The Zend Developer Zone has posted about a new survey that Adobe is doing to try to get to know some of the web developers out there.
Adobe is hoping to play a little SHOW and TELL with PHP developers. We SHOW you what we are working on, you TELL us if you think we've got it right. Please take a minute to complete the survey we have posted here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=540413426135
If they think you're a good match, they'll get in contact with you. There's also a gratuity of $150 to compensate for your time for the talk.
Matthew Magain has some interesting observations over on the SitePoint Ruby on Rails blog today - specifically that PHP developers are the most likely (out of those working with other web-based languages out there) to make the switch to Ruby on Rails.
Of all the graphs in The State of Web Development 2006/2007 report that SitePoint and Ektron published recently, the one that stood out the most to me was the one showing the platform currently being used by developers planning to start using Ruby on Rails.
It wasn't the fact that the graph shows PHP developers to be likely to start using Rails-this makes sense, as someone is more likely to experiment with another open source platform if they're already using another open source platform-it was the fact that PHP developers are more than three times as likely to start using Rails, even more so than Java developers!
Unfortunately, the study mentioned isn't too cheap, otherwise it would be interesting to see the info behind this graph....
A new group is being proposed in this post from Ben Ramsey, this one from Ligaya Turmelle, and these comments from Elizabeth Naramore - a gathering of the female PHP programmers out there.
From Ligaya and Elizabeth:
We started talking about the number of women in PHP world. Elizabeth Naramore and I know we aren't the only ones (between the 2 of us we could count ~10 other women in the PHP world). There have got to be more then that. So if you are a woman and a PHP developer - stand up and be counted.
We think it would be a great idea to start a women's group for PHP programmers and we want to know who's with us. We've all noticed the lack of females at conferences, user groups, and in print - let's get together and change those numbers, shall we?
If you're interested in this kind of group, you can send off an email to Elizabeth at elizabeth _at_ naramore _dot_ net or just post a comment to this entry over on Ligaya's blog.
The Zend Developer Zone also has their perspective posted today, talking about how the idea was formed and the above discussions on the topic.
Elizabeth Smith has also shared a few thoughts with the community on the "women of PHP" idea.
Mike Potter has posted an update on the status that Adobe is making for developers, including some new offerings for PHPers.
Over the last several months, Adobe has made enormous progress with software developers. In the few short months since the Macromedia acquisition, we have released new products, opened access to SDKs and continued to create communities of open source software.
It's great to see a larger company taking such an interest in the dynamic web languages out there and providing good, solid tools for thier developers to use to create bigger and better applications.
Unless you've been coding under a rock somewhere, there's no doubt that you've heard of Ruby on Rails. Have you tried it, though? Well, if you're hesitant to take the plunge into this other language, at least you can get an idea of what it's like from posts like this on palmcoder.net.
My first experience of web site design was in PHP, no frameworks, just purely PHP and MySQL. With all the fuss about Ruby on Rails, and some pushing from Vish about the merits of writing apps in a proper framework (namely Ruby on Rails) I decided to take the plunge and write my next project in RoR.
So this post is for those people who like me are writing apps in PHP on a page by page basis or using a rough framework like Drupal or something else.
He spends most of the post talking about the Model-View-Controller framework style that is at the heart of RoR and a bit of how it compares to both programming in general and, more specifically, to his previous PHP development. He also finishes it off with some "things to look at" in the form of links to other RoR tutorials.
Lukas Smith has a new post over on his blog with his take on the moves that Oracle has been taking with several Open Source companies out there (such as Sleepycat).
The topic at hand is Oracle buying one dual license open source company after another. This is getting a lot of people worried. Of course it also got me thinking.
Dual licensing is a business model associated with companies distributing their code under two very different licenses. However the same code is also provided through some open source license, usually one of the so called reciprocal licenses (GPL and friends).
That system is pretty nice on many levels. Everybody gets the code with the license they prefer. The dual licensing company benefits through a cheap open source style distribution model. However they can still make money with selling licenses which is a very lucrative business model, while they can also make money through support.
He continues, mentioning some of the serious flaws with this dual license model, including the inability for a company, at any time, to move to a more closed-source method of development. He even mentions a situation where a project could loose all developers.
And, in his words:
So are we up for the challenge if we are faced with such an exodus?
In his latest post today, Chris Shiflett takes a good look at Ruby on Rails from the perspective of a PHP developer to see what all of the fuss is about.
I'm glad to see all of the hype surrounding Ruby on Rails lately. I've always been an advocate of open source software, and Ruby (particularly Ruby on Rails) is yet another feather in the cap. I'm not afraid to say it - I'm glad Rails exists.
I do think it's good to maintain some perspective, and some Ruby fans are more than a bit overzealous. Ruby on Rails is a niche technology, and although all signs indicate that its popularity is growing rapidly, it's a bit premature to be thinking that it will dethrone existing technologies.
He goes on, mentioning that he doesn't see Rails as a direct competitor to PHP, rather two technologies that have the flexibility/power to do the same jobs well. There are "camps" for both sides, but really, as Chris puts it:
It's also important to realize that excitement is subtly different than popularity. Excitement is trendy.
He lists a few sites built in both, noting that, of the popular sites out there, things seem pretty equal. He also notes that, despite what language you're using, the real key is that it takes a good developer to write a good application, regardless of the language...
From Sean Coates today, there's this post with his follow-up to some of the issues that have arrised from the PHP Developer's Meeting notes posted the other day.
If you don't read the PHP Internals mailing list, you've probably missed most of the recent discussion on namespaces.
Since you're reading this entry, there's a good chance you've read one of the other posts about the results of the 2005 PDM, though. Of particular interest (especially given the recent Date class debacle) is the point on namespaces.
He mentions specifically one topic causing a lot of discussion - the current suggestion for a namespace operator (the ""), and, of course, the differing of opinions on either side...
