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Having been exposed to far too many million-dollar apps that require another 50k in billable support just to get installed and working, I can tell you those "expensive consultants" are doing just fine. They're not selling Linux, they're just charging to fix the app they sold you, that was broken in the first place.

You know what's even more lucrative ? Fixing the flaws yourself, and selling the tool(s) you created in the process. I know a guy who floated himself post-bubble by selling software swiss-army-knives for Oracle and Peoplesoft sysadmins. Hell, some people do just fine selling GUIfied WAMP stacks. User friendly is a 3rd-party industry.

That is still debated, apparently. The FSF believes as you do, while many others, including OSI say otherwise. Personally, I side with OSI's interpretation.

http://www.nusphere.com/products/library/gpl_0401openmag.pdf

I have tried pretty much every PHP-capable IDE/Editor and hands down the best is Nusphere PHPEd (windows only). Zend Studio is very close and Eclipse PDT (the open-source basis of Zend Studio for Eclipse) is getting there, but the intellisense and other features aren't nearly as complete as Zend Studio and PHPEd. I have not tried the official Zend Studio for Eclipse releases since I did not really like PDT.

My impressions come from about 2 years on PHPEd, a few months with PDT and a couple of days with Zend Studio and other products (such as PHPEdit).

Here are some of things that draw me to PHPEd:
- Full intellisense/autocomplete for all PHP code and all of your PHP code from anywhere in your project
- Full parsing of PHPDoc comments
- Multi-line PCRE regex find and replace across files/directories/current project
- SFTP/FTP project mapping like "Sites" in Dreamweaver
- DB console that works with SQLite, MySQL, Postgre, MSSQL, Oracle and others
- Full debugger, local web server, code performance analysis

Zend Studio 5.5 seemed pretty good from my usage (it has a lot of the features PHPEd has), however I disliked a few things:

- It ran on Java which always seems to make apps feel more sluggish
- It requires 1 license per computer, so you can't share your license at home and at work
- It was more expensive that PHPEd

PDT (the basis for the new Zend Studio for Eclipse) was ok, however it had the following issues. Note that these issues will be different if you but Studio for Eclipse since it comes with specific bundled software:

- It took a while to get the interface to a state where I was productive with PHP stuff (be sure to have the right version of the JVM!)
- All of the database interaction was through separate JDBC drivers which were a pain to set up
- The code intellisense/autocompletion did not always work properly and did not fully parse PHPDoc comments

I'm sure this all sounds like an ad for the product, but I just _really_ enjoy using PHPEd.

How complex is a message queue? That sounds like kindergarden technology to me.

Large industrial and financial systems use message queues to control and monitor stuff. These systems form complex networks of messaging. The message queue software must be very scalable and reliable.

Generally, a message queue product is expected to be ACID. For message queues this means exactly one delivery of a message; no dups, no loss, regardless of network or hardware failures. Messages may have multiple destinations. Delivery of particular message may or may not require a guarantee. Messages may be prioritized. All of these properties are defined through configuration, as opposed to coding. Recently the desire to do this across platforms and languages has become a big priority.

An example; Imagine you're WalMart and you want to monitor cash register activity worldwide. At any given moment a percentage of all uplinks from the stores to the corporate network will be down because lots of backhoes are mangling lots of cables. The volume of data is vast and continuous because the sun never sets on WalMart. You can't tolerate lost data due to any one of; upgrades, hardware failures, network failures, administrative blunders, scheduled downtime, etc. Further, you want to minimize the complexity of computing system that must reside at each site. Finally, you need your solution to survive a changing environment; you might turn over your cash register assets every few years, changing vendors in the process.

To deal with this you establish a message queue network. You feed transactions into distributed collection queues as early as practically possible (on-site). These feed into larger, faster queues across the network, whenever it happens to become available. Finally, the data is asynchronously pulled from the destination queues and (generally) recorded into some sort of database.

This same model applies to no end of large scale systems. ATMs, cell networks, any sort of dispatch operation, manufacturing... The software is generalized; you can pass damn near anything across it and it comes out the other side with perfect fidelity regardless of version, platform, transient conditions, etc. The software is efficient; minimum latency, extremely high volumes, etc. without long-hair geeks frobing arcane knobs all day.

Clever people having used message queues to distribute computation. Multiple receivers can pull from a queue as they become available. Receivers can be added and removed dynamically. Simple, reliable, load balanced cluster computing!

It isn't kindergarden stuff. It is rarified; systems complex enough to justify message queues are generally very expensive "core" systems. If a message queue system fucks up it's going to get noticed at the top where some household name CEO type deals with the people who deal with the problem. It is also an old idea; IBM has been selling MQ for most of it's computing history.

For all the PHP developers, the good ole Zend Studio is available on Mac OSX. If only NuSphere's PHPed was.

Hmm, what else keeps me a windows box next to my linux box. Perhaps it's DAOC, management of my Clie. The MS office support in OSX is tempting though!

As of now, NuSphere's website doesn't seem to have any information about the dispute and search for "MySQL" returns

NuSphere MySQL is a fast, reliable relational database management system for developing database-driven Web sites. The integrated distribution of MySQL, Apache, Perl, ..

As of now, NuSphere's website doesn't seem to have any information about the dispute and search for "MySQL" returns

NuSphere MySQL is a fast, reliable relational database management system for developing database-driven Web sites. The integrated distribution of MySQL, Apache, Perl, ..

"I'm a free-software publisher who has dealt with similar license issues, even so far as bringing up concerns about the GPLv2 with Bradley Kunz and in turn, Eben Moglen."

My appologies to Mr. Kuhn. I had met him at the open source convention in San Diego, and spoke with him about the FSF, which he is Vice President of -- the man on the street, if you will. He was extremely helpful and quite expedient in helping me with my GPL'd project and understanding license issues. (Thanks Brad - My bad!)

Anyway - I wish I had read this before I came down so soundly on MysqlAB's side: http://www.nusphere.com/misc_stuff/declarationofbr ucefwebster.pdf

Why does the name Bruce Webster sound so familiar? He must have argued this GPL issue before?

Abe

I use phped 2.96, which is the last version released before Nu-Sphere took it over. It's really a shame, I would love to get the new version but Nu-Sphere is charging $299 for it, which is a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a scripting language ide. The older version is great when it works, but can be extremely frustrating when you try to add a file to your project and the whole thing crashes. Also, there isn't a linux version to my knowledge. All in all though, it's the best choice for windows php development.

From www.mysql.org...

If you are looking for the MySQL AB company, click here. If you came here looking for NuSphere, click here.

No, row level locking isn't coming to a stable release until MySQL 4. Here are some relevant URLs:

Slashdot | MySQL 3.23 Declared Stable -- search for "lock"

10/30/00: NuSphere to Contribute Row-Level Locking to MySQL Database

01/30/01: NuSphere Contributes Significant Code Enhancement to MySQL(TM)

For an example of a real-world application that has suffered from MySQL's deficiencies, take a look at Bugzilla. It seemed great at first, but then it started to bog down badly last fall on a few tens of thousands of bug reports.

Tim

No, row level locking isn't coming to a stable release until MySQL 4. Here are some relevant URLs:

Slashdot | MySQL 3.23 Declared Stable -- search for "lock"

10/30/00: NuSphere to Contribute Row-Level Locking to MySQL Database

01/30/01: NuSphere Contributes Significant Code Enhancement to MySQL(TM)

For an example of a real-world application that has suffered from MySQL's deficiencies, take a look at Bugzilla. It seemed great at first, but then it started to bog down badly last fall on a few tens of thousands of bug reports.

Tim

So Do Nusphere.
I ran tests for a client using both Nusphere & AbriaSQL distributions of php, mysql,apache & perl (nupshere only) on Red hat & win 2k. The Nupshere was easyer to install on both platforms.
Also unless you pay for support, AbriaSQL use elder versions of all the programs. whixh is bad.

NuSphere, a part of Progress Software (Progress RDBMS) announced that they plan to offer commercial support and services for MySQL. Launch of NuSphere to Provide Open Source Services.

What's more interesting to me is seeing a big software comapny like Progress, who has made enterprise class databse systems for years, adopt MySQL as its "Open Source" databse product rather than release its own existing tools as Open Source.

In case you missed it the press release I am refering to is at LinuxToday and talks about Progress software's new company NuSphere.

The company I work for has been a Progress shop for years, it would sure be nice to see MySQL be more compatible with many of our old databases. It would be even better if through this relationship Progress will support other open source endevauors (most notably PHP).

-MS2k