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http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/38-The-no-framework-PHP-MVC-framework.html

I never thought I'd be a beneficiary from the OLPC project. I'd never be able to use an OLPC for anything I do. But I love how the project has put a bent in the technical landscape of portable devices industry. It was a failure as an education project perhaps, but it succeeded in more than one way as a laptop research project.

When OLPC came out in 2007, the laptops were on a lap-melting, back-breaking rush towards bigger & faster. Nearly everything came in with a Core2 or a Core2 Duo, with lots of RAM (yeah, guess what you can't save power on, RAM needs a strobe whether it has data or not). The fact that OLPC came out in 2007, sort of forced the geeks to look at weight as a valid concern for a consumer device. Not to mention questions about why a 1995 top-end laptop ran for 4 hours on batteries, when a 2005 one won't do the same at the same weight.

Less than a year after OLPC came the rush of netbooks. Finally machines that people can afford to buy (like here in India) and carry around without being tied to a wall plug. Scroll paste a few years, it is not only consumers, using them. I see Rasmus post PHP benchmarks off his netbook, I see entire teams (like Inkscape) suddenly sit up and re-work their UI workflows/dialog-space for it. I see the Notion Ink use OLPC Pixel Qi tech in the new tablet.

Socially speaking, the project has been a great failure. But technologically, it has left a huge impact on portable devices everywhere. As for the former, the project probably forgot that "Charity begins at Home". Refusing to sell full-price to americans wanting them shows a complete lack of understanding of how economies of scale & price segmentation would've worked out. I'm not going to mourn the failure of Negroponte, but I'll just give the technical folks at OLPC a big thumbs-up.

I'll happily pay 200$ for an arm netbook'ish if they'll sell me one in India. Hell, I'll even fix all the things that don't work for me - for FREE. Not all of us are poor & in need of a hand-out. Heck, I'm at the verge of putting in a pre-order for a Notion Ink Adam, for double the price, if the hype pans out.

I have yet to see even -one- that adjusts the address bar so that I can link to a specific photo

Implementation of user-friendly URLs is not standardized much at all among web applications/servers. Building a reliable routing framework requires extensive knowledge of multiple disparate platform implementations. A small photo viewer application is not meant to provide a web platform implementation, but rather a framework for inclusion into your companies generally bigger and pre-existing platform. Simply building applications with rudimentary/standardized technology means some developers opt of the game entirely with the no-framework framework, relying primarily on automation and a thorough understanding of systems design to create elegant solutions for common application tasks. The game being played is sell your shit at any price, which in the industry sometimes translates to 1) intrusive DRM, 2) vendor lock-in, 3) traffic shaping, etc..

They do actually. It has more to do with the devil that works than the devil that doesn't ...

At least, here's what one of my f/oss gurus who uses Apple had to say.

1. lack of decent module namespacing. Everything lives in the same global scope, which means any public module needs to "hack" this in with naming conventions, such as pg_{connect|query|execute} instead of language-supported alternatives such as pg.connect or pg::connect
2. interpreter weaknesses. Only recently has it been possible to chain method calls such as $a->getFoo()->doBar(), and it's still not possible to do something like $a->results()[0]. The result is (IMO) unnecessary temporary variables, which end up being the bane of literate programming. Plus, now that I've been spoiled by Python and Lua's abilities to pass in named parameters to functions, it's frustrating to not have that anymore (e.g. x = Window(x=100, y=100, width=200, height=200), which is much easier to understand sans reference than $x = Window(100, 100, 200, 200))
3. frustratingly bad precedence rules for short-circuit operators. Consider this:

   $a = true;
   $b = false;
   $x = $a and $b; // parses as ($x = $a) and $b, so $x = true
   $y = $a && $b; // parses as $x = ($a && $b), so $y = false
   

   This is an AWFUL gotcha. I can't think of any benefit to justify the behavior. Backwards compatibility should be deliberately broken to fix this.
4. the typical arguments about poor function standardization. I won't elaborate on them.
5. Poor coordination between PHP core and PEAR/PECL repositories. I've seen a lot of buck-passing between the two camps. PEAR is treated both as a core part of successful project libraries and as a completely independent repository, depending on whichever is more convenient at the time.
6. Poor version-numbering schemes. Major behavior changes occur during minor revisions, and changelogs don't always do a good job of explaining the impact of certain revisions.
7. Poor default error-handling. I can override the default error handler myself, but there are certain failures that can't be overridden (a command-line switch to say "treat all errors as exceptions" would be nice).
8. Community encouragement of subpar programming practices. PHP/*SQL tutorials are still being written that show gaping injection vulnerabilities. Everyone writing a web framework seems obsessed with the Front Controller design pattern, without realizing that Apache/Lighttpd is the Front Controller [note: Rasmus Lerdorf is awesome in this regard]. Some people even try to relive other languages within PHP, emulating Java's XML-everything-configuration whilst completely forgetting how that works in Java, when the configuration is loaded once for the lifetime of the server, instead of every page load.

It's funny how Google releases a new version of a toolbar and Slashdot covers it immediately; but Yahoo releases a new API with lots of good stuff and nary a peep at Slashdot Central...

The new API looks awesome. Rasmus has a demo page which shows how you can mash data from different sources onto a very slick map.

Forget about the pranks; it's the new Maps APIs that deserve attention. Not only can you create JavaScript/Ajax maps like with the Google API, but you can also embed Flash maps in your pages or even your own Flash applications. And there's a free geocoder.

Rasmus Lerdorf has a handy tutorial on using this stuff with PHP.

Actually I just got my NEW Linksys 802.11g PCMCIA Card working with linux using linuxant.com's Driver Loader.

No I do not work for the company or know anybody who does. I found mention of this while googling for Linux Wireless drivers... running across
Rasmus Lerdorf's site with screenshots and a brief explaination of what he did to configure it.

I was amazed at how easy it was to configure [unzip, run, configure through a web interface.]

$20 gets you an permanent license to use their software -- otherwise you get a month of use for free to make sure the card works.

It's a pretty neat idea -- they use the WindowsXP drivers through a compatibility layer.

So for me, using Debian unstable[sid], I'm finally able to run wireless linux on my Thinkpad :)

Never see PHP stories again:

1. Login to Slashdot
2. preferences link
3. Homepage tab
4. "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" section
5. Topics subsection
6. Scroll down and check PHP
7. Scroll to bottom and click save button
8. Stop complaining about PHP book reviews (some of us find them helpful)

An interesting side note: the MySQL people "stole" (Rasmus Lerdorf's words, not mine) php.net's webmaster. For a long time now, I've gotten very used to typing things like php.net/mysql_pconnect in the location bar of my browser and getting redirected to the right page in the online docs. MySQL's new webmaster brought that feature with him, so you can do things like mysql.com/select and get answers fast. (If you want to do this on your site, it's actually fairly simple. Check out lerdorf.com/tips.pdf. Look midway through for a slide on the $PATH_INFO environment variable.)

The web sites obviate both books for all but beginners, IMO.

-B

If this book interests you, of course, you can "Be cool like Carl", son of Rasmus, shown absorbing PHP knowledge through osmosis. $fp = fopen("/dev/diaper", "w"); sleep(7200);