unicode support. A pre-release of version 6.0 is expected in December with the general release planned for 2007. Questioned about the differences between PHP and the also-popular Ruby on Rails platform, Gutmans said PHP is more accessible to nonprogrammers than Ruby.
One of the more interesting comments made in this interview was the improved support for the windows platform (more info on this Here). This will include 12 new patches that are supposed to improve the ovarall performance of php.
More of this interview can be found Here