syndic8 is a site dedicated to exactly this sort of thing. it has a rapidly-growing list of newsfeeds, and has aspirations of becoming a focal point for advocacy related to convincing more publishers to produce their own feeds.
i've always been a fan of what i'd call passive code reviews, and its something you see all over the place in open source projects -- diffs of cvs checkins mailed to all developers. i used this when managing/working with small teams of programmers on a few projects now (one a consumer software product, the others web-related), and i found it to be tremendously beneficial and unobtrusive. with a little practice, reading a diff is a very quick process, and the number of stupid little bugs you can pick up is just gravy on the top of getting a great feel for what other people on the project are doing.
that said, i'm sure the formal code review has its place. but who really wants to work that way?
Because then they can add new information (new fields or whatever), which would change the format of the document, without breaking all the apps that rely on their feed.
whatever. xml doesn't make that necessarily any easier or more likely than any other alternative.
and you missed a step -- i asked for the application, then the explanation of why xml made it better.:)
Given the controversy about the Amazon.com patents related to basic web technology, and as a holder of several web-related patents, how do you feel the US patent process has helped foster or hinder development of new web technology?
PHP4 is open source (and "Open Source"). A component of it (Zend) uses the QPL, and the rest is under a BSD-like license (with an extra pointer to the license for Zend to help clear up confusion).
Bruce Perens and/or the OSI aren't doing anything to have the license changed, and haven't for quite some time, to the best of my knowledge.
(PHP3 also had ODBC support. This is not new to PHP4. The big new thing that would have an impact on the original question is the PHP4 introduces an IIS plugin for PHP, which does not exist for PHP3.)
Apparently they're using PHP behind the scenes to drive all of the statistics pages.
Unfortunately, it appears the online store part of the site is done in ASP. Of course, that may explain why it is completely un-integrated into the look and feel of the site. Probably some contract job or off-the-shelf ecommerce system.
Its like a train wreck. Stuck PHP4 on one of my testing servers, virtually none of the existing base of PHP3 code seems to work properly.
Has anyone had much luck with it?
http://www.php.net/ has been running PHP4 for a week or two now, with no problems.
Has anyone done any serious OO coding in PHP3 and had it work cleanly in PHP4? I recognize that a lot of the OO functionality wasn't documented, and should've known it could be changed, but some of this stuff isn't rocket science, and works in most other OO languages.
This is a beta release. There may be simple things broken. In fact, there are probably lots of simple things broken.
PHP is not an OO language. It has OO features. Right now they may not be as well-tested as you'd like, possibly because not many of the regular PHP developers rely on the OO features that heavily, particularly things that are the slightest bit exotic.
Anyway, good in concept, but looks like I'll be sticking to PHP3. I wonder how long development will continue on the PHP3 code base...
As long as there are people willing to maintain it. You certainly won't see it disappear before PHP4 is out of beta.
Actually, it was the standard Apache mis-configuration of having MaxClients set too high, so the machine was swapping itself to death. This has since been rectified.
As someone else pointed out, PHP3 was dual-licensed, under the GPL and "yet another free license" (basically the Apache license plus a "written permission for commercial use" clause).
PHP4 is available only under the PHP License v2, which is essentially the PHP License v1, minus the "written permission" clause, plus a reference to the fact that the Zend code is under a different license.
The Zend code is under the QPL, and is something that PHP4 is dependent on. But it is a different body of code, with different owners.
You probably won't see Ilib support in the main distribution of PHP4 because it is licensed under the GPL. But PHP4 makes it much easier to distribute third-party extensions to PHP, which means we can stop putting everything and kitchen sink in the main distribution.
Silicon Valley, like San Francisco, is northern California.
Southern California may have a nasty reputation as far as highways go, but it's actually quite reasonable as long as you avoid some of the stupid commutes (anything involving the 405), and make an effort to commute a little bit off-peak (sleep in an extra hour, stay a little later, or if you're an early-riser, do the opposite).
And, unlike the Bay Area, you can actually find and afford an apartment in reasonable neighborhoods.
If you're an IT person, just hop on board at an idealab! company, and live in Pasadena. It's every bit as pretentious and annoying as the Bay Area.
You have to wonder who it was from which studio that started this rumor about Blair Witch Project's marketing. (Well, okay, it was obviously Gordon Paddison at New Line Cinema, based on the quote in the second paragraph.)
But it wouldn't be at all surprising if it was sparked by Artisan Entertainment (distributors of Blair Witch Project).
Very few large projects are being "mostly developed for free by mostly unpaid people". In many cases (and a happily increasing number), someone is paying them to work on the projects.
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syndic8 is a site dedicated to exactly this sort of thing. it has a rapidly-growing list of newsfeeds, and has aspirations of becoming a focal point for advocacy related to convincing more publishers to produce their own feeds.
that said, i'm sure the formal code review has its place. but who really wants to work that way?
Because then they can add new information (new fields or whatever), which would change the format of the document, without breaking all the apps that rely on their feed.
whatever. xml doesn't make that necessarily any easier or more likely than any other alternative.
and you missed a step -- i asked for the application, then the explanation of why xml made it better. :)
cool, all sorts of new buzzwords.
i can use an http get request to get stock quote information from yahoo (in a tab-delimited format, if i remember correctly).
i'd love to see an xml-rpc application as useful as that. and then for someone to explain why wrapping it all in xml makes it better.
With web services, the programmer never needs to deal with XML at all.
uh, yeah. no debugging required. xml is my friend. xml makes the world taste better.
wow, twenty-nine implementations. then again, way more people than that have my phone number, and still nobody calls.
what can i do with xml-rpc or soap? why is it so much better than just plain-old http post? just because it has the correct buzzword juju for today?
it just seems like a lot of pissing in the wind (pick your direction) right now.
funny that it should come up again.
glad to see i was right.
jim
Given the controversy about the Amazon.com patents related to basic web technology, and as a holder of several web-related patents, how do you feel the US patent process has helped foster or hinder development of new web technology?
Bruce Perens and/or the OSI aren't doing anything to have the license changed, and haven't for quite some time, to the best of my knowledge.
(PHP3 also had ODBC support. This is not new to PHP4. The big new thing that would have an impact on the original question is the PHP4 introduces an IIS plugin for PHP, which does not exist for PHP3.)
Jim
Unfortunately, it appears the online store part of the site is done in ASP. Of course, that may explain why it is completely un-integrated into the look and feel of the site. Probably some contract job or off-the-shelf ecommerce system.
Has anyone had much luck with it?
http://www.php.net/ has been running PHP4 for a week or two now, with no problems.
Has anyone done any serious OO coding in PHP3 and had it work cleanly in PHP4? I recognize that a lot of the OO functionality wasn't documented, and should've known it could be changed, but some of this stuff isn't rocket science, and works in most other OO languages.
This is a beta release. There may be simple things broken. In fact, there are probably lots of simple things broken.
PHP is not an OO language. It has OO features. Right now they may not be as well-tested as you'd like, possibly because not many of the regular PHP developers rely on the OO features that heavily, particularly things that are the slightest bit exotic.
Anyway, good in concept, but looks like I'll be sticking to PHP3. I wonder how long development will continue on the PHP3 code base...
As long as there are people willing to maintain it. You certainly won't see it disappear before PHP4 is out of beta.
Jim (jimw@php.net)
Jim (jimw@php.net)
PHP4 is available only under the PHP License v2, which is essentially the PHP License v1, minus the "written permission" clause, plus a reference to the fact that the Zend code is under a different license.
The Zend code is under the QPL, and is something that PHP4 is dependent on. But it is a different body of code, with different owners.
Jim (jimw@php.net)
You probably won't see Ilib support in the main distribution of PHP4 because it is licensed under the GPL. But PHP4 makes it much easier to distribute third-party extensions to PHP, which means we can stop putting everything and kitchen sink in the main distribution.
Jim (jimw@php.net)
Southern California may have a nasty reputation as far as highways go, but it's actually quite reasonable as long as you avoid some of the stupid commutes (anything involving the 405), and make an effort to commute a little bit off-peak (sleep in an extra hour, stay a little later, or if you're an early-riser, do the opposite).
And, unlike the Bay Area, you can actually find and afford an apartment in reasonable neighborhoods.
If you're an IT person, just hop on board at an idealab! company, and live in Pasadena. It's every bit as pretentious and annoying as the Bay Area.
But it wouldn't be at all surprising if it was sparked by Artisan Entertainment (distributors of Blair Witch Project).
It's hardly negative PR.
Hollywood people are silly.
Very few large projects are being "mostly developed for free by mostly unpaid people". In many cases (and a happily increasing number), someone is paying them to work on the projects.
What's your point?