Year: 2006

PHP5: a big failure ?

Alessandro Crugnola general, php , ,

What’s happening ?
PHP 5 has been presented as a revolution, a lot of new features have been added and a lot of projects have been made. But only a small group of hosters seem interested in supporting PHP 5 on their web servers. It is not so useful to have a beautiful programming language to use if we can’t apply it to production environments.
But what about the causes ? Maybe they are related to the fact that Zend decided to support both PHP 4 and 5 separately, allowing hoster to choose which version to compile on their webservers, or maybe to the fact that PHP 5 is not fully compatible with the older versions, and there are some security-related bugs that increase our doubts.
I’m using a lot PHP 5 in production environments, without any problem. It is quite fast and reliable, and has got a lot of useful features that adapt perfectly to enterprise development. We MUST use PHP 5 to help it growing until it become the standard …
To conclude I’d like to inform the ones who don’t know it, that PHP team is working on the sixth version (yes … PHP 6 … and it is available for download at snaps.php.net) that will add to the language a lot of interesting features, such as native support to Unicode.
I hope there will be only one (working) version of PHP in the future …

SWF server side compiler with MTASC

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript , , ,

I never thought at this before but it was so obvious!! …put the mtasc binary on remote server and let it create swf on the fly!
HOSHI Tetsuya put toghether a server side swf compiler using mtasc (http://hossy.net, Everything is unreadable… just click on ENTER 🙂 ).
He also published the source code (php files): http://hossy.net/sssc.zip
http://hossy.net/

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 to public

Alessandro Crugnola general , ,

Microsoft has just released Internet Explorer 7 beta for the public.
For Firefox and Opera users its new features are very familiar, such as the tabbed browsing, quick tabs (a very handly plugin I use in Firefox and which lets to see thumbinails of all the opened borwser pages), zoom and the quick search box…
For the full feature list please read more on Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/featuretable.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/default.mspx

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer (“Sparkle”)

Alessandro Crugnola general , ,

Is the last Microsoft child aiming to be a Flash concurrent?
Sparkle uses Windows Presentation Foundation, which also introduces Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), which enables developers and designers to use an XML-based model to declaratively specify the desired user interface (UI) behavior.
I’ve just downloaded it and the first impression is that the graphic UI is really ugly… but it’s just my very first impression 🙂
Then I will try to do some deeper tests…
some tutorials and examples can be found also here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/articles/516697.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/interactive_designer/id_free_trial.aspx

Flash 8: security problems

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript

There’s a couple of interesting posts on franto’s blog about the problems which the new release of flash brought… (about local and network access)

http://www.franto.com/blog2/flash8-security-problems
and
http://www.franto.com/blog2/flash8-security-problems-still-no-solution
I suggest also read all the users’ comments, very interesting… and the problem seems to remain unsolved.
http://www.franto.com/blog2/flash8-security-problems