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Blogs » Archive for October, 2005
PHP Collaboration Project official Q&A
Just a brief update on the PHP Collaboration Project (PCP for short… hmm…), the rumours of which I speculated on yesterday. It seems an official announcement was indeed made at the Zend/PHP Conference, because Zend has posted an official Q&A about the project on its site.
Details are still scarce, mainly because there are no details to share. Really this is just Zend inviting developers to a party it has yet to plan.
Thankfully, the intent expressed in the Q&A seems to be in line with the direction I would like to see PHP head in. Whether Zend can turn this ambitious, hand-wavy concept into working code before the next ice age remains to be seen. Given the number of parties involved in the project–not to mention the number of opinionated PHP developers who will wish to have their own say–this broth has plenty of cooks…
Update: Some intense discussion about what the PCP should be is already underway in the SitePoint forums.
The Catfish - Part 1
If you’ve visited the site at all in the last 2 months you would have most likely noticed our new Catfish book banners hugging the page bottom from time-to-time. Since we launched them, we’ve been receiving around 3-4 comments/email per week asking how it’s done. Rather than answering each email individually, we thought this is might be a good place to walk you through the finer points — for those interested.
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 …
An Introduction
Howdy, my name is Chris Beasley. If you’re a member of SitePoint’s Forums you know me as aspen, the team leader of the Manage Your Site section.
I built my first website in 1993 or 1994 and published my first site that was meant to make money in 1999. I’ve been at it ever since. I now own nearly 100 sites on various topics. It’s sometimes hard to explain to people what it is that I do, especially people not in this Industry. Most people assume I build websites for other people, in actuality what I do is closer to owning a magazine or television station. I publish content and collect advertising revenue for the most part. I got my start doing consulting for other people of course, but working for a pain in the butt client for what is in comparison very little money just wasn’t the life for me. I thoroughly enjoy being my own boss, working from home, and cashing large checks. Also, I still make money when I sleep, when I take a vacation, when I go out to eat. Residual income like that is …
Reinvent yourself
I once got some great advice about dating: “Want to date a ‘10′? Then be a ‘10′.”
The same is true in business. If you want ‘10′ clients — well-known, high-paying, exciting assignments — then you have to be a ‘10′ developer/designer.
Sometimes that means reinventing yourself. Fortunately, that’s not terribly hard to do in business. In fact, I’m doing some reinvention of my own right now. I’ve grown a bit weary of certain types of clients that call from time to time (boring, me-too companies), and want to work exclusively with dynamic companies with unique business propositions.
So:
- I’ve gotten testimonials/endorsements from investment bankers and others who work with these sorts of companies.
- I’ve built up referral releationships with the same folks (and continue to do so).
- Coming soon is a new website with a value proposition/marketing message that speaks more powerfully to my target audience.
- I’ve adjusted my solution set to meet the needs of this group.
- I’ll be writing and speaking to this group shortly, in order to get visible.
We create perceptions of ourselves through our language and through our appearance (both in marketing materials and in how we carry ourselves).
In a snap, we can determine to be something different …
Web 2.0 is about…
This is a reprint from the Tech Times #124, for those who don’t follow that publication.
Web 2.0 is about what the development community considers new and good ideas and trends in Web development today. Though the specific technologies, companies, and applications that symbolize Web 2.0 change daily, there are some core themes that they all share. It is these themes that, in my mind, define Web 2.0.
I should point out that I haven’t devised this list on my own. A lot of bright minds have tackled this question before me, and this is only my take on the answer. Other authorities you might like to consult are Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0 and Jeff Veen’s Designing for Web 2.0.
Sites as applications
When people first hear about Web 2.0, this is usually the angle they come at it from: Websites with rich user interfaces that behave more like desktop applications than a collection of interlinked pages to be read.
The first widely-used examples have come from Google: Gmail and Google Maps. If you haven’t tried them yet, you really should.
Macromedia actually began pushing this approach to Web design several years ago, under the banner of Rich Internet …
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