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

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.

Zoli has an interesting post on the debate regarding SaaS vs Open Source.

It is clear to me that both works very well together.

Take the best of both world for the best return on investment.

After Office Live it is Google's turn to offer a web site creation technology.

We anticipated the democratization of web site creation tools a couple of years ago and we invented a nice technology, called the Page Builder.

It is the first Ajax web site builder around.

It is currently sold to web hosting companies as a Do It Your Self web site solution under the Drag and Drop Site Creator brand. http://www.dragdropsitecreator.com/

Page Builder is already 70% open source. We are improving our documentation and preparing a full open source release very soon.

So please stay tuned...

We now have a lot of experience in site creation technology and I am waiting for my Beta access to Google Page Creator to see what they have and give you my 2 cts on it.

I do not see Google Page Creator or Office Live as a threat for our site creator, we are open source and we support / package / license to any web host or community builder who wants to offer site building features to their users.

This is definitely exciting.