php

PHP and Perl crashing the enterprise party

The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors.

That's the message I got from Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, the "dynamic languages company," in a conversation this past week. I wanted to find out how the Vancouver-based "old school" open-source company is faring in building business solutions and developer tools around Perl, Python and Tcl.

Quite well, as it turns out (and as described by Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond). But the story is … Read more

'Old' tech like Java and .Net is hot in cold economy

If you're part of the "cool kid" developer crowd, you're undoubtedly writing your new application with Ruby on Rails, and spend a lot of time talking about Git, Squeak, or Memcached.

But if you want a job, apparently you should get back to ancient technologies like Java and .Net, according to new data from IT employment company Dice.com, cited in Baseline magazine. In addition to those programming heavyweights, other enterprise bellwethers like Oracle, SharePoint, and SAP also make the cut.

On Java, Tom Silver, senior vice president at Dice.com, sees value in formal training, … Read more

Zend targets Java with growing PHP community

Leave it to Zend to kick Java-loving Sun Microsystems when it's down.

PHP has become one of the hottest programming languages in technology, and the engine behind the little scripting language that could is Zend Technologies. Back in 2000 Zend released its Zend Framework to facilitate PHP development, and it's now taking this Java-bashing crusade a step further with the release of its new Zend Server, as The Register reports.

As Dave Rosenberg notes over on CNET's Software Interrupted blog, Zend Technologies is making available its Zend Server on Tuesday as both a commercial product and one … Read more

Q&A: Zend CEO talks up latest server releases

Zend is widely known as "The PHP Company," and this week, it's announcing new products that further its mission to make PHP the most popular language for building dynamic Web applications.

I spoke with company co-founder and recently appointed CEO Andi Gutmans about the upcoming product launch and the rise of PHP in the enterprise.

Q: What is Zend announcing this week? Gutmans: We're announcing the general availability of Zend Server and Zend Server CE. We released the beta in February and have been working diligently over the last couple months to put the finishing touches on both products.

Zend Server is an enterprise-ready Web application server for running and managing business-critical PHP applications that require a high level of reliability, performance, and security. Zend Server CE is our first-ever community version of Zend Server that gives developers a complete, simple, and faster way to develop and deploy PHP applications. We're very happy with the end results!

When you start talking about high reliability, security, and performance, it sounds like you're working to disrupt traditional Java environments? Is my hunch correct? Gutmans: The Java disruption by PHP is well under way.

PHP is everywhere, and Zend's solutions are being used in business-critical deployments by companies such as Tagged, Fiat, BNP Paribas, and Fox Interactive Media, to name a few. The strategic adoption of Zend in larger accounts, often in favor of Java, is related to our strong return on investment and shorter time to market.

The business is growing as a result of the maturation of Zend and the PHP ecosystem, which includes enterprise-grade frameworks such as Zend Framework and standardized tooling such as the Eclipse-based Zend Studio. We've also done a great deal of work with large vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe Systems to successfully interoperate in enterprise environments.

With Zend Server, we're taking this maturity to the next level and addressing the increasing market demand we see for a production environment that can support PHP developers and administrators. … Read more

Is open source becoming like Microsoft?

Talking with Microsoft officials last week, I was surprised to hear a key reason for the company getting involved with things like optimizing Windows for PHP: it was the only way to ensure products like PHP work with Microsoft technology at all.

Even as traffic is up to Microsoft's open-source code hosting site, CodePlex, and even as it starts to release code under standard open-source licenses like Apache and openly include open-source code in its products like Powerset, the open-source world seems to be closing off somewhat.

WordPress? Written for MySQL. PHP? Same. The list goes on.

While I'… Read more

Microsoft digs into PHP

Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center used to make news by partnering with SugarCRM, MySQL, and other commercial open-source projects. Those partnerships seem to have hit a dry spell over the past two years, with little in the way of new announcements, but this doesn't mean that Microsoft's OSTC has been inactive.

Quite the contrary. As its work with the PHP community suggest, the OSTC has actually been in overdrive. In an interview with the PHP Classes blog, Microsoft gives some background as to the motivations behind its work with the scripting language:

Open-source initiatives at Microsoft are … Read more

Apple's October update fixes 20 security flaws

With the release of its Apple SA-2008-10-09 security update on Thursday, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer company provided patches for nearly two dozen software flaws.

Some of the fixes included in the update, which can be obtained from Apple's Software Downloads page, are specific to Apple features, such as Single Sign On, Finder, and ColorSync. But the release also addresses an error introduced in Mac OS X 10.5.5. Other fixes are updates to open-source projects, including Apache, ClamAV, PHP, and Tomcat.

Apache This patch affects users of Mac OS X v10.5.5 and Mac OS X … Read more

Why is Zend raising more money?

I just saw the news that Zend has raised $7 million more, in its fifth (Series E) round of funding. Zend last raised $20 million in August 2006. Zend has raised so much money that it must be bought for a bazillion dollars for its investors to get a good return from it.

There are good reasons to raise money heading into a downturn: The justification noted in the press release is to use the funds "as needed." That sounds like "in case things go awry during a recessionary period." This is smart.

One of two … Read more

Building on growing platforms

When you are contemplating starting a new software company you want to look at where money gets spent now and where it's going to be spent in the future. That's why startups these days are building their applications on utilities like Amazon S3 (which despite last week's outage, I still believe in) and attempting to monetize Facebook (I am not a big believer in this one though I get the idea.) And while neither of these things may be right, they are better bets than building your infrastructure on dying platforms or betting on outdated technologies.

One product that I use daily is SpanningSync, a simple sync utility that connects iCal and Google calendar. One of the guys there (Charlie is his name, but I couldn't find his title or role) has a very logical and eye-opening take on why they went the way they did.… Read more