So Steve did a great job by using the Internet to skip standard distribution channels for music... Why this didn't work so well for games? http://www.steampowered.com/
It should help , who knows (I haven't read the patent:)
However, this is a real problem that we have, and we were slashdotted for good not so long ago, when we've made a solid PHP market analysis PHP usage in the Enterprise. It was a (un)pleasant experience, never made it again.
I would literally pay google to say my site is legit, but I suspect spammer would do the same...
And another small note... Initially, we have used an HTTP 403 (Permanently moved) from interakt.ro to interaktonline.com. This caused us a MASSIVE degradation of our position, so right now we just do a transparent redirect from interakt.ro to interaktonline.com, without the Permanently moved headers (and this is how we've reached page 2...)
I always suspected this... When we've started our business, we used the domain www.interakt.ro (we're from Romania). However, because we sell software tools mostly to the USA and Western Europe, we've decided to go to www.interaktonline.com.
Instantly, our ranking went from number one (for "Dreamweaver Php" for example, we were number one there instead of Macromedia itself a long time), to page 10.
Now, we're working hard to promote our site, we have links all over the place, but still our site don't get up again to page 1 (search for "dreamweaver extensions" - we have to pay to get our site in the first position). I even thought that they do this on purpose for us to continue to pay on Google Ads:D
Probably they say it too in the patent, but the best ranking tool is to use the right "title" tag in your pages. It's invaluable how well this scores as compared to the page content.
I am from Romania, a country scheduled for EU integration in 2007. I might see that my bitter-sweet joke wasn't interpreted as it should. We'd like to have a strong EU, but unfortunately the western europeans are scared by the integration problems... on the short term, the Eastern-Europeans will invade their workplaces, and thus unemployment will be higher... however, in the long term, a strong EU will help Europe compete with USA and China. Anyway - Romania will probably be delayed one year... We'll live and see.
Dreamweaver is also a great framework for plugins. While the host application still offers some functionalities, they are related with the actual implementation of the plug-in architecture. You probably don't know - but Dreamweaver is now mostly built from plugins, and those are built with HTML and JavaScript almost exclusively. The HTML editor is not a plugin, but almost everything else is, and the options are unlimited.
Not only this plugin architecture is powerful, but it's also platform independent - you can easily configure it to generate PHP/ASP or JSP code with the same plugin implementation and different platform files. Everything is XML, and a lot of regexps are used to detect code patterns and parameters that are presented in the visual interfaces. This plugin system is so powerful, that it allowed us to build a fully functional Dreamweaver PHP support layer (they only supported ASP and JSP back then), in just several months.
If you've read the Cooper book - The Inmates are Running the Asylum you will understand easily how plugins have appeared in Dreamweaver back in the Drumbeat 2000 times - as a layer between the IDE user (Betsy - an HTML designer) and the hardcore programmer (I forgot his name, but he was a he:). When building dynamic sites, the designer and the programmer always clashed as they have different value systems (the designer dislike programming, the programmer don't care about design). So Dreamweaver was built as a layer between the programmer and the designer - helping the programmer work with the designer by writing plugins for the IDE that the designer will use to create complex things.
That's what a lot of companies are doing now with great success. <shameless plug>We're doing it - http://www.interaktonline.com - with significant results - 10000 licenses sold and 500,000 downloads for the free extensions</shameless plug>, and there are also a lot of other companies doing it (you'll find more on the Macromedia Exchange - a place where people exchange free and commercial plugins)
Dreamweaver also avoids the plugin hell using a powerful packaging technique (they came with their own package format - MXP - that knows how to do "safe changes" to the IDE - like adding menu entries, code completion features, etc). Those changes are applies using the Extension Manger - a nice piece of software that knows how to "undo" IDE changes when uninstalling an extension.
Want to learn something from a working implementation? Learn how Macromedia did it and a lot of interesting lessons will be learnt.
I am also managing a software company (we produce tools for web developers), and there is indeed a need to have a long term-strategy that could lead to a constant cash-flow. We have several tactics in place to help us in this respect:
Release new major versions of our products each 20 months (as we generate code, the previous version is probably "obsolete" by the time we release the new version - so we don't expect problems in this respect). We also add features each time.
Horizontal expansion - enter markets that are related to our core markett - in our case, online training, commercial support, book writing.
Intuit is probable facing the same problems (at a bigger scale - they're public company and they have responsibilities for their stockholders). It seems that they have offered the online service for free, planning to get the cashflow from software sales only. Now, as the sales have decreased, they have to find a way to make people upgrade to their latest version, and I personally can't blame them.
You also have to take into account that they are probably still battling Microsoft... I am from Romania, so I'm not very familiar with the limited MS Money success. Is Money still an alternative?
Open Office, Mozilla, Java based applications, Apache with PHP, and other applications written by a bunch of programmers without a management control:)
It's a pity the MySQL guys are trying to reinvent Oracle.
Java in the database is so 98, that makes me wonder why all companies are trying to conquer the world with the same approach..
PHP would make just a more natural choice for stored procedures, and the approach in MySQL should be to allow stored procedures, triggers and referential integrity (this should be native like in PostgreSQL).
It's weak typed and has a pretty standard MySQL api. However, a metalanguage over PHP to minimize the API and to make it transparent would be nice.
I was just wondering, what kind of metrics do they use when comparing source codes... I mean, identical lines are pretty uncommon, but there might be other "similar" code lines in the 120 MB unarchived source code of the linux kernel/SCO kernel.
On the other hand, it's pretty hard to define a Hamilton metric that should be "unpartial" in this case. I think that it might easily reveal that "i++;" is stolen from SCO...
That's why I originally have explained why to go from PHP to Zope. I did not compared Zope to Krisalis as today I first time heard about it (but I promise to read more about it some day).
Please do so:). PHP is a scripting language, and Krysalis is a platform that comes over standard PHP and that allows you to do things a little bit more clever, but by finally translating everything to pure PHP.
If I would go with pure XSL solution that it will be Cocoon - many developers know it so it would be no problem to make a team. Cocoon has a very stable support from one of open source leaders: Apache. And Cocoon has the best XSL-oriented design for being used in content-processin applications.
We have inspired a lot from Cocoon2 (sitemap, generators, transformers, Serailizers, pipelines, etc), but we have slightly changed the taglibs to better suite our needs. We have also added a lot of innovations in the platform to make it easier to use and develop with.
However, I don't think that "pure XSL" solution is the way to go. XSL doesn't cover everything. It's good for dynamic content processing, while typically I need a content management. How kristalis solves that problem
XSL is used in Krysalis only for adding the presentation layer over the application data. The idea is to use a language (taglibs+PHP (taglibs are just a way of defining and sending parameters to specific code blocks) to dynamically generate an XML tree, then use XSL to manipulate the tree to a specific output. As for content management, we have Komplete Lite that uses the whole platform in the most clever approach we've been able to find.
The most important part missed in XSL is that functionality (as it's applied to a content) should be managed as a part of the content in a same dynamic way.How is this issue addressed in Kristalis?
We haven't thought Krysalis as an XSL only platform, I mean we still offer as main feature the possibility of including application logic to the Krysalis XML generator, either using taglibs (like psql:execute-query) or by using direct PHP code to embed the application logic. So the first layer of a Krysalis request is the application logic layer, that will generate a dynamic XML tree, and then XSL will be used as a generic template language to add the presentation layer.
XSL is not designed as a general programming languages. But all attempts to extend it with non-scripting languages will almost always fail. You need a flexibility of a scripting language to embed it to tags on the fly. why the choice is coming to Python in Zope. Can you compare it in details to Kristalis
Yes - as we include support for PHP code inside the original XML generator, we don't rely on XSL for generating the dynamic content.
I think you should take a look at Krysalis, it's a pretty mature platform and you will surely find a lot of interesting features inside.
You might be right, but actually in some countries (Romania for example, or even France), USD 17000 might be a decent salary.
We haven't invented those numbers, we've just processed the survey responses. And this is the PHP Indistry average.
Potentially that's a massive market to anyone selling PHP related tools (and their aren't many). Of course that's based on the questionee's estimate.
Actually it seems that the PHP developers are spending around USD 500 for tools, that means that the market for PHP development tools is actually 38 millions USD, and this is a much reasonable estimate.
The 5.6 billion dollars market is our initial figure, supported by the people that filles our survey
See what I mean... Couldn't think of one company to offer support? That's the problem.
There are some companies that offer support - check this for some companies that do PHP support for a living, and they have very large accounts as their clients, as seen here
Language: sure Python is better choice for a readable code and OOP. In my personal opinion, Python is the best among imperative languages. I love using FP style in Python, getting the smaller code doing more and still very expressively
You will find our Krysalis taglibs extremely interesting for code reuse - as they allow you to define an XML dictionary that is compiled into code later on.
Templates: Even DTML in Zope beats PHP. As for ZPT - after learning it you cannot go back to PHP. Never.
I am not familiar with your template markups, but actually why invest new markup languages when you could use the template language of all platforms - XSL - Krysalis uses XSL and we are very satisfied that people from other platforms can use Krysalis without having to learn new template languages..
Namespaces: ZPT has a very excelent design and implementation of namespaces. All accordingly to W3C standards and traditions.
We support XML namespaces in our taglibs in Krysalis
Content management: in PHP you still have to write it (or find it, or buy it). With Zope you have already got it, working, convinient, secure and well designed. CMF with Plone improve it even more bringing in workflow management and collaboration.
Anyway, the most interesting part is that we have an already open CMS built upon Krysalis - the Komplete Lite CMS. Komplete Lite was designed for Krysalis and I can also say that Krysalis advanced because of Komplete requirements.
We have tried to make Komplete a very adaptive CMS, that allows us to use most of the nice Krysalis features - I think all of them:
- it uses taglibs everywhere for code reuse
- it's pages are designed as aggregated pipelines with cache support for performance and for site section independence
- it is based completely on the separation of application logic from the presentation layer - so changing the presentation layer can be made with a simple click
- it already includes a very powerful structure manager
- has various page types (to be rendered in the central site section) and can easily include new page types
- it can import RSS streams from other sites
- has support for various types of nuggets (not as many as nuke, but we are welcoming contributions)
- includes a visual HTML editor (KTML lite)
- and many other features.
What problems have people had in trying to migrate their applications to php, and how did you overcome them? How would you sell php to your boss? Bearing in mind most of our applications aren't simple database-driven (and I used that word hesitantly!) ones like Slashdot - hint: banking and insurance sector.
First of all, you should understand that not all application types are suitable for migration to PHP. In order to migrate to a new technology, you should first have some real benefits brought by the new technology... Unfortunately, technology "geekity" is the main reason for software refactory or platform change, and this is one of the main factors of having not realiable software:)
Thinking from our experience, only a subset of the software applications that currently exist can benefit of PHP: CMS and Company management.
CMS - because it is about storing the content in the database and serving it fast in a dynamic site - php.net is a good example
Company management - (CRM/ERP/reporting/helpdesk) - because it's all about listing records from the database and edit them - that is lists and forms, where employees could edit business information stored in the database (take a look at this and login with admin/admin to see a complex CRM application)
Of course other application types can be developed, and many large companies use PHP for interal websites managed by the HR department to communicate with the employees - but we can merge this in the CMS section.
Knowing that PHP is a platform built for stateless existence (HTML requests that instantiate the PHP page that will connect to the database and retrieve information, then merge the information with the layout and then sending it to the client, then exit), it is clear that thinking at n-tiered transactions platforms in PHP are not at all feasable - that is bank and financial systems. As neither in PHP5 we will not have support for persistent objects (because Apache1 is not multithreaded and the processes can share a common memory), we can safely assume that PHP will probably never enter this "persistent objects architecture" area. PHP is not Java and should not be considered a Java replacement - just a competitor on some areas where Java usage is cumbersome (just remember the Servlets where out.write("<html>"); was used everywhere).
Some of your arguments stand up, but I'll do my best to explain what we think of PHP in the enterprise.
This is about WEBSITES for Intranets. This isn't in the enterprise, this is the information site the HR department thinks everyone should have. And while I do applaud the rules above, i.e. sell solutions not technology, I question the idea that this is PHP in the enterprise.
In our current view, Intranets does not mean only website for the HR department - as we have created a lot of ERP and CRM systems with PHP, and we know that they are very feasable. You can take a quick look at the Impala ERP - here or at this CRM demonstration here (login with admin/admin) and you will see that complex stock management applications can be created with PHP (and they also feature powerful PDF reports).
PHP in the enterprise would be PHP being used within a business critical function. Say something like your stock management system, or procurement system, CRM etc.
As you've mentioned above, it is... Many companies use web based application to manage their internal operations or even stocks (we are one of the examples of a company that has all software based on PHP - but we are not the regular company):)
Now to all the people who are about to write pithy replies, please realise that 95%+ of systems out there are NOT websites, and that the ability to render pages easily is last on the list of reasons to use a technology.
PHP is not design to write websites, but also can be used effectively to create web based applications.
This is "PHP in the low end of the website market" NOT PHP in the enterprise.
I want to think that our survey will start of trend of making companies realize that PHP can be safely used in the Enterprise - replacing other scripting language. I mean that some of the current applications does not fit at all the PHP approach (like banking and transactions - because PHP communicates with the client using HTML: a stateless protocol, and because PHP objects can't be instantiated and don't have a life of their own). But for other kind of applications - lists and forms with records, PHP can be safely used.
It seems that you are pretty angry at the XML/XSL approach - and I must admit that the initial learning curse is very steep - we had the same problems when we've met Cocoon2 2 years ago and didn't have a clue on how to handle it.
However (we have advanced a lot in the meanwhile and even created our own XML/XSL publishing engine particularized to PHP), we have reached a point where the architectural beauty of the platform really pays off.
Check our documentation for Krysalis, take a look at our IDE and you will see that this could be pretty simple to work in this XML/XSL approach - Krysalis home
Slashdot Mirror
There is a free JavaScript IDE with Intellisense - JS Eclipse http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/Eclipse/JSE clipse/Overview/
So Steve did a great job by using the Internet to skip standard distribution channels for music ... Why this didn't work so well for games? http://www.steampowered.com/
Alexandru
Oups - 301, indeed :)
Alexandru
It should help , who knows (I haven't read the patent :)
However, this is a real problem that we have, and we were slashdotted for good not so long ago, when we've made a solid PHP market analysis PHP usage in the Enterprise. It was a (un)pleasant experience, never made it again.
I would literally pay google to say my site is legit, but I suspect spammer would do the same...
And another small note... Initially, we have used an HTTP 403 (Permanently moved) from interakt.ro to interaktonline.com. This caused us a MASSIVE degradation of our position, so right now we just do a transparent redirect from interakt.ro to interaktonline.com, without the Permanently moved headers (and this is how we've reached page 2...)
Alexandru
I always suspected this... When we've started our business, we used the domain www.interakt.ro (we're from Romania). However, because we sell software tools mostly to the USA and Western Europe, we've decided to go to www.interaktonline.com.
:D
Instantly, our ranking went from number one (for "Dreamweaver Php" for example, we were number one there instead of Macromedia itself a long time), to page 10.
Now, we're working hard to promote our site, we have links all over the place, but still our site don't get up again to page 1 (search for "dreamweaver extensions" - we have to pay to get our site in the first position). I even thought that they do this on purpose for us to continue to pay on Google Ads
Probably they say it too in the patent, but the best ranking tool is to use the right "title" tag in your pages. It's invaluable how well this scores as compared to the page content.
Alexandru
I am from Romania, a country scheduled for EU integration in 2007. I might see that my bitter-sweet joke wasn't interpreted as it should. We'd like to have a strong EU, but unfortunately the western europeans are scared by the integration problems ... on the short term, the Eastern-Europeans will invade their workplaces, and thus unemployment will be higher ... however, in the long term, a strong EU will help Europe compete with USA and China. Anyway - Romania will probably be delayed one year... We'll live and see.
It seems that EU is going away :) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4601439.st m
Alexandru
And imagine how cool we'll do drive defragmentation in the near future. It will be like piling bites ontop each other ..
Alexandru
Dreamweaver is also a great framework for plugins. While the host application still offers some functionalities, they are related with the actual implementation of the plug-in architecture. You probably don't know - but Dreamweaver is now mostly built from plugins, and those are built with HTML and JavaScript almost exclusively. The HTML editor is not a plugin, but almost everything else is, and the options are unlimited.
:). When building dynamic sites, the designer and the programmer always clashed as they have different value systems (the designer dislike programming, the programmer don't care about design). So Dreamweaver was built as a layer between the programmer and the designer - helping the programmer work with the designer by writing plugins for the IDE that the designer will use to create complex things.
Not only this plugin architecture is powerful, but it's also platform independent - you can easily configure it to generate PHP/ASP or JSP code with the same plugin implementation and different platform files. Everything is XML, and a lot of regexps are used to detect code patterns and parameters that are presented in the visual interfaces. This plugin system is so powerful, that it allowed us to build a fully functional Dreamweaver PHP support layer (they only supported ASP and JSP back then), in just several months.
If you've read the Cooper book - The Inmates are Running the Asylum you will understand easily how plugins have appeared in Dreamweaver back in the Drumbeat 2000 times - as a layer between the IDE user (Betsy - an HTML designer) and the hardcore programmer (I forgot his name, but he was a he
That's what a lot of companies are doing now with great success. <shameless plug>We're doing it - http://www.interaktonline.com - with significant results - 10000 licenses sold and 500,000 downloads for the free extensions</shameless plug>, and there are also a lot of other companies doing it (you'll find more on the Macromedia Exchange - a place where people exchange free and commercial plugins)
Dreamweaver also avoids the plugin hell using a powerful packaging technique (they came with their own package format - MXP - that knows how to do "safe changes" to the IDE - like adding menu entries, code completion features, etc). Those changes are applies using the Extension Manger - a nice piece of software that knows how to "undo" IDE changes when uninstalling an extension.
Want to learn something from a working implementation? Learn how Macromedia did it and a lot of interesting lessons will be learnt.
Alexandru
Intuit is probable facing the same problems (at a bigger scale - they're public company and they have responsibilities for their stockholders). It seems that they have offered the online service for free, planning to get the cashflow from software sales only. Now, as the sales have decreased, they have to find a way to make people upgrade to their latest version, and I personally can't blame them.
You also have to take into account that they are probably still battling Microsoft... I am from Romania, so I'm not very familiar with the limited MS Money success. Is Money still an alternative?
Alexandru
John Lim has also his doubts on PHP 5 :) "revolutionary"
php.weblogs.com
Yet, I am glad PHP is maturing to a more stable platform.
Alexandru
Open Office, Mozilla, Java based applications, Apache with PHP, and other applications written by a bunch of programmers without a management control :)
It's a pity the MySQL guys are trying to reinvent Oracle.
Java in the database is so 98, that makes me wonder why all companies are trying to conquer the world with the same approach..
PHP would make just a more natural choice for stored procedures, and the approach in MySQL should be to allow stored procedures, triggers and referential integrity (this should be native like in PostgreSQL).
It's weak typed and has a pretty standard MySQL api. However, a metalanguage over PHP to minimize the API and to make it transparent would be nice.
Alexandru
I was just wondering, what kind of metrics do they use when comparing source codes... I mean, identical lines are pretty uncommon, but there might be other "similar" code lines in the 120 MB unarchived source code of the linux kernel/SCO kernel.
On the other hand, it's pretty hard to define a Hamilton metric that should be "unpartial" in this case. I think that it might easily reveal that "i++;" is stolen from SCO...
Alexandru
As for content management, we have Komplete Lite that uses the whole platform in the most clever approach we've been able to find. We haven't thought Krysalis as an XSL only platform, I mean we still offer as main feature the possibility of including application logic to the Krysalis XML generator, either using taglibs (like psql:execute-query) or by using direct PHP code to embed the application logic. So the first layer of a Krysalis request is the application logic layer, that will generate a dynamic XML tree, and then XSL will be used as a generic template language to add the presentation layer. Yes - as we include support for PHP code inside the original XML generator, we don't rely on XSL for generating the dynamic content.
I think you should take a look at Krysalis, it's a pretty mature platform and you will surely find a lot of interesting features inside.
Alexandru
We haven't invented those numbers, we've just processed the survey responses. And this is the PHP Indistry average.
Alexandru
The 5.6 billion dollars market is our initial figure, supported by the people that filles our survey
Alexandru
There are some companies that offer support - check this for some companies that do PHP support for a living, and they have very large accounts as their clients, as seen here
Alexandru
Congratulations!
:)
.php applications as .jsp just to win the attention of large companies and sell our solutions :)
You've done a nice work - and belive me (we hire PHP programmers) this is the type of employees we are looking for
Anyway, we might consider your idea of presenting
Alexandru
- it uses taglibs everywhere for code reuse
- it's pages are designed as aggregated pipelines with cache support for performance and for site section independence
- it is based completely on the separation of application logic from the presentation layer - so changing the presentation layer can be made with a simple click
- it already includes a very powerful structure manager
- has various page types (to be rendered in the central site section) and can easily include new page types
- it can import RSS streams from other sites
- has support for various types of nuggets (not as many as nuke, but we are welcoming contributions)
- includes a visual HTML editor (KTML lite)
- and many other features.
Komplete can be found here
Alexandru
First of all, you should understand that not all application types are suitable for migration to PHP. In order to migrate to a new technology, you should first have some real benefits brought by the new technology... Unfortunately, technology "geekity" is the main reason for software refactory or platform change, and this is one of the main factors of having not realiable software
Thinking from our experience, only a subset of the software applications that currently exist can benefit of PHP: CMS and Company management.
- CMS - because it is about storing the content in the database and serving it fast in a dynamic site - php.net is a good example
- Company management - (CRM/ERP/reporting/helpdesk) - because it's all about listing records from the database and edit them - that is lists and forms, where employees could edit business information stored in the database (take a look at this and login with admin/admin to see a complex CRM application)
Of course other application types can be developed, and many large companies use PHP for interal websites managed by the HR department to communicate with the employees - but we can merge this in the CMS section.Knowing that PHP is a platform built for stateless existence (HTML requests that instantiate the PHP page that will connect to the database and retrieve information, then merge the information with the layout and then sending it to the client, then exit), it is clear that thinking at n-tiered transactions platforms in PHP are not at all feasable - that is bank and financial systems. As neither in PHP5 we will not have support for persistent objects (because Apache1 is not multithreaded and the processes can share a common memory), we can safely assume that PHP will probably never enter this "persistent objects architecture" area. PHP is not Java and should not be considered a Java replacement - just a competitor on some areas where Java usage is cumbersome (just remember the Servlets where out.write("<html>"); was used everywhere).
Alexandru
Hello,
:)
Some of your arguments stand up, but I'll do my best to explain what we think of PHP in the enterprise.
This is about WEBSITES for Intranets. This isn't in the enterprise, this is the information site the HR department thinks everyone should have. And while I do applaud the rules above, i.e. sell solutions not technology, I question the idea that this is PHP in the enterprise.
In our current view, Intranets does not mean only website for the HR department - as we have created a lot of ERP and CRM systems with PHP, and we know that they are very feasable. You can take a quick look at the Impala ERP - here or at this CRM demonstration here (login with admin/admin) and you will see that complex stock management applications can be created with PHP (and they also feature powerful PDF reports).
PHP in the enterprise would be PHP being used within a business critical function. Say something like your stock management system, or procurement system, CRM etc.
As you've mentioned above, it is... Many companies use web based application to manage their internal operations or even stocks (we are one of the examples of a company that has all software based on PHP - but we are not the regular company)
Now to all the people who are about to write pithy replies, please realise that 95%+ of systems out there are NOT websites, and that the ability to render pages easily is last on the list of reasons to use a technology.
PHP is not design to write websites, but also can be used effectively to create web based applications.
This is "PHP in the low end of the website market" NOT PHP in the enterprise.
I want to think that our survey will start of trend of making companies realize that PHP can be safely used in the Enterprise - replacing other scripting language. I mean that some of the current applications does not fit at all the PHP approach (like banking and transactions - because PHP communicates with the client using HTML: a stateless protocol, and because PHP objects can't be instantiated and don't have a life of their own). But for other kind of applications - lists and forms with records, PHP can be safely used.
Alexandru
It seems that you are pretty angry at the XML/XSL approach - and I must admit that the initial learning curse is very steep - we had the same problems when we've met Cocoon2 2 years ago and didn't have a clue on how to handle it.
However (we have advanced a lot in the meanwhile and even created our own XML/XSL publishing engine particularized to PHP), we have reached a point where the architectural beauty of the platform really pays off.
Check our documentation for Krysalis, take a look at our IDE and you will see that this could be pretty simple to work in this XML/XSL approach - Krysalis home
Alexandru