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:
I always find these type of stories ironic. Last week, I had someone make a comment to an old article I wrote on the Radiant CMS. For those liking Radiant, the commenter remarked "give cakePHP a trial run if you want a cms similar to this but in PHP". One of the reasons I chosen to discuss Radiant was that it was built with Ruby on Rails.
At the turn of the century it was estimated that there were over 7 million Websites in the world. In October of this year, Netcraft estimates that there are now nearly 50 million active sites on the Internet. However, I can't help but wonder how many of those 50 million sites are actually unique sites?
I have been sitting on this story for some time. Daniel Glazman has been writing a number of posts recently on a brand new project he's just starting. Daniel Glazman was involved in the development of the Netscape and Mozilla Composer (now called SeaMonkey) as well as the author of the Nvu Web authoring system. All these composers contain a WYSIWYG HTML editor and in many ways can be the considered the open source versions of Microsoft's Frontpage and Adobe's Dreamweaver.
Although MySQL 5.1 is still in beta, I have a feeling it will be making the headlines this week in many of the IT related publications. MySQL has officially dropped support for the BerkeleyDB engine. The following release notes for MySQL 5.1.12 (beta) may be of interest to BerkeleyDB fans:
Functionality added or changed:
Incompatible change: Support for the BerkeleyDB (BDB) engine has been dropped from this release. Any existing tables that are in BDB format will not be readable from within MySQL from 5.1.12 or newer. You should convert your tables to another storage engine before upgrading to 5.1.12.
However, Brian Aker of MySQL has already responded in a few blogs letting users know that the changes do allow for the BerkeleyDB engine to be returned to MySQL through a third party plug-in:
I have been keeping an eye lately on two version control systems, Subversion (SVN) and Concurrent Versions System (CVS). My sudden interest in version control is due to a project team I'm on for my organization. The team is in the early phases of project management and needing to pick either CVS or SVN. At this time we are leaning toward SVN.
Sigh...another round of security updates coming from the folks at Mozilla. It looks like version 1.5.0.7 will be at our doorsteps soon. Now at home, updating Firefox and Thunderbird on the Windows PC is a snap since it is all automatic. However, updating in a secure enterprise environment is a different matter.
In most enterprises, most users don't have administrative privileges and without those rights Firefox and Thunderbird in most cases will not auto install the new version. What would really help is if Mozilla would provide their software in a MSI package. Until MSI packages are provided by Mozilla, it is difficult for me to accept Firefox and Thunderbird as "enterprise software". In a Windows Server 2003 environment, MSI packages are a must for easy deployment, management, and auditing.
I'm working on an ecommerce site using osCommerce to enable the shopping cart functionality for my client's online store. This is the first time I've used osCommerce so I'm still working on improving my comfort level with the application. osCommerce is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. According to the osCommerce site: