Latest News from PHP Developer's Journal

Smearing Cloud Lipstick on a Legacy Tech Pig

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

The Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara has come to an end, leaving a fair share of opinion, skepticism, and robust discussion for the period of incubation leading up to the next conference. Many companies have adopted “Cloud-something or other” as their new name, and are aggressively bringing their products to market. We observed exhibitors displaying cloud network management software, cloud email and SMS messaging, cloud security - basically cloud everything.

Cloud Computing on Gartner's Top 10 List and SYS-CON Events' 2010 Calendar

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:45:00 EDT

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption. “Companies should factor the top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies. They should determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives.”

Yahoo! Query Language

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EDT

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter and join data across Web services in real-time. With YQL, applications run faster with fewer lines of code and smaller network footprint. In this session Jonathan Trevor, who works in the Y! Platform group will further discuss how developers can access and shape any data across the Internet through one simple language, no need to learn different APIs.

The Time Is Right for Enterprise Cloud Computing

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EDT

Up to now you may have been reluctant to move your Enterprise application workloads to the cloud, fearing a lack of security in the cloud, compliance issues such as data location regulations and having to rewrite your applications. During his keynote, Rich Marcello will discuss the latest technologies and approaches that help knock down these barriers, creating the opportunity for attendees to now consider cloud managed services as part of their data center journey to secure "IT as a Service".

Moving the Operating System & Desktop to the Cloud

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Eyeos is an Open Source project (selected Project of the Month in Sourceforge for August 2009) that creates a Cloud desktop and is installable on a wide variety of cloud environments (including single LAMP virtual servers). At the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Pau Garcia-Mila will go into detail about how it acts as a platform for web applications written using the eyeOS Toolkit, and includes 67 applications and system utilities as the default pack. It currently has 9 communities in 9 countries and more than 530.000 downloads.

Swine Flu Stocks are Seeing Their Largest Pullback Yet

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:06:00 EDT

After posting large gains throughout 2009, swine flu stocks are seeing their largest pullback yet. For investors looking to position their portfolios for flu season, there are more ways to trade the flu than ever. Investors have large-cap pharmaceutical plays to choose from, and some of the more volatile, small-cap names have proven the efficacy of their drugs, while others are too far behind in their clinical trials to capitalize on the current pandemic.

Stock in Focus: Sunwin International Neutraceuticals

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:35:00 EDT

The press release states that under the terms of the one year agreement, Sunwin will provide marketing support and technical staff to support Hunan Fuhui's sales efforts within the province. Additionally, Hunan Fuihui must distribute at least 50 tons of stevia extract within the first year for this agreement to be subject to renewal. Hunan Fuhui is an experienced distributor based in the Hunan province, located in southern China and home to more than 64 million people.

The Real Story Behind Independent Internet Consultants?

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EDT

In a recent post on a cloud computing mailing list, an old timer from the telecom days admitted that for him “being an independent consultant means about the same things as “being unemployed.” Over the past few years the joke was “you cannot swing a dead cat over your head in downtown LA without whacking an unemployed telecom engineer.”

1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo: Themes & Topics

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EDT

A round-up of the problems, issues and opportunities due to be discussed October 6, 2009 in Washington, DC, at SYS-CON's 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com), a 1-day deep dive into the new wave of Internet-based technologies that are changing the way that Federal agencies leverage, procure and utilize IT.

New Simple Cloud Storage API Launched

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:30:00 EDT

PHP/Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, GoGrid and Nirvanix have launched a new low level cloud API for PHP called the "Simple Cloud API". The API can best be described as low level storage focused API (An API for other API's). In a sense it's a way to create other higher level programmatic API interfaces such as REST or SOAP using an easy, yet portable PHP programming environment. The Simple API allows you to easily interact with a variety of cloud interfaces including support for File Storage, Document Storage, and Simple Queue services. The Simple Cloud API is not a web service; it is an API that exposes common operations in application services offered by different vendors, making it easier for PHP developers to build ‘cloud native’ applications.

KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) 3.0 Soars Higher Than Ever

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:12:00 EDT

Keynote Systems, a provider of on-demand mobile and Internet test & measurement solutions for continuously improving the online experience, today announced Version 3.0 of KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment). KITE 3.0 is Keynote’s free desktop tool for real time testing, diagnosing and troubleshooting of Web performance issues from the end user perspective. KITE 3.0 makes it easy for all Web teams, especially QA testers, Web developers and IT Operations teams, to optimize Web site performance from the end user perspective. And KITE 3.0 arrives just in time for online retailers preparing their sites for the upcoming 2009 holiday shopping season.

Using the New, Simpler DOCTYPE in HTML 5

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:15:00 EDT

HTML 5 is making some things easier to use. The first is the DOCTYPE. Located at the top of a Web page before the opening BODY tag, the DOCTYPE describes the syntax for the page. The roots for the DOCTYPE lie in SGML. Bearing this in mind, all DOCTYPES for HTML 4 and XHTML require a DTD (Document Type Definition) to describe the content. This is all gone in HTML 5. Now, all you have to do to declare that you are using HTML 5 as your DOCTYPE is add the following to the root of your Web page:

The Ten Attributes of a Magnetic Sales Professional

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 05:45:00 EDT

The Magnetic Sales Professional doesn't see their role as job. They see it as a calling.

Word Saved from Ban

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EDT

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has rescued Microsoft Word from being clamped in injunctive leg irons, barred from sale on the US market. On Thursday the court gave Microsoft the stay it was looking for while it appeals the decision of a Texas district court that it infringed on an obscure custom XML patent held by a little Canadian company called i4i. Nobody ever heard of i4i until a few weeks ago when Microsoft was told to pay it $290 million in damages for treading on its IP and to take Word and the Word-bearing Office suite off the American market until Word stops offending. The injunction was supposed to go into effect next month. Microsoft maintains that the patent is bunk and that there’s prior art. It also claims that it would take months to fix the problem.

Web 2.0 & Collaboration... Opportunities Ahead

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:00:00 EDT

While so much of the buzz around Web 2.0 has focused on the business-to-consumer market, the greatest opportunity today for vendors is in the business-to-business collaboration space.

Cloud Security Is Nothing New but It Changes Everything!

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Glenn Brunette, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security Architect at Sun Microsystems, will be presenting at the upcoming Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com) this coming November 2-4, 2009, in Santa Clara, California. His session will be entitled “Cloud Security – It’s Nothing New, It Changes Everything!”

VS.Php for Visual Studio 2010

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:45:00 EDT

Now that VS.Php 2.7 is out, I'll like to share our progress with VS.Php for Visual Studio 2010.

If you are currently participating on the VS2010 beta program, you can try VS.Php for Visual Studio 2010.

Here is a screenshot of VS.Php running on Visual Studio 2010:

There are a number of things broken but basic functionality is there.

You can download the latest build here: vsphp_en_2010.exe

Oracle To Keynote Cloud Computing Expo

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:15:00 EDT

Enterprises large and small are drawn by the advantages of cloud computing - pay-for-use, self-service, elastic scalability and the elimination of hardware management – resulting in very low barriers to entry and exit and high agility. However, enterprises are also concerned about security, quality of service, integration, compliance, lock-in, and the long-term costs of public clouds.

VS.PHP 2.7 Adds Support For Silverlight Integration

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:00:00 EDT

We pleased to announce the release of VS.Php 2.7 for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005. This release introduces a number of new key features and enhacements of existing features. Silverlight One of the most exciting new features is Silverlight integration. With VS.Php 2.7, you can develop Silverlight applications and host them in your server side PHP application. VS.Php makes it easy to develop, debug and deploy these types of applications.

The Cloud, SaaS and BPMS

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:15:00 EDT

Many have discussed and commented on Cloud computing’s benefits, as well as its risks, though I have heard few discussions on Cloud computing’s impact on business process re-engineering, and how to get from the existing internal business processes to a Cloud computing model. For smaller organizations this may not be as great a concern as it would be for larger, more complex organizations, with many stakeholders. It will be interesting to see how the major vendors of BPMS position themselves for this migration to Cloud computing.

Were You Hit By the $23 Quadrillion Error?

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:45:00 EDT

Reports are flying around the Internet about people using their VISA debit cards and seeing errors on their billing statements for charges of $23,148,855,308,184,500. That’s a pretty serious software bug and one that will cost VISA a lot of time and credibility to fix. They’ve already indicated that the charges and the additional fees will be removed. But in the meantime, some VISA holders are stuck with very empty bank accounts (these were debit cards, so they were directly tied to the card holder’s bank account).

Social Media Will Replace BusinessWeek Too

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:00:00 EDT

This morning I received a story link from a friend, her email subject - McGraw-Hill Said to Hire Evercore to Sell BusinessWeek Magazine - Bloomberg.com. As I read the story I recalled our Ulitzer launch where our development work started a little over two years ago. During our first production meeting in April 2007, we put on the whiteboard that Ulitzer would be a social media platform that would replace traditional media in the near future. The news story says: "BusinessWeek, the McGraw-Hill Cos. magazine that lost 30 percent of its advertising revenue in the second quarter, is up for sale, according to a person close to the situation."

Windows Azure PHP Development Kit

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:15:00 EDT

Microsoft announced at TechEd India — a show running simultaneously with TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, a new software development kit for people interested in building apps in PHP for Windows Azure cloud. The PHP SDK for Windows Azure, a.k.a. PHPAzure, is an open source project, available for download from Microsoft CodePlex. The SDK provides consistent programming model for Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables, Queues).

Why SOA Is a Good Fit for CRM Solutions

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Online commerce is no longer just for consumer products, but also for direct and indirect goods and services. As a result, new demands are placed on classic customer relationship management (CRM) applications. While most have successfully automated customer-facing interactions (such as order capture, configuration, pricing, and order query), they still rely on external systems to process subsequent steps (such as invoicing, fulfillment, and pick-pack-ship), which are completed in a back-office enterprise resource planning (ERP) application.

Altor Networks Wins Network Products Guide Reader Trust Award for Virtual Network Security

Tue, 19 May 2009 12:16:00 EDT

Altor Networks announced today that Network Products Guide, industry’s leading publication on information technologies and solutions has named Altor VF virtual firewall a winner of the 2009 Best Products and Services Award. This respected annual award honors products and services that represent the rapidly changing needs and interests of the end-users of technology worldwide. As part of the tech-industry’s leading global awards program, this year’s Best Products and Services were nominated from all over the world. The first security solution of its kind and purpose-built for the virtualized environment, the Altor VF monitors and controls inter-VM traffic and enforces security policies at the individual VM level. Designed from scratch to secure the latest virtualization technologies, the Altor VF provides the thorough protection and ease-of-operation missing from traditional network security products that were not designed for the virtual environment. “Increased end-user awareness and ongoing advances in technology are helping shape better products and services.” says Rake Narang, editor-n-chief, Network Products Guide. “Altor VF is the industry’s only complete virtual firewall solution, delivered as a virtual appliance, which secures VMotion and auto deploys for easy installation.” “Network Products Guide’s recognition of the Altor VF is further validation that we are taking a leadership position in providing defense-in-depth security for virtualized environments,” said Catherine Edwards, communications director at Altor Networks. “The Altor VF goes beyond basic virtual firewall functionality to provide best-of-breed protection, and tight integration with existing security management systems, allowing security administrators to feel confident about expanding virtualization to their production environment.” The Altor VF gives customers unprecedented visibility into and granular control over virtual network traffic with award-winning technology that dramatically improves the security of virtual servers in data centers. Data center administrators can now pinpoint virtual security compromises and easily create role-based security policies. Security policies can be continuously enforced on individual VMs, simplifying deployment and on-going security management of the virtual infrastructure while reducing the dangers of security breaches.

Oracle + Sun Will Be Like the iPhone: Larry Ellison

Sat, 16 May 2009 20:00:00 EDT

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told Reuters in an e-mail interview that then got put in a filing and shipped to the SEC that, despite all the armchair speculation, he's keeping Sun's hardware business. Not only that but he's going to pour money into Sun's Sparc chip.

New Zend Framework 1.8 Delivers RAD for PHP

Fri, 01 May 2009 03:01:00 EDT

Cloud programming support for Amazon’s infrastructure is now also a part of Zend Framework, with both S3 (simple storage service) and EC2 (elastic compute cloud) components to help users quickly build web applications to both store and serve data, and to manage application instances in the Amazon cloud. Cloud deployment means less upfront investment is needed by organizations seeking to leverage utility computing and scalable services and making some classes of web applications easier to scale and faster to develop.

Michael Dell Part of Group Buying Busted IndyMac Bank

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:00:00 EST

Michael Dell is going to try to turn a buck on the mortgage mess. He’s part of a consortium of seven private equity investors that signed a letter of intent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on New Year’s Eve to buy the failed IndyMac Bank, one of the accursed entities that led the US economy down the primrose path of sub-prime loans.

Novell Reminds Folks It Bought PlateSpin

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 05:00:00 EST

Novell is repositioning the virtualization widgetry that it bought for $205 million this spring when it bought PlateSpin and now claims to be the only kid on the block who can support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all the leading hypervisors. It ticks off Citrix’ XenServer, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Virtual Server, VMware’s ESX and ESXi and the Xen integrated in its own SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

GoGrid CEO Speaking Next Week at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo November 19-21 in Silicon Valley

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:15:00 EST

In the past, there was heavy segmentation between developers who used .NET for development and those who used PHP. Traditionally, .NET developers used the Windows platform while PHP developers remained fairly closely tied to Linux distributions. Windows Server 2008 marks a new generation of platform for both types of developers in that now with one server platform both PHP and ASP.NET applications can be run simultaneously on the same machine under the same OS.

Is PHP the Answer to Interoperable Cloud Computing?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:15:00 EST

"There is already sort of a cloud ecosystem out there in the world of PHP," notes Sun's Tim Bray in a recent post. "There are a whole bunch of competitive vendors where you can upload a bunch of .php files and database dumps and with only a moderate amount of twiddling, get your app running," he adds.

Composite Software to Exhibit at SYS-CON's Virtualization and Cloud Computing Conference & Expo

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that the global leading virtualization technology provider Composite Software to exhibit at SYS-CON's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, (www.virtualizationconference.com) which will take place November 19-21, 2008, at the Fairmont Hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California.

SOA and the Internet: An Architectural View

Thu, 29 May 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Exploring the boundaries between the Enterprise and the Internet, this talk focuses on Architectural approaches from the service pattern, process pattern and event pattern to help SOA practitioners understand topics such as Web 2.0, AJAX, SaaS, Social Networks and how they connect with the Enterprise. The emerging patterns of architecture can enable the savvy architect to empower their IT to embrace an accelerating vision of the network economy.

AJAX World - Two Great PDF Creators

Wed, 28 May 2008 22:15:00 EDT

I like reading stuff in pdf format. But it's even better if you can easily create pdf files. By easily I mean a button click. Literally.Since I have Adobe Acrobat, my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint just have an extra menu to create it. But it's kinda boring. Let me share with you a couple of better ways.

Computer Lab International Announces Support for Citrix XenDesktop Virtualization

Fri, 23 May 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Computer Lab International (CLI) announced support for Citrix XenDesktop - a desktop virtualization solution. Each of CLI's desktop appliance platforms will support XenDesktop including CLI XP Embedded, Windows CE Embedded and Linux Embedded desktop appliances. This tight integration with XenDesktop allows organizations to offer the best user experience combined with the reliability and manageability of CLI desktop appliances.

Rolling Your Own MVC Framework - Starting-Point for Any PHP Application

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:30:00 EDT

Over the next couple of articles, I'll be walking you through the process of developing a simple MVC framework that you can use as a starting point for almost any PHP application that needs to be developed. Furthermore this framework won't be like any other framework you've seen: it's going to be small enough to not obstruct the real development, elegant enough to make it a pleasure to work on in the future, and scalable enough to be useful in the development of applications of any size.

Why Do 'Cool Kids' Choose Ruby or PHP to Build Websites Instead of Java?

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:30:00 EDT

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

C#, Turbo Pascal, C++, PHP...and the LEGO Brick: Denmark's Leading Exports

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:45:00 EST

Google's main page today celebrates the 50th anniversary of the iconic LEGO brick. Today?s LEGO bricks still fit bricks from 1958, but more importantly it is one of Denmark's best-known exports, along with programming language creators Anders Hejlsberg, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Rasmus Lerdorf, who between them created C#, Turbo Pascal, C++, and PHP.

"What's New and Exciting About the Web Right Now?" Asks Time Magazine

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:30:00 EST

Time magazine has chosen and posted what it considers to be the top 50 web sites of 2007 - sites that show, '...exceptional style and smarts, sites that offer new and improved ways to access and share content, generate our own and otherwise enrich the online (and off-line) experience.' In the Social Networks category, the top sites included StumbleUpon, Hitchsters (a carpooling site), and LinkedIn.

First Eclipse Project Targeting PHP Now Available

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:15:00 EDT

'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,' said Mike Milinkovich, general director of the Eclipse organization, as The Eclipse Foundation this week announced the availability of the 1.0 release of the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) project.