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The spec is called OLE Compound Documents, and an open source import/export library was recently added to the Apache Jakarta stable of projects.

They even have a new logo!

Have you ever actually configured IIS? The interface, though graphical, is actually completely aweful. Apache is actually simple and easy to configure with a text file, especially by comparison. And when you have to administer more than one, a text file is a significant advantage.

The reason people believe IIS is easier is that there is pointing and clicking involved. However, there are graphical configuration tools for Apache. Any one of these would be easier to use than IIS. Don't believe the hype.

What I've never understood about Microsoft is why they don't have licenses that give people the opportunity to learn their product. In doing this they are shutting out a huge number of developers (not just students).

Most of the software we learned about was written by Microsoft (Windows 95/NT, Visual C++, Visual Basic, MS SQL Server, IIS, ASP, Word, Excel, Front Page, etc.) and our professors always told us to get this software from somewhere and install it for educational purposes (the pirated versions of course). Some of them were even offering us their own CDs which we could borrow and install.

They used to say "it's for educational purposes, it's not a piracy, it's not unfair to Microsoft" and guess what? They were right. Microsoft should pay them for that!

Why? Because they were teaching thousands of future IT experts, which were totally unable to use free software. Will their future employers buy Windows for servers? Sure they will, because their "sysadmins" will be too dumb to run Debian or OpenBSD. Will they buy IIS? Of course, because their "webmasters" will have no idea how to run Apache. Will they buy MS SQL Server? They will have to, because their "database experts" won't be able to use MySQL. Will they use ASP for server-side scripting? What else could they do having PHP/Perl/Python-ignorant "web developers". Will they buy MCVC++? They won't have much choice as VI/Emacs+GCC will be a black magic for their "C++ programmers".

What else can I say? "Pirating software is like stealing crack from a drug dealer and pretending that it makes you free from addiction." This is especially true on the university.

I'm sure that every time Bill Gates gets the information that students on such a university are pirating thousands of copies of Microsoft software, he laughs like an evil genius - and he's right. People don't use IIS because it's better, faster, more secure, stable or cost effective than Apache. They use it, because that is everything they know.

And what would most of employers do when their crew knows only IIS and ASP? Would they ask them to read many different books and lots of online documentation and start the project next year? No, it'd be cheaper and faster to just give up, buy Microsoft licenses and start the project today.

But maybe I shouldn't be angry, after all I have a rare knowledge how to save hundreds thousands of dollars in just a small-sized server farm so I have quite a nice money thanks to other people's stupidity. Actually, I should (together with Bill Gates) pay those ignorant professors, or at least send them flowers!

What I've never understood about Microsoft is why they don't have licenses that give people the opportunity to learn their product. In doing this they are shutting out a huge number of developers (not just students).

Most of the software we learned about was written by Microsoft (Windows 95/NT, Visual C++, Visual Basic, MS SQL Server, IIS, ASP, Word, Excel, Front Page, etc.) and our professors always told us to get this software from somewhere and install it for educational purposes (the pirated versions of course). Some of them were even offering us their own CDs which we could borrow and install.

They used to say "it's for educational purposes, it's not a piracy, it's not unfair to Microsoft" and guess what? They were right. Microsoft should pay them for that!

Why? Because they were teaching thousands of future IT experts, which were totally unable to use free software. Will their future employers buy Windows for servers? Sure they will, because their "sysadmins" will be too dumb to run Debian or OpenBSD. Will they buy IIS? Of course, because their "webmasters" will have no idea how to run Apache. Will they buy MS SQL Server? They will have to, because their "database experts" won't be able to use MySQL. Will they use ASP for server-side scripting? What else could they do having PHP/Perl/Python-ignorant "web developers". Will they buy MCVC++? They won't have much choice as VI/Emacs+GCC will be a black magic for their "C++ programmers".

What else can I say? "Pirating software is like stealing crack from a drug dealer and pretending that it makes you free from addiction." This is especially true on the university.

I'm sure that every time Bill Gates gets the information that students on such a university are pirating thousands of copies of Microsoft software, he laughs like an evil genius - and he's right. People don't use IIS because it's better, faster, more secure, stable or cost effective than Apache. They use it, because that is everything they know.

And what would most of employers do when their crew knows only IIS and ASP? Would they ask them to read many different books and lots of online documentation and start the project next year? No, it'd be cheaper and faster to just give up, buy Microsoft licenses and start the project today.

But maybe I shouldn't be angry, after all I have a rare knowledge how to save hundreds thousands of dollars in just a small-sized server farm so I have quite a nice money thanks to other people's stupidity. Actually, I should (together with Bill Gates) pay those ignorant professors, or at least send them flowers!

Here is a quote from an article about that:

"Abraham Foxman, ADL's national director, said the groups were both creating racist games using open source software and modifying commercially available games to make targets of particular ethnic groups."

Great, now we will have people trying to outlaw Open Source - saying it promotes hate.

Well I have 2 responses to that.

#1 Just because a tool can be used for evil doesn't make it evil. Baseball bats aren't evil, even though they can and often are used in a wrongful manner.

#2 The NAACP website is running Apache which is Open Source Software.

Web site design needs a lot of different things, Information architecture & usability, HTML & XHTML, CSS & implementation bugs, search engine ideas and keyword research, Web server techniques & content management, deeziner discussion & tech discussion, good practices & sucky practices.

I could go on. My point is that you can either be a half-hearted jack-of-all-trades, or do the Web a favour and pick something, learn to understand it and collaborate with people who have complimentary skills.

Of course a Web site is no use if no one visits it. A link from the /. home page is a good start.

Calum

All this talk of simplicity, avoiding flash etc is all well and good, but don't loose sight of the basics when you're coming up with your design.

Look at your URI namespace; think about what it means; go read about what it means, don't just choose names arbitarily or you'll find you break them in no time. Do your users really need to know all your content is served by index.php? Does that really mean anything outside Apache? If not, remove it; go mod_rewrite it away and when you find you need to move to Java or C# or /bin/sh you can make sure nobody notices. No worrying about 404's, no waiting for search engines to catch on, and if you're lucky and/or smart, you'll get nice clean meaningful URL's the user won't be scared of. Cool URI's Don't Change, and they mean the same to everyone.

Always remember that HTML is a semantic markup; a <h1> tag, for instance, defines a HEADING, it doesn't define a larger font or anything else; on an aural browser it'll be read in a slightly different tone or gender of voice, on a PDA where space is limited it may just be a different colour, or displayed indented, or any of 1001 different things. With XHTML and CSS2 you can accept all this and still have decent control over how your site looks and lays out on the devices you do know about. A great way to see this in action now is to play with turning off navigation elements, and even things like making copyright notices bigger for print media (@media print { .. } in CSS2); excellent for publishing documents on a site without making multiple versions AND without dropping the niceties of your site.

Make use of the semantic structure of HTML; surround abbreviations with <abbr>, use title="" attributes to give links and even arbitrary areas of text descriptions; these things add to the user experience and provides them with the rich set of information hypertext was always supposed to without you needing to worry about crap like DHTML bubble windows; they're standard parts of the browser.

A nice technique for design is to develop your HTML from XHTML 1.1 Strict (think: HTML 2.0 in XML). Build up a meaninful document and surround all the logical sections in <div>'s, then you can use CSS to move them around; you'll probably find a nice natural layout magically appears.

Er. Better stop now ;)

If you are a Unix geek you should seriously think about doing your own. I host 7 domains web/email now and it really wasn't too hard. Just put a cd-burner on the webserver. (For fast backup/restore) All you need is one IP address.

OpenBSD makes a great firewall. Drop three NIC's in it and you are ready to rock. The really cool part is you can charge a nominal fee for hosting and either pay for your DSL or bump it up to a bigger pipe.

Virtual Hosting with Apache is brain dead easy. With postfix and OpenBSD and the ports tree, Authenticated SMTP is really easy too.
A friend of mine has a howto on the authenticated part.

I think this article is basically ZDNet trolling again. After all, the more "controversial" the article, the more hits they get = more ad revenue.

So today's developers will use one of three languages: Java, C# or VB.Net.

Strange, a lot of projects I'm familiar with don't use any one of those languages. I think it depends who you talk to.

I think the author believes in two common fallacies:

1. C++ has some plus signs after it, so it must be a replacement for C
2. All problems in systems programming are trivial and have already been solved, and will never need solved again, so there's no need for really low-level languages.

I'm sure the argument is a lot more valid for big corporations, but they've always been bastions of VB and "4GL's" (even when 4GL was just a marketing term). Basically, /. has been trolled again.

That'll be a helluva project. I'd love to be a part of, but it'll require a lot of time and personnelle. Might I suggest Jakarta Struts as a base framework?

First off, Cocoon 2 is NOT slower than Cocoon 1. Cocoon 2 passed version 1 a while ago. Cocoon 1 with caching is only faster than Cocoon 2 with its cache turned off -- and then Cocoon 1 barely beats Cocoon 2.

Second, Cocoon 1 works by putting processing instructions in every XML document pointing it to an associated XSLT stylesheet or other secondary processor. So what happens when you want to switch stylesheets for every document in a directory (or a site!). Do you write a script to do it? And what if you want multiple views of the same document? Say on one page, you want a certain subset of data from a XML document dedicated to the band U2, and on another page you want a different subset. Do you split up your document into two pieces? Do you make a copy of the document and worry about redundancy? What if you change your mind later and want to have a different information snippet? This is precisely the sort of thing that Cocoon 2 solves.

With regard to folks claiming that they don't want to use a JSP/Servlet solution, I have a couple of points to bring up. While Cocoon can use JSPs, they were only included so that there would be a migration path. In normal installations, Cocoon does not use JSPs at all. Then again, if you really have a hard-on for PHP, Cocoon can use that as a language for generating XML. It's up to you. In fact, you can write XML generators in PHP, Velocity, JSP, Python, and JavaScript (and of course, Java). You can mix and match. Or you can pull information out dynamically through a relational or XML database. You can generate XML from a directory listing. All without writing a single line of Java code.

And no, just by using Xerces, Xalan, and FOP, you are not going to make something just as good as Cocoon. What if you want to make multiple transformations in the same pipeline (transforming the source XML more than once before it hits the client)? Will you write the code to handle every different case you come across during the lifetime of the site? Or would you rather not reinvent the wheel and just use Cocoon (which handles it very well indeed).

Download it (and a servlet engine like Tomcat) and give it a try. The worst that happens is that you find that you don't like it (Note that it comes with debug logging turned on and will be slower than if you turned it off or to "warn" instead). The best that may happen is that you see how powerful a real publishing and XML processing engine can be.

You can even run it from the command line to pre-generate your site! You don't need the servlet running if that's your preference!

----------

That said, I can't speak to Zope. I've heard good things about it so I'll leave it at that. But don't denegrate Cocoon when you haven't even tried it (which most of the folks who've posted have done). It's not just an XML parser, an XSLT processor and some duct tape. It's much much more! The sitemap alone should be enough to get you to try it. What's a sitemap you ask? Go to the site and find out! ;-)

And no, I am not a member of the Apache Software Foundation, nor do I have any affiliation with it other than as a user.

since you say all your developers all "know java well" the choice is already made for you. Go with Tomcat as your servlet engine (unless you are already a J2EE shop with jboss/websphere/weblogic...
instead of trying to wrangle with cocoon or cocoon2, (cocoon1 seems faster imho) i'd just go ahead and use the XSL:FO utilities from apache known as FOP. we're using FOP right now to deliver reports in PDF and print them directly from the PCL it can generate. Having the reports as XML makes sense since we can tell our SQL server to output XML and all we have to do is tell FOP to render it with appropriate XSL. Rendering HTML is simple also - we just transform it on the fly with xalan/xerces.

good luck!

"We strongly encourage folks to report such problems to our private security mailing list first, before disclosing them in a public forum."

Let's not bash Microsoft too much, if Apache is doing the same thing.

An anonymous dickhead wrote:hack the apache source to call your c functions. Perl is a scripting language; i.e. slow

Go learn about modperl, Anonymous chum: Apache/Perl integration.

Some hints for the technologically challenged:

1: apache already has a good C API for writing your own modules (don't have to "hack the source")

2: What everyone else is talking about is a module (not "hacked source") called mod_perl that embeds a perl interpreter into apache. Scripts are compiled once then cached. Even emulating vanilla CGI scripts gives massive speed increases (on par with C), and using the apache API gives much more control over the various phases of URI serving.

I've been looking forward to the perchild MPM. It can run different server processes under different UID/GIDs. This is important because mod_{perl,php,python,snake} run in-process with the Apache server. It's the only way to run them securely for different people other than a completely seperate webserver for each person (with its own IP address, configuration file, memory footprint, etc.)

But perchild doesn't really work:

• It's not portable to non-Linux platforms. (There was talk on the mailing list of marking it experimental because of this.)
• It hasn't compiled (even on Linux) out of the box in several releases. In 2.0.29, easy to fix but still doesn't work right. (Not compiling is a sure sign it hasn't been maintained.) Not quite as easy on 2.0.32. There's a patch, but it doesn't look right to me.
• It's easy to misconfigure it into running virtual hosts as root. (Bug report)

So, Apache 2.0 may be promising in the future...but when a feature I've been looking forward to for a long time is broken, I'm kind of disappointed.

I've been looking forward to the perchild MPM. It can run different server processes under different UID/GIDs. This is important because mod_{perl,php,python,snake} run in-process with the Apache server. It's the only way to run them securely for different people other than a completely seperate webserver for each person (with its own IP address, configuration file, memory footprint, etc.)

But perchild doesn't really work:

• It's not portable to non-Linux platforms. (There was talk on the mailing list of marking it experimental because of this.)
• It hasn't compiled (even on Linux) out of the box in several releases. In 2.0.29, easy to fix but still doesn't work right. (Not compiling is a sure sign it hasn't been maintained.) Not quite as easy on 2.0.32. There's a patch, but it doesn't look right to me.
• It's easy to misconfigure it into running virtual hosts as root. (Bug report)

So, Apache 2.0 may be promising in the future...but when a feature I've been looking forward to for a long time is broken, I'm kind of disappointed.

8.WebDAV support for Digest authentication

That's interesting, because AFAIK MSIE still doesn't support Digest authentication for WebDAV shares (a.k.a. "Web Folders"). (At least, IE5.5 doesn't, and IIRC neither does IE6). It seems to get confused and try to access the site using FrontPage extensions instead, which of course doesn't work because it's running Apache 2.0. That makes it hard to interoperate MSIE with other WebDAV products (like Subversion), at least if you're using Digest auth. I'm glad to see at least someone is actually trying to implement web standards, instead of mixing them together with proprietary stuff. Anyway, just my $0.02.
---
Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!

1) Hypocrisy. Everyone screeches as loudly as possible because the big, closed source vendors like Sun and Microsoft want you to report security problems privately. Well, okay, let's look at Apache. Now, let's look at their policy regarding reporting security issues.

"We strongly encourage folks to report such problems to our private security mailing list first, before disclosing them in a public forum."

Sounds like the same thing as Sun or MS. Why aren't we bashing Apache?

2) The recent SNMP vulnerability. Wow, many eyes have gone over the SNMP code. Check out the CERT list of vendors on this puppy. Those many eyes should have been going over RedHat, over FreeBSD (okay, in their ports), over Netscape's products (too bad they don't tell you which ones). No word on the CERT site about SuSE, Mandrake, et al.

How much you want to bet that it's one old hunk of code to do SNMP that has been ported from one platform to another over many years? Even if it isn't ... wow, don't millions of eyes look at Linux? Some might look ... few look very hard.

And I now proceed to duck and cover for the nuclear blast.

I think what people are losing site of here is the options you are provided with in OpenSource. While on a Windows platform there are relitivly few companies that make server software(ie FTPd, http), while on the OpenSource Platforms there are many more choices.

How many people would run WuFTPD on a production box while there are other options around like Pure-FTPD or ProFTPD?

But for windows for example there are relitivly few closed source HTTP Servers. Namely IIS, while on the open source side there is everything from Apache to Abyss.

So what this brings me to, another point of Open Source Software, because there are many *options* in a production enviroment for the choice in software, the only costs of changing to a product that is more secure is the time to install it. While in closed source to get Microsofts newsest and most secure IIS 6+++ bundeld with Windows ZP 2003, you will have to shell out a few grand. Thats where security matters in the end, how much money does it cost you in a production enviroment. We are a bunch of capitalists at heart you know :-)

I've never used assertions, but they seem a great complement to unit testing. Unit testing allows you to write code to test your functions and easily see if something breaks, the major problem is that they lack an easy way to look inside objects to keep an eye on internal consistency. Assertions can be great to catch those silly little boundary mistakes.

A good unit testing framework for Java is JUnit, they are available for other languages as well.

BTW, you can create your own assertions with Log4J, so even JDK 1.1/1.2/1.3 users can use them:

if(logger.isDebugEnabled())
if (bla>10)
logger.warn("bla>10, bla=" + bla);

This uses almost no CPU-time if debugging is disabled. Log4J is a very good logging package, it surely beats System.out.println, check it out!

OK.. I am a Java fan... (recently this has been changing though.)

I have mixed feelings with JDK 1.4.

The JPDA (debugging) support in 1.4 is vastly improved. You can now redefine classes in a running virtual machine. This is really cool and I have written an Ant 'Redefine task to take advantage of this.

The assert facility is OK.... i don't like the fact that they added an Assert keyword but I don't get to make the decisions.

There is also some controversy.

The JSPA agreement that one has to sign to participate in the JCP is WAY too restrictive for Open Source developers. The Apache Software Foundation has a good document where they drawn the line in the sand on their participation.

The Log4J people are upset because there is now a 'stanard' Java package for logging. IMO the 'standard' package is inferior to Log4J in many situations.

The regexp package is not all it is cracked up to be either. I would recommend Jakarta ORO or Jakarta Regexp.

As far as that... it runs GREAT on Linux. Probably the most SOLID VM I have ever run.

They did break some stuff with legacy code. If you ever named a class 'URI' your code will now fail to compile because they put this class in the java.net package which everyone imports anyway.

As far as C# vs .Java. I am really impressed with the CLR/CLI stuff. Right now, as it stands, Java is a proprietary language. Unless we see SUN Open Source Java (or push it through a standards committee), we *may* see a JDK 1.5... but no one will use it.

Also.. check out my Reptile project. It is Java based, only requires JDK 1.2 and incorporates some really cool Java/XML stuff. :)

You also might want to look into Lucene, it has very powerful full text search and index capabilities.
Lucene

Just one detail: Apache is released under the Apache license, not under the (modified) BSD license. Both are free software licenses, but not the same thing; for example, the modified BSD (not the original one) is compatible with the GPL, while the Apache license is not.

Some of the folks involved with jakarta are less than convinced about sun's attitude towards OS.

Some of the folks involved with jakarta are less than convinced about sun's attitude towards OS.

I'd love to see in-depth books on Web programming using the Jakarta Project products, especially Turbine and Velocity.

They're extremefully cool projects, but severely lacking in documentation.

I'd love to see in-depth books on Web programming using the Jakarta Project products, especially Turbine and Velocity.

They're extremefully cool projects, but severely lacking in documentation.

I'd love to see in-depth books on Web programming using the Jakarta Project products, especially Turbine and Velocity.

They're extremefully cool projects, but severely lacking in documentation.

I would like to see a book on some of the Jakarta projects, specifically: Ant, Velocity, and Turbine.

also a book about JUnit, especially if you can tie it in with Ant, etc, using real examples of setting it all up.

and again, dead tree, please, until that whole 'digital paper' thing pans out.

-rp

I would like to see a book on some of the Jakarta projects, specifically: Ant, Velocity, and Turbine.

also a book about JUnit, especially if you can tie it in with Ant, etc, using real examples of setting it all up.

and again, dead tree, please, until that whole 'digital paper' thing pans out.

-rp

I would like to see a book on some of the Jakarta projects, specifically: Ant, Velocity, and Turbine.

also a book about JUnit, especially if you can tie it in with Ant, etc, using real examples of setting it all up.

and again, dead tree, please, until that whole 'digital paper' thing pans out.

-rp

I would like to see a book on some of the Jakarta projects, specifically: Ant, Velocity, and Turbine.

also a book about JUnit, especially if you can tie it in with Ant, etc, using real examples of setting it all up.

and again, dead tree, please, until that whole 'digital paper' thing pans out.

-rp

I don't know about anyone else, but I would really like to see a 1 or 2 volume set on the various components of the jakarta project and how they fit together, especially in a practical enterprise.

How is this situation any different from free software projects using Sun's Java technologies? Isn't this just two sides of the same coin?

On one side you have Gnome intending to use Mono, a cross-platform language and runtime environment based on open standards,
and on the other you have projects such as Apache's Jakarta using Java, a cross-platform language and runtime envionment based on almost open standards.

I don't recall seeing RMS bitching too heavily about Sun's absolute control of the Java language and runtime.what it was that RMS didn't like about it. I wouldn't be surprised if he's just being reactionary for the sake of it.

How is this situation any different from free software projects using Sun's Java technologies? Isn't this just two sides of the same coin?

On one side you have Gnome intending to use Mono, a cross-platform language and runtime environment based on open standards,
and on the other you have projects such as Apache's Jakarta using Java, a cross-platform language and runtime envionment based on almost open standards.

I don't recall seeing RMS bitching too heavily about Sun's absolute control of the Java language and runtime.what it was that RMS didn't like about it. I wouldn't be surprised if he's just being reactionary for the sake of it.

I am wondering if such a comparison can bring a real relevance for the PHP development community evolution to an improved level. I don't think that small nifty features will make PHP development a better choice for the real web developers, that need productivity and a framework for application development.

During the last 3 years, all the editors have included nice and standard functionalities like: multi project support, code highlighting, autocompletion(even for your own functions), integrated debugger, integrated help, etc.

But when it comes to programming dynamic websites, the tasks to do are pretty repetitive and boring and real programming is usually not needed. Usually you connect to a database, get some fields from a query and put them in a HTML table (repeating the procedure for each row or not). Usually you need to see the HTML output and to write some HTML code (preferable in a WYSIWYG editor).

None of the current IDEs allow you to do this (except for Macromedia UD, which does not support PHP natively, but using our GPL extension PHAkt). Programming web application using one of them is a very complicated solution to the problem. You have to reinvent the wheel a zillion times in creating a lot of "form validation", "user authentication", "repeated regions" etc. code blocks, that are very particular, hard to use by others and unmaintanable.

<paradigm shift>What we need is a powerful framework for developing PHP applications, something like .NET, a platform that will allow us to compete with the ubiquitous .NET and J2EE.</paradigm shift> (I love using this paradigm shift thing:). It has to support SOAP and the rest of the current communication protocols (UDDI, ebXML, etc) and has to provide some "already written and tested code blocks" for reuse.

That's why we are developing and have released Krysalis - as an Open Source project. Krysalis aims to become what Cocoon is for Java. (if you don't know Cocoon, check http://xml.apache.org). A platform for writing web applications with a complete separation between the data, the application logic and the presentation layer. Of course, to do this, the most hyped and elegant way is by using XML and XSLT. The process is very simple, we use a sitemap that describes the possible requests to the server, some pipelines where we describes the succession of data gathering and transformations and then, for each request to the server (the server is Apache with PHP support) we execute the corresponding pipeline. That is, read the PXP file ( an XML that contains the application logic), execute it and retrieve the complete XML tree, then read the XLST files associated with the request and process the original XML tree with them. After all the XSLT processing is done, we print the output to the browser.(the output can be XHML or PDF or anything else if you provide a Serializer that will do the conversion from the last XML tree to the needed format).

This way, might a site became a little harder to write, but maintaining it will be a piece of cake. The current alternation between application logic and HTML tags (presentation) is a real pain in the ass when you need multiple presentations (like HTML / PDF, like English version and German version, etc). Each time you make a modification in the application logic, you have to search all the places where that application logic block is used and correct them, too. Etc.

How can Krysalis help me create my sites faster? Using taglibs. Taglibs are already written code sections that are included and parametrized in your files and which are converted to real PHP code at the execution time. We have already implemented taglibs for the SQL connection, form variables, authentication.

Technically, Krysalis is also based on ADODB (php.weblogs.com/ADODB), and the PHP problems with way too many and different database connectivity APIs is solved.

To get back to the current topic, what Krysalis need right now is an IDE. We are working on one (Krysal IDE), an editor that will allow you to develop Dynamic Websites with the same ease as you develop Web Services. To reach both the Windows and Linux community, we'll implement it Java (we know. Maybe it will be slower, but at the current hardware prices I don't think this makes a real difference). The rendering engine will be Mozilla (probably) as in the next 3 month it will be mature enough (we think). More, the Lite version will be also open source, so everyone will be able to use and improve it.

Take a look at a current pre-alpha screenshot of Krysal IDE at http://www.interakt.ro/products/Krysalis/. The XML/XSLT part is not yet implemented, we have done only the dynamic XML generation and preview with a preliminary support for taglibs.

That's what we think on PHP development. I would like to know how the slashdotters view this approach.

Alexandru COSTIN
Product Manager
http://www.interakt.ro/ :: Engineering Your Desires
+401 411 2610

However, you might want to look at Language Negotation. It is very useful when you develop multilingual sites. It is excellently implemented on Debian's site

See also the babel site

Small list of open-source Java projects:

• Jakarta - the Apache Software Foundation's primary Java development site. Most notable are their Tomcat and Ant projects.
• Xerces - a pure-Java XML parser (there's a C++ version too) - also by the Apache Software Foundation.
• jEdit - pure Java text editor. Very powerful and easily extensible with Java plugins.
• Over 4000 projects at SourceForge.
• Freenet - the idea behind the network has gotten a lot of publicity, it's client is written in Java.

There's quite a community based around Java - I would suggest people start looking at those aspects of its cover.

Small list of open-source Java projects:

• Jakarta - the Apache Software Foundation's primary Java development site. Most notable are their Tomcat and Ant projects.
• Xerces - a pure-Java XML parser (there's a C++ version too) - also by the Apache Software Foundation.
• jEdit - pure Java text editor. Very powerful and easily extensible with Java plugins.
• Over 4000 projects at SourceForge.
• Freenet - the idea behind the network has gotten a lot of publicity, it's client is written in Java.

There's quite a community based around Java - I would suggest people start looking at those aspects of its cover.

Small list of open-source Java projects:

• Jakarta - the Apache Software Foundation's primary Java development site. Most notable are their Tomcat and Ant projects.
• Xerces - a pure-Java XML parser (there's a C++ version too) - also by the Apache Software Foundation.
• jEdit - pure Java text editor. Very powerful and easily extensible with Java plugins.
• Over 4000 projects at SourceForge.
• Freenet - the idea behind the network has gotten a lot of publicity, it's client is written in Java.

There's quite a community based around Java - I would suggest people start looking at those aspects of its cover.

Small list of open-source Java projects:

• Jakarta - the Apache Software Foundation's primary Java development site. Most notable are their Tomcat and Ant projects.
• Xerces - a pure-Java XML parser (there's a C++ version too) - also by the Apache Software Foundation.
• jEdit - pure Java text editor. Very powerful and easily extensible with Java plugins.
• Over 4000 projects at SourceForge.
• Freenet - the idea behind the network has gotten a lot of publicity, it's client is written in Java.

There's quite a community based around Java - I would suggest people start looking at those aspects of its cover.

Small list of open-source Java projects:

• Jakarta - the Apache Software Foundation's primary Java development site. Most notable are their Tomcat and Ant projects.
• Xerces - a pure-Java XML parser (there's a C++ version too) - also by the Apache Software Foundation.
• jEdit - pure Java text editor. Very powerful and easily extensible with Java plugins.
• Over 4000 projects at SourceForge.
• Freenet - the idea behind the network has gotten a lot of publicity, it's client is written in Java.

There's quite a community based around Java - I would suggest people start looking at those aspects of its cover.

Once you get into server-side technologies like servlets, Java starts to become a useful language. Thinks like ant are pretty cool - it's nice to be able to write build scripts that work under Linux and Windows.

Tomcat is a very nice platform for writing web applications. At one point, I had a fairly interesting thing running through Cocoon 2.

I can see why the wiz-bang graphical stuff turns people away from Java, but there really is a lot of cool things that can be done with it.

Once you get into server-side technologies like servlets, Java starts to become a useful language. Thinks like ant are pretty cool - it's nice to be able to write build scripts that work under Linux and Windows.

Tomcat is a very nice platform for writing web applications. At one point, I had a fairly interesting thing running through Cocoon 2.

I can see why the wiz-bang graphical stuff turns people away from Java, but there really is a lot of cool things that can be done with it.

Once you get into server-side technologies like servlets, Java starts to become a useful language. Thinks like ant are pretty cool - it's nice to be able to write build scripts that work under Linux and Windows.

Tomcat is a very nice platform for writing web applications. At one point, I had a fairly interesting thing running through Cocoon 2.

I can see why the wiz-bang graphical stuff turns people away from Java, but there really is a lot of cool things that can be done with it.

How many times have I compiled a "stable" and had it not boot?
FreeBSD: 0 Linux: lost count

How many times have I rebooted after new kernel, and corrupted all mounted filesystems?
FreeBSD: 0 Linux: 0, but I laughed like hell when it happend to you.

Even if FreeBSD did cease to exist, and develpoment stopped, I would still use it, because it is that damn good.

Oh, and considering DARPA is putting a bunch of money into furthering FreeBSD development, I don't see it going anywhere soon.

For general programmer-level stuff, a good place to start would be Eric Raymond's Software Release Practice HOWTO. The GNU coding standards and maintainer information provide guidance for practices on the GNU project; although other open source projects will not follow all of these practices, they give you a good idea of how things are generally organized. Sourceforge itself has pretty good documentation. There are various guides to sending patches (the diff manual is also good reading for this). There is a book on autoconf. There are several documents on CVS; an interesting one is the CVS best practices HOWTO. It's fairly new (November 20, 2001) and still pretty sketchy, but perhaps it will evolve into a more complete best practices guide (the author is soliciting input, so this is a chance to contribute).

And, of course, nearly every Open Source software package comes with some sort of manual. (This contrasts with proprietary Windows applications, which seem to expect you to buy some sort of proprietary book on the side, in addition to the proprietary application you have already bought.) E.g., the the GCC manual, the GNU Make manual, the Perl manual, the Python tutorial, and so on. Although these are not always ideal for the beginner they will certainly be a useful reference to keep handy.

I'm wondering, are there alternative implementations of Slash? Of Wiki? Is everything written in Perl (no value judgment here)?

How difficult would it be to port Slash to Java Servlets? Wiki?

The reason I'm asking is not because I'm a Java bigot or anything, but because (1) it seems to be the platform of choice for the Apache Project, and (2) I have a couple of webapps deployed, and I would like to know how difficult would be to integrate Slash/Wiki with them.

Any comments from developers/porters welcome. Thank you!

" Theres a core group in charge of what goes and what stays."
Actually, in Linux it's the same (f.e. Torvalds, Cox, Tosatti).

So, where the BSD team is some 10-20 people who can all get in a room and hash out details and come out with a coherent ports system, or a standard place to put software (apache goes in /var/www? Wtf patrick?), the Linux world is far too big to do that. Hell, we can't even document stuf coherently -- everything has its own man page, readme, manual, plus linux documentation project. Compare to FreeBSD's Handbook.

This is a weakness in the Linux system of cooperation. It's also a strength. Just as no one can take control of the whole thing and fix it, also nobody can break the whole thing. Even if Linux and Cox between them decided to sabotage Linux, they couldn't, whereas one guy with cvs commit privileges on cvsup.freebsd.org could give himself a root shell on every BSD box on the planet. (Okay I exaggerate -- he'd get caught, probably, but that's only because most of the people working on BSD are good guys.)