It's not often that a report generates this much excitement but "Open Source in the Enterprise" says a lot of what needs to be said to C-Levels considering making the jump to Open Source.

Cal mentions one of the 6 factors that are driving more and more businesses to open source software (like PHP) - the community that surrounds them (how vibrant is it?). He also points out the concept of "vendor lock-in" and how open source can help companies accomplish it by ridding themselves of proprietary software. The report can be gotten from the O'Reilly Radar group for $399 for an individual copy or $995 for a sitewide license.

Okay, time for some code samples to boost traffic to my site. In a previous posting I talked about the idea of RADAR, or RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient. So, wanting to see if I could put it into use, I decided to do the following for a new application: Have the core of the application provide data via a REST service, For the web part of it, create controller / action pairs that call the REST service and pass the output onto the views.

There's four code examples included in the post:

• Defining the IndexController for the app
• Creating the results, standings and schedule methods in the controller
• Rendering the XML for the response and for the standings and for the standings for a particular division (two code blocks).

I used the great mobile site from the NWS, but it still didn't give me the effect I wanted. And hey, I'm already filling a database with weather observations and radar images! So I decided to see what it would take to make a custom radar loop that I could get to at any given moment. The Treo can display animated gif files, so that seemed like the most efficient solution. The question is, how do we create an animated gif using PHP?

To answer the question, he found this script ("GIF images into animated GIF with native PHP class") and used it to create a simple script to grab the GIF images and combine them into a single animated image suitable for viewing in any browser. He includes the script used to generate it as well as an example of the result and how it looks on the phone.