Hasin Hayder has posted part one of a series he's doing on making an application similar to the popular FriendFeed site in PHP.

Friendfeed is an excellent life streaming service aggregating all your feeds from different service providers, compile them together, build a social network among your known people and finally deliver all these feeds as a mashup. [...] In this blog post I will try to focus on how to develop such a service like Friendfeed using PHP and JS and how to scale such a huge load successfully.

This first part looks at the photo sharing handling of the application, including links to libraries already written in PHP to connect to them (like Flickr and Smugmug).

As mentioned by both Sean Coates and the International PHP Magazine, ActiveState has release the latest version of their popular development environment - Komodo IDE 4.0.

Komodo IDE 4.0 is the first unified workspace for end-to-end development of dynamic web applications. A rich feature set for client-side Ajax languages such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript and XML, coupled with advanced support for dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl, enables developers to quickly and easily create robust web apps.

Komodo is all about simplicity and helping you write your code. This includes features like a multi-language editor, integrating sharing abilities, the ability to create Firefox-like extensions to add to other applications, and full customization settings to make your worspace your own.

Find out more about the software on Komodo's page or just head over and buy this latest version for a discounted rate of $245 USD. There's also a trial copy you can download and check out before spending the cash.

Via this new post from LinuxLibrarian.org today, there's a pointer to this new article on the IT Manager's Journal site about the Supreme Court Library of North Carolina's move to an Apache/MySQL/PHP combination.

Until last year, [Ronald] Diener's organization was paying thousand of dollars a year to a library software vendor, but the vendor's services had become inadequate for the task. The court's IT team determined that they could develop a better, cost-effective in-house solution that would at the same time be open to participation from outside.

The open source option available through Apache, MySQL, and PHP (AMP) would serve as a resource to collaborate with other organizations and libraries, even internationally, in creating a continually upgradeable software portfolio. This solution would both cut costs and enhance the value of what could be offered to their own clients and a larger audience of legal professionals.

They do mention the comment made about finding documentation on implementing an AMP setup, but other than that, they seem happy overall with the system - plus it's already saving them money.