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Blogs ยป Archive for October 17th, 2005
Zend and IBM to co-develop new PHP IDE and framework
Word on the street is that Zend and IBM are cooking up a big open source initiative called the PHP Collaboration Project. The project will be based on PHP and Eclipse, and will aim to compete with Microsoft’s .NET platform in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), whose needs aren’t great enough to warrant adopting the Java platform for Web development.
I’m sure that the timing of these rumours, with the Zend/PHP Conference 2005 just getting underway in San Francisco, is more than coincidental. An official announcement is doubtless just around the corner.
From what I can tell, we’re looking at two related projects, here:
- a new PHP IDE built on Eclipse, the most popular development environment for Java developers
- a new framework that standardizes the architecture of enterprise-class PHP Web applications
Presumably, the IDE will be built with the framework in mind, providing specialized tools to work within that prescribed architecture (in much the same way as Visual Studio does for Microsoft’s .NET).
Is this the shot in the arm that PHP needs to further penetrate the enterprise space? Or is PHP simply “me too”-ing Java when it should really be capitalizing on its own strengths with a unique direction?
All I know is …
Flex 2 and Flash Player 8.5 alphas available
Macromedia’s recently-announced Flex 2.0 platform (see Flex 2.0 announced with more affordable pricing) is now available to download in alpha form from Macromedia’s newly-launched Macromedia Labs site.
Macromedia Labs in itself is an exciting change of direction for Macromedia, which plans to use the site to expose developers to experimental technologies, works-in-progress, and other early ideas coming from the software company. With full community features like open discussion forums and a wiki, it will be interesting to see how this openness flies with Macromedia’s nearly-complete merger with Adobe, another traditionally closed software company.
Why free consultations don’t work
Lots of professionals offer their clients a free consultation or free trial.
These usually don’t work as an initial offer. Why? Because people are skeptical. They don’t know you in the first place, and so:
1. Think you are going to make a sales pitch (and you are).
2. Don’t want you inside their business, because they don’t know or trust you. The downside risk of letting someone into their private and personal concerns is too high.
It is much better to demonstrate your value with something that presents less risk to them, and is less intimate - like a free report that addresses one of their more pressing problems (and that you solve).
As a somewhat related aside, I was walking to Raymond James Stadium yesterday to see the Tampa Bay Bucs play the Dolphins. The Fresca company was offering free soda samples to fans. Now, the day was hot, and it was way before the game, and so you’d think everyone would take a free can of soda. Not true. I counted that maybe 25-33% of people took the free soda. The rest walked by — too busy to respond, skeptical about such a kind offer, or just not interested.
Anyways, the Fresca people …
Introducing Yahoo Publisher Network
This isn’t exactly breaking news anymore. I decided a while ago that one of my first posts on this blog would be about Yahoo’s new publisher network. Unfortunately it took longer than I expected to get this blog up and going. I’m sure that by now many of you are already familiar with YPN, but I thought I’d go ahead with this anyway as its hard to find a bigger web publishing news story than Yahoo getting into the Ad Network game.
Yahoo Publisher Network, found here is actually still in beta, but don’t let that stop you from signing up. If you’re familiar with Google Adsense then you pretty much know what to expect with YPN. Like Google, YPN analyzes your content and then serves appropriate ads based on your content, or that’s the plan anyways. In actuality I’ve found that YPN’s targeting is abysmal. The ads served when I ran my tests were barely related to my content at all, and some were completely unrelated scummy sounding MLM ads (think pyramid schemes).
The upside to all of this is that Yahoo’s per click payout rates are far superior to …
Preview: JBuilder 2006 vs. IntelliJ IDEA 5.0
All of the Java IDE announcements I reported on a few months back have come to fruition, with recent releases of Eclipse 3.1, NetBeans 5.0 Beta, IntelliJ IDEA 5.0 and Borland JBuilder 2006.
As a longtime user of JBuilder, I’ve always been in something of a niche. At last count, only 8 per cent of Java developers were using JBuilder, with the most popular choices being the free Eclipse (76%) and NetBeans (21%), with IDEA as the most popular commercial option at 13%. With this wave of new releases, I figured it was about time to reevaluate my own choice.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve jumped back and forth between IDEA 5.0 and JBuilder 2006, working on various projects including complex Web applications, heavy-lifting desktop apps, nimble applets and lightweight mobile games.
JBuilder has always been my choice due to its feature-richness. In my experience, if JBuilder didn’t have it, it wasn’t worth having. The tradeoff was always usability–JBuilder was never a particularly attractive environment to work in, and a bad configuration choice (a slow CVS server, for example) could immediately bring it to its knees. A venerable product indeed, it …
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