Software Development

Except for some Python programming, I've done very little software development this decade with most of my efforts in the 80's and 90's (BASIC, Pascal, Perl, Tcl, etc). Those that know me know I've wanted to dig more into PHP and Ruby, but I have been distracted by one sorry excuse after another.

Elgg, an open source social networking platform, opened its development process much wider the past few months. Not every company that goes fully open source benefits from the changes in their license or the changes in how they develop and manage the code. However, open source seems to be treating Elgg very nicely these days.

I have not had time to talk about Google's Highly Open Participation Contest. Luckily, Amy Stephen posted a good article about the contest at Open Source Community which I encourage you to read. In the article, she talks about the positives of this program for both the high school age coders as well as the open source communities involved.

As Amy mentions in her article, Google invited ten Open Source projects, including Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python and SilverStripe to participate. In Google's own words this is what they have to say about their program:

Drupal 6.0 Beta 3 was released just before the Thanksgiving holiday. As in the past, I wanted to use CMSReport.com as a "live" test site for the beta/release candidates of Drupal as I did with Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5. However, as this site has matured, so has my reliance on too many contributed modules currently not supporting Drupal 6. So for now, I've decided to place Drupal 6 in a subdomain, drupal6.cmsreport.com.

I am excited with what I have already seen in Drupal 6. I consider version 6 to be Drupal on steroids. Drupal 6 has a lot of performance and power improvements that are already apparent even in the Beta. Put it this way, the day the Views module is ready for Drupal 6, is the day I go live with running CMS Report on Drupal 6.

Yesterday, I upgraded the PHP version on my server from 5.2.4 to 5.2.5. PHP 5.2.5 brings improved "stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related". I also reintroduced eAccelerator back onto the server. I stopped using eAccelerator last spring, not so much because I had any real issues with it, but because I spent the summer months hosting my sites on the cheap.

A couple months ago, I experienced a number of errors at my Drupal site that all pointed to a corrupted database. I believe the problem likely was the caused by a sloppy export/import I performed with the MySQL database while moving the site to a new server.

While my particular database problem was an easy fix, if you really don't know much about databases you may find that you really need some guidance on how to solve problems like these. This article is the process I went through to correct this particular MySQL database problem in Drupal 5 and some general database rules that show why this problem occurred in the first place.

Coach Wei, Java developer, asks the following question on his blog.

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?

At work we're actually moving many of our in-house desktop applications from Python to Java. I wouldn't be too surprised to see us migrate more PHP Web applications over to Java too for some of the reasons Wei gives in his blog post. But I have a theory as to why PHP and Ruby could be considered "cool" and it has less to do with Java's features and more to do with the culture of open source.

I was looking for variety in the CMS headlines to excerpt/post at my site, but everything is coming up Drupal this morning. Not such a bad thing if you like Drupal, is it?

What I hadn't expected was a discussion of Larry Garfield's benchmarking of PHP magic over at Jeff Moore's Professional PHP Blog. Garfield has been collecting some benchmarks in preparation for Drupal 7 development. Drupal 7 "will open up developers to PHP 5 functionality when it is released next year" and likely break Drupal's compatibility with PHP 4.

I was really surprised not only find out that Joomla! 1.5 is going through a third release candidate, but will likely be followed with more release candidates.  In most projects, the release candidate is a nearly-done final product where the only thing left is to make sure all the i's are dotted and all the t's are crossed.  Not so with Joomla! 1.5.

Johan Janssens's writes in his post, "Is Joomla! 1.5 RC3 really a release candidate?":

So, Python isn't really a CMS topic unless you're a Plone user.  However, as my world at work slowly moves from Python to Java as the language of choice...I'll promote this underdog open source language anytime.  From the IBM developerWorks site: