Showing posts with label PHP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PHP. Show all posts

10 March 2013

Python Trademark At Risk In Europe: Python Software Foundation Appeals For Help

The open source programming language Python -- named after the British comedy series "Monty Python" -- became popular in the 1990s, along with two other languages beginning with "P": Perl and PHP. Later, they formed a crucial part of the famous "LAMP" stack -- the GNU/Linux operating system + Apache Web server + MySQL database + Python/Perl/PHP as scripting languages -- that underpinned many of the most successful startups from this time. 

On Techdirt.

04 February 2010

The New Face of Open Source: Facebook

Without doubt, one of the most extraordinary developments in recent years has been the rise of Facebook - not just as the most popular social network, but increasingly as a force to reckoned with in the world of computing, perhaps soon on the scale of Microsoft and Google. This makes its relationship to free software something of more than passing interest.

On Open Enterprise blog.

12 September 2009

On Opening Up with PHP

PHP is one of the big success stories of open source, so it's great to read this interview with its creator, Rasmus Lerdorf. I was especially struck by these words of wisdom:

in 1997, it basically came to the point where I was going to kill the project, because it was growing so fast and my mailbox was filling up with suggestions, complaints, patches, all these things. Up until then, I had been doing everything myself. Someone would make a suggestion, send me a patch and I'd rewrite the patch the way I thought it should be done.

I would disagree with people, I'd argue back and forth, and I just couldn't keep up any more. I was getting frustrated and sick of it all, [thinking]: "Why are all these people expecting me to fix their code? They're not paying me. What the hell am I doing working my ass off for these folks? I don't even know them – what the hell is going on here?"

So that was the time when I said: "This has to change. Give the guys who have been complaining over the last few years access to the code. The guy who has been complaining about the Oracle extension, he's been a pain in my ass for years, so it's yours now buddy. Any further issues or complaints about Oracle go directly to you." And that really empowered people.

When they felt that they now owned a slice of PHP, they started getting defensive. Instead of complaining to me about things – once they got ownership, and power, the whole atmosphere changed. And it got a lot more fun as well, because I didn't feel like it was just me against the world any more; now it was a real team effort.

That, in essence, is the secret of free software. Putting it into practice is slightly harder...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

04 December 2007

What Does This Mean for NetBeans?

NetBeans has always been something of a mystery to me. I'd always regarded it as the runner-up IDE for Java, after Eclipse. But it's clear that I'm behind the times:

Netbeans 6.1 will have plugin support for creating, editing, deploying to Apache HTTPD, running and even debugging PHP projects.

And according to the NetBeans site:

You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications, in Java, C/C++ and even Ruby.

Add in PHP, and that's increasingly impressive, but it does beg the question: Do we really need another all-purpose IDE alongside Eclipse? Doesn't that just dissipate the effort? Answers on the back of a postcard. (Via Tim Bray.)

10 October 2007

PHP, Oracle and Cognitive Dissonance

It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between Larry "Ninja" Ellison's personal plaything, aka Oracle, and the hacker's scripting tape-duct duct-tape of choice, PHP. And yet the miracle that is open source is able to bring even these polar opposites together in an act of seamless connectivity:

Continuing to deliver on its long-standing commitment to the Open Source community, Oracle today announced the contribution and a preview release of an enhanced Oracle Call Interface (OCI8) database driver for PHP. This helps bring breakthrough scalability to PHP applications, further enhancing PHP as a viable development environment for mission-critical applications. The OCI8 database driver for PHP supports important Oracle Database features such as connection pooling and fast application notification, enabling a single industry-standard server to support tens of thousands of database connections while providing higher availability.

...

The enhanced OCI8 database driver for PHP provides new, improved integration between PHP and Oracle Database 11g, to allow a server-side connection pool shareable across web servers and languages, significantly enhancing the scalability of web-based systems.

(Via Alan Lord.)

19 September 2007

A Marriage Made in Geek Heaven

Long-time readers of this blog will now that I'm a big fan of Eclipse, and believe it to be potentially one of the top two or three open source projects ever. A further step towards that position has been taken with the release of the Eclipse PHP Development Tools project:

Eclipse PDT is a set of tools and frameworks that enhance the productivity of developers using PHP, a popular, general-purpose dynamic language that is especially suited for development of web applications and web services. This is the first Eclipse project that targets the large PHP developer community.

“Eclipse has long been enriched by the wide number of programming languages supported” says Mike Milinkovich, general director of the Eclipse organization. “The release of PDT 1.0 is great news as it will allow the estimated 4.5 million PHP developers to begin using Eclipse-based tools and greatly expand the entire Eclipse community.”

PHP developers using PDT will now be able to leverage the large ecosystem of over 1,400 Eclipse plugins. Many PHP developers use a number of different development languages, such as Java and C/C++. They also use development tools for tasks like source code management (SCM), testing, and profiling when building rich internet applications. PDT enables them to use Eclipse to integrate all of these tools into one single development environment.

The best IDE for probably the most popular Web scripting language: what's not to like?

02 March 2007

Whatever Happened to Borland?

Rather longer ago than I care to think, there was a software company called Borland, run by an ebullient Frenchman by the name of Philippe Kahn. Philippe, I presume, is out sailing his yacht, and Borland still seems to be there. Good to see that one of Borland's best products, Delphi, is also moving into new waters:

Delphi for PHP is the first completely integrated visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for PHP. Delphi’s proven and familiar visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach means you are quickly up to speed and productive, without the headaches normally associated with learning a new development environment. The powerful PHP editor and debugger increase coding speed and efficiency, while the integrated VCL for PHP 5 component class library lets you quickly and visually create PHP web applications and integrate PHP open source components.

(Via TheOpenForce.com.)

21 November 2006

Sweet as Sugar FastStack

This kind of thing is the future of open source in business:

Sugar FastStack, a software support and delivery service that provides a fast and simple way to install a complete open source software solution, including Sugar software, the Apache Web Server, PHP and the MySQL database.

Out-of-the-box solutions, full of stack goodness. (Via TheOpenForce.com.)

30 August 2006

Zend, Zend, Zend

News that Zend is picking up a fat bunch of VC dosh is no suprise: PHP is consisently one of the most popular options for the LAMP stack. What's more interesting is what they are going to spend it on:


“The new funds will enable us to expand faster in emerging geographical markets, accelerate our product development and extend the services organization to meet the demands of our growing number of enterprise PHP customers,” said Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the co-founders of Zend Technologies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: but what are you really going to do with it? (Via Matt Asay.)

11 July 2006

How the Stacks Stack Up

The ever-interesting Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who goes back a long way in the free software world, has a fascinating article about a comparison of two application stacks, one open source, the other from Microsoft. The results were surprising:


The tests showed that such vanilla LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) stacks as SLES (SUSE Enterprise Linux Server) 9, Zope, ZODB, and PHP and a pure LAMP based on SLES, produced "C" results. They weren't bad, but they weren't anywhere near as good as an out of the box .NET stack based on Windows Server 2003, IIS (Internet Information Server), SQL Server 2005, ASP (Active Server Pages), and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

The results mirror those of the Mindcraft tests back in the late 1990s, when GNU/Linux found itself whupped by Microsoft. But the consequence was a range of improvements that soon took free software past Windows. However disappointing the current outcome for the stack tests may be, I'm sure that the same will happen here.

Remember: every bug report makes open source stronger, and the same goes for adverse benchmarks.

10 February 2006

Scrying an Oracle

This story has so many interesting elements in it that it's just got to be true.

According to Business Week, Oracle is poised to snap up no less than three open source companies: JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat Software. JBoss - which calls itself the "professional open source company", making everyone else unprofessional, I suppose - is one of the highest-profile players in this sector. Not least because its founder, the Frenchman Marc Fleury, has a tongue as sharp as his mind (you can sample his blog with this fab riff on genomics, Intelligent Design and much else).

His controversial remarks and claims in the past have not always endeared him to others in the free software world. Take, for example, the "disruptive Professional Open Source model" he proudly professes, "which combines the best of the open source and proprietary software worlds to make open source a safe choice for the enterprise and give CIOs peace of mind." Hmm, I wonder what Richard Stallman has to say about that.

JBoss has been highly successful in the middleware market: if you believe the market research, JBoss is the leader in the Java application server sector. Oracle's acquisition would make a lot of sense, since databases on their own aren't much fun these days: you need middleware to hook them up to the Internet, and JBoss fits the bill nicely. It should certainly bolster Oracle in its battle against IBM and Microsoft in the fiercely-fought database sector.

While many might regard the swallowing up of an ambivalent JBoss by the proprietary behemoth Oracle as just desserts of some kind, few will be happy to see Zend suffer the same fate. Zend is the company behind the PHP scripting language - one of the most successful examples of free software. (If you're wondering, PHP stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" - employing your standard hacker recursive acronym naming convention).

Where JBoss is mostly key for companies running e-commerce Web sites, say, PHP is a core technology of the entire open source movement. Its centrality is indicated by the fact that it is one of the options for the ubiquitous LAMP software stack: Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Perl or Python. The fact that Oracle will own the engine that powers PHP will be worrying for many in the free software world.

About Sleepycat, I can only say: er, who? - but that's just ignorance on my part. This article explains that Sleepycat's product, Berkeley DB, is actually the "B" in LAMP. Got that? The Sleepycat blog may throw some more light on this strange state of affairs - or maybe not.

Whatever the reason that Oracle wants to get its mitts on Sleepycat as well as Zend and JBoss, one thing is abundantly clear if these rumours prove true: Oracle is getting very serious about open source.

In the past, the company has had just about the most tortuous relationship with open source of any of the big software houses. As I wrote in Rebel Code, in early July 1998, an Oracle representative said "we're not seeing a big demand from our customer that we support it" - "it" being GNU/Linux. And yet just two weeks later, Oracle announced that it was porting Oracle8 to precisely that platform. This was one of the key milestones in the acceptance of free software by business: no less a person than Eric Raymond told me that "the Oracle port announcement...made the open source concept unkillable by mere PR" - PR from a certain company being a big threat in the early days of corporate adoption.

Open source has come on by leaps and bounds since then, and these moves by Oracle are not nearly so momentous - at least for free software. But I wonder whether the otherwise canny Larry Ellison really knows what he's getting into.

Until now, Oracle has mainly interacted with open source through GNU/Linux - that is, at arm's length. If it takes these three companies on board - especially if it acquires Zend - it will find itself thrown into the maelstrom of open source culture. Here's a hint for Mr Ellison: you don't get to assimilate that culture, whatever you might be thinking of doing with the companies. You either work with it, or it simply routes around you.

Yes, I'm talking about forks here: if Oracle misplays this, and tries to impose itself on the PHP or JBoss communities, I think it will be in for a rude surprise. To its credit, IBM really got this, which is why its embrace of open source has been so successful. Whether Oracle can follow in its footsteps, only time will tell.

But the rumoured acquisitions, if they go ahead, will have one other extremely significant effect. They will instantly add credibility, viability and desirability to a host of other second-generation open source companies that have grown up in the last few years. Free software will gain an immediate boost, and hackers will suddenly find themselves in great demand again.

Given the astonishing lift-off of Google's share price, and the palpable excitement surrounding Web 2.0 technologies (and the start-ups that are working on them), the hefty price-tags on open source companies being bandied around in the context of Oracle have a feeling of déjà-vu all over again: didn't we go through all this with Red Hat and VA Linux a few years back?

You don't have to be clairvoyant - or an oracle - to see that if these deals go through, the stage is well and truly set for Dotcom Delirium 2.0.