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 …
Blog
SWF server side compiler with MTASC
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
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”)
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
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
AMFPHP 1.0
Finally AMFPHP 1.0 came out! After about 3 months since the Milestone 3, the AMFPHP team released the definitive version as Christmas Gift for us!
In addiction, some day ago on the AMFPHP website is appeared also an annouce about a new project, CakeAMFPHP (http://cakeforge.org/projects/cakeamfphp/).
These are great news for AMFPHP users! 🙂
http://www.amfphp.org/
CVS or SVN, to be or not to be?
I use CVS from many years and I’ve always appreciate its features.
Team development can’t stay without a source version control.
I currently went accross some pages describing differences between cvs and svn (for example: http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php) and I must admit svn has some cool features which cvs doesn’t have.
I was just curious to know which do you use currently..
http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php
NetConnection Debugger Alternates
Today I’ve started a new Flash project which will also involve Flash Remoting.
So I decided to try this ServiceCapture tools for debugging the amf messages as replacement of the builtin NetConnection debugger.
I’m really suck of the flash NetConnection Debugger (it works 50% of the times for me). Sometimes I need to close and re-open it in order to make it works again, sometimes it doesnt display anything at all…
Btw, ServiceCapture can capture every kind of HTTP traffic, not only remoting calls and it has also a bandwidth simulation feature. (and these are cool features)
However the full license costs $34.99, which is not so cheap for this kind of tool.
http://kevinlangdon.com/serviceCapture/