PanNotes

Zend, the primary company behind PHP, has just released version 1.0 of the web framework they have been developing for the last 20 months…

On Tuesday Zend released the final version of its newest PHP based offering Zend Core 2.0. Zend Core is a fast an easy way to install a stable combination of PHP, MySQL and Apache on Windows, Linux or OS X. See my previous post for more details. Overall this release is good news, however there is one big change in the final package that nobody seems to be talking about.

Firebug 1.0 was released today. Firebug takes the process of debugging HTML/CSS/Javascript to a whole new level. I could try my best to extol its virtues, but their website would still do a better job.

If you are web developer and you have never heard of Firebug, you need to stop what you are doing and get it now. Run, don’t walk.

An interesting footnote to this new announcement is that Firebug’s creator almost decided to start charging for the product in order to bring on a full time developer. In the end he decided to keep it open source and continue to fund development from donations.

On Tuesday Zend launched a beta of Zend Core 2.0, a brand new and extremely important addition to the Zend Core line up. Unlike its predecessors, Zend Core 2.0 is not designed for a specific database or hardware platform, it is a stable, certified, and (optionally) supported PHP Application Server bundle provided by Zend. It looks like they won’t be releasing a Zend Core for Windows or Zend Core for MySQL but instead will deliver a single, cross-platform product that includes the improvements from the collaboration with Microsoft. In addition to that, they are including a whole lot more…

Last Friday there was a rather spirited discussion at the office between Kaiton (a Ruby aficionado and ex-Panmedia employee currently at Microsoft), Nesta (a python aficionado who is forced to use PHP) and myself, (an un-biased PHP user who is forced to defend it ;-). The topic of course was PHP, its woes, its past, its present and its future.

According to Kaiton, PHP will be marginalised in 2008 by more literate programming languages like Ruby, Python and even Erlang. His view is that as the web becomes more important to business, backend programmers will start to get involved in the front end and web programming will be dominated by more experienced programmers who care more about the language they code with. According to Nesta, Drupal is the only good thing that ever came out of PHP. I think that 2007 will be the year of PHP.

The long overdue electronic transactions bill that passed last week has sparked new interest in the online opportunities available to local businesses. Though short on solutions for the real problems hindering e-commerce in Jamaica, the bill at least gives legal recognition to electronic commerce here and raises awareness with the general public.

This legislation has been “coming soon” since as far back as 2001. According to this overview, the majority of the act deals with providing legal recognition for the electronic equivalents of many of the paper based processes that we deal with today (e.g. ). It goes into great detail about personal electronic signatures and transmitting documents electronically.