SQLFusion blogs

Eliot Van Buskirk, did a nice review of the pre-beta version of NowHound.

NowHound is a project we've been working on for the past 2 months.
It's in PHP5 using xajax and the Ricoh javascript library to provide Live Cast search.

It's the one place where you can find all the live events. From ustream.tv to college football with cstv you will find npr, wcsn, world wide programs from JumpTV and much more to come.

NowHound offer a REST API to automate the process of adding live cast from your application.
It also supports the new MRSS (live event RSS feed) standard.

We are preparing for the public beta and will add more APIs and widgets soon.

links:
Wired

Nowhound

The build once reuse everywhere web application.

PHP / Javascript web applications today are more complex than ever.
We use a framework or a CMS for the base functionalities, place in it a template system, include a few additional modules, then add some PEAR classes and a couple of javascript toolkits.
Finally we glue everything together with our custom code.
Sound familiar?

Unless you write everything from scratch using only the base PHP functions, most of the time web applications are composed from various components and libraries.

Now here is the fun part. 2 weeks after going live with one of the libraries, modules or CMS it become insecure due to a newly discovered vulnerability.

I found it hard to maintain and upgrade all those applications, modules and libraries each time there is a bug fix or security advisory.

Wouldn't it be great if you could just press one button and get that part of your project upgraded to the latest most secure version?

This is now possible for applications packaged in a Linux distribution but not for web applications.

What the perfect web application packaging system would look like:
- It would be project centric
- Manage and resolve dependencies
- Install and upgrade database data and structure
- One click upgrade or install
- Not writable by the web browser user
- 100% in PHP
- Work with all the frameworks
- Web based user interface

A few web application packaging solutions already exist.
Debian as created Debian packages for the most popular PHP web applications. Pear package is today probably the most advanced packaging system available for web applications. A lot of todays frameworks or CMS have their own packaging systems.

But they all have shortcomings that make it difficult for us to use and work with.

Debian is per server installation, so on one server you can't develop multiple projects.
We had similar problems with PEAR and found it very difficult to work with on development servers when we only wanted selected packages to be available for selected projects.
All the built-in package and update feature we found in frameworks and CMS require manual downloads and installs of modules or themes.

So a few years back we started our own web application package solution.

The goal was to meet all the above criteria, and its harder than it sounds.

The solution we created is a 2 step package installation.
All the projects are created on a development server. In the first step, we install packages of libraries, toolkits and full applications from a web based user interface. In the second step we publish the web application to a live server with a built-in synchronization application.
Then the packaging system secures all the folders and reconfigures the application to work on the live server. (converts absolute file or url path, database connection information.... )
We even added an experimental feature to update the database structure when upgrades are uploaded to the live server.

This 2 steps package installation allows us to have a secure published application with a web based package manager.

We still have a lot of work to do but we are definitely on the right track, our current packaging system is usable and most of the features listed above are implemented and working.

You can give it a try at http://radria.sqlfusion.com/

Got an email from Palm about dropping the Foleo and concentrating on their new operating system.

The iPhone technology is showing its effects also with Nokia demonstrating new touch screen capabilities for their next version of Symbian OS:
Nokia iPhone

The competition is reacting and the good news is that everything is moving the phone closer to a web terminal.

The number of web applications for the iPhone are increasing at a faster rate than any other Mobile OS.

They are web based allowing them to take full advantage of Web 2.0 technologies and networking capabilities.

With its 1 year advance Apple is setting up THE standard for cell phone web applications.

Next year we will mostlikely see Palm OS, Sybian, PocketPC and Opera releasing web browsers compatible with iPhone web applications.

Prediction never works, lets see....

The PHP community is pushing everybody to move to PHP5.
PHP4 support will stop at the end 2007 in a cry to increase PHP5 adoption.
The GoPHP5.org was recently started to help.
On a language point of view it make no sens to keep using PHP4 today. PHP 5 and specially 5.2 is much better.

Now the reality is that 80% of the PHP web sites are running php4.

July 2007 stats from Nexen

Blame the Web Host ?
Blame the php developers ?
Well its a simple chicken / egg situation: WebHost offer PHP4 because more applications are available in PHP4, developer create PHP4 applications because they want their customer to run their application on regular web hosting accounts.

When I was a developer I started with PHP/FI and I have some of my customer that are still running PHP3 and PHP4 sites or applications.
The applications runs great and maintenance cost are low.
Its hard to justify the cost to upgrade to PHP5 without creating animosity against PHP and its community.

Its like a proprietary vendor forcing you to upgrade by threatening an end of life of your current product.

My message to the PHP core developer team:
You are doing an amazing job with PHP the language is strong, rich, powerful, fast and has evolved in the right direction.
PHP developers loves PHP5 (at least the one I know) its great and so much better than PHP4.
But a couple of things would make a huge difference in new versions adoption.

• Stop creating backward incompatibility: Like removing the register global option in PHP6, you have all the good reason to do it, but just don't. For PHP6 adoption its key that PHP5 code run without errors out of the box on PHP6. (notice are fine). Add environment or configuration flag/variables to make PHP5 code to run on PHP6.
• Incentive for Web Host: Improved apache module shared hosting security with better jail function like open_base_dir or a suexec compatibility, dynamic block of PHP function from Virtual hosts..... Maximum security without hurting performances. Even if it sounds more like an Apache problem, Web Host don't care. If you give them a reason that make sens to them: security improvement, increase performance, less customer support requests (upward incompatibility) you will get a better adoptions rate.

Good luck, this is just my 2c after working more than 10 years with PHP and over 400 customers running PHP applications.

We are putting together a new Open Source Project for PHP and javascript developers.

Its called Radria and stand for Rapid Development of Rich Internet Application.

Its a collection of 100% web based tools to build web applications.

For the last 5 years we are building web applications for customers and to help us in that task we created a collection of tools to reuse code and make our job faster and better.

Its not a new CMS
Its not a new Framework

Its a totally new concept for Web Application development.

Stay tune we will have information very soon