Software Development

PHP 5.2.1 has been released and includes a number of stability and security enhancement of the 5.X branch. Besides the usual bug fixes (over 180 of them), PHP 5.2.1 also includes the following key improvements:

John Newton, Alfresco, has written an interesting posts regarding "Web 2.0".  I find the article interesting because I think Newton does bring up some new ideas or at least something that hasn't been talked about in some time.  Newton has observed that the main audience for those of Web 2.0 appear to be users that tend to think on the right side of your brain.  Newton also takes it one step further by saying perhaps it is time we start taking into account the personality types of users when it comes to CMS development.

This was a real revelation for me. However, I don’t think that John and Caterina shared my excitement. Maybe it’s already bleeding obvious. The next day I did a Google search on “Web 2.0” and right brain and didn’t find a lot. However, for me it is profound and it is something I think that we can apply immediately to the development of Alfresco. I am going to explore the concept more and I believe that there are implications from Myers-Briggs personality types in how they interact with the Internet.

Taking this further, this might also mean why those who are "left brainers" are kind of annoyed with this whole Web 2.0 terminology.  It has been my experience that while the general public still craves Web 2.0 those involved in the project are exhausted of hearing the phrase be used so much these days.  If you know anything about Myers-Briggs personality types you know there may be some truth to why some of the strongest groups that dislike the Web 2.0 concept appear to be the hard core developers.

The Newbie Issue

I received an interesting e-mail the other day through the contact form at my site regarding the social bookmarking "features" I have for my posts.  The questions asked to me are quite common among new users of any Web content management system.  While the questions in this particular e-mail I received would be more appropriate to be asked and answered in the forums at Drupal.org, there were some things in the message I felt the need to address though my blog.

While most bloggers are using the new year to look ahead, I am not quite ready to make promises to the year of 2007. In fact, I am more inclined to looking at the past thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link in the comment section of this post. There are no prizes being awarded in this "contest" but I promise you can have some space for bragging rights. Feel free to include any history on the page that you feel is necessary to tell your story.

The archive contains archived web pages from 1996 to the near present. The oldest web pages I could find that I authored was from 1997 for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Sioux Falls, SD.

The above site actually originated in March 1996, but this 1997 image is the earliest I could find in the archive. Not very impressive is it? However, you have to remember that I was authoring with HTML 1.x and worried that Netscape's introduction of the blink element was pushing the envelope further than I wanted to go.

Congratulations to the Ruby language folks for converting their CVS repository over to Subversion (SVN). From what the "experts" tell me, it is not easy moving your developers over to another version control system. At least that's what was hinted when I asked the question, CVS or Subversion?

I'm currently testing a development version of Mozilla's Firefox 3 (codenamed Gran Paradiso). The contents of the release notes for Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 may surprise a few users.

Currently Firefox 3 is scheduled to be officially released in May 2007. When Firefox 3 is finally released it is expected to no longer support older versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. Support for Apple's Mac OS X 10.2 will also be dropped. For the Mac platform, Mozilla is recommending users run Firefox using OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

Several new features for the Alpha 1 version of Gran Paradiso include:

• Cairo is now being used as the default graphics library, affecting all graphic and text rendering
• Cocoa Widgets are now used in OS X builds
• An updated threading model
• Changes to how DOM events are dispatched (see bug 234455)
• Changes to how web pages are painted
• New SVG elements and filters, and improved SVG specification compliance

Many of the new features are a result of changes in the Firefox rendering (layout) engine, Gecko. For this alpha version, Gecko 1.9 Alpha 1 is being used under the browser's hood.

Computerworld and the National Policy Research Council (NPRC) recently completed a study ranking the Websites of state, county, and local governments on usability and other criteria. In the study, Michigan's site earned top marks.

According to the article, the "the e-government report card is based on an extensive examination of 11,227 official government Web sites." Sites were judged on 25 criteria, including "whether people could use them to pay taxes, bid for contracts, find government jobs and complain to local officials about concerns such as potholes." Also included in the article was a report card summarizing other top e-government performers among city, state, and local sites.

What separated the winners from the losers?

Wyatt Barnett in his Sitepoint article, "I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like" makes some very valid points about content management systems straight out of the box. Take note that he isn't just talking about commercial products but also open source systems. His first complaint about "boxed" CMS:

The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and fails at doing most things particularly well. The tasks required for content management are generic, but every organization has a far different focus when it comes to how that content should be managed and how it thinks about that content. I have lost days of meetings trying to help subject matter experts understand that an article, according to this system, is really a page. Trying to make a generic application to handle this for all comers is a very, very tricky prospect.

Sadly, his post doesn't really offer a solution. I assume building your own CMS is the only alternative to the boxed version. But I have to ask, who really has the time? I think there are some obvious reasons you see so many capable software developers are using open source software such as Wordpress, TYPO3, e107, Alfresco, and Drupal for their Web presence.

I'm finally down to just the finishing touches on that osCommerce project I mentioned about last month. The site is Dakota Angler, a fishing bait and tackle store, that finally is ready to sell their goods online.

The start of November is big news for users and developers of PHP applications with the release of PHP 5.2 on the 2nd of the month. According to the release announcement, this "release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements".

Significant features of PHP 5.2 include:

• New memory manager for the Zend Engine with improved performance and a more accurate memory usage tracking.
• Input filtering extension was added and enabled by default.
• JSON extension was added and enabled by default.
• ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files was introduced.
• Hooks for tracking file upload progress were introduced.
• Introduced E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR error mode.
• Introduced DateTime and DateTimeZone objects with methods to manipulate date/time information.
• Upgraded bundled SQLite, PCRE libraries.
• Upgraded OpenSSL, MySQL and PostgreSQL client libraries for Windows installations.
• Many performance improvements.
• Over 200 bug fixes.