Monthly Archives: November 2006

Php for .NET

Posted on by
1

As weird as it could appear a couple of years ago, right now i think it is slowly becoming a possibility – PHP.NET. Microsoft is collaborating with Zend for creating a FastCGI module for a new IIS 7.0, and parallel they are developing iron python for .NET. Sure thing that it is still far from becoming a reality, but from the other side, microsoft has never managed to motivate the biggest part of the internet community development moving from PHP to some of their technologies and they’ve been trying a lot lately – like releasing community editions of the Visual Studio and SQL Server.

This week the world have seen the collaboration announcement between Novell and Microsoft, in which (as usual) Novell is going to pay about 40 million dollars to Microsoft. For me this all is a part of a bigger Microsoft’s plan for advancing on the web market. Thinking from the Microsoft’s point of view i would say, that it makes a lot of sense in implementing Php.NET, cause with a commercial solution some of the developers would chose to buy Microsoft products, especially those developers, who are already using Visual Studio products. Being a regular VS user, i confess that this could be an option for a lot of people i know from the developers area. This could help Microsoft, conquer the part of the market, which since the very beginning being ignoring opportunity to pay the fees to them…

The most important aspect is that PHP’s implementation for .NET is not something from the other world, as they have now managed to implement python and i know about some commercial adaptations of Cobol and Fortran, so PHP’s adaptation in every sense would make a reasonable solution for Microsoft, but would it be so reasonable for end developers and users ? How would Zend act in such situation, and what about Sun’s Java …

Internet Advertising Revenues

Posted on by
Reply

According to IAB Press Releas, in the third quarter of the year, Internet advertising revenues reached an estimated new record of 4.2 billion dollars, which represents about 33% growth, and which is telling me that this market is still relatively at the beginning, cause no stable is about to grow in such proportions. Those data is about US market, and since Portuguese market is not even a one percent of it as i believe, i expect that the local internet advertisement is going to explode only in a couple of years from now, being as usually late in comparison with the pioneers.

With 8th consecutive quarter in a steady growth, i believe that even more and more firms are going to dedicate their marketing resources to the internet and mobile advertisement. I have no doubt, that this market is going to grow much more in the nearest future, as the newest generation is a internet generation and since people starting spending more time in internet then watching TV the priorities are going and already changing at this very moment.

Writing about internet marketing i can not forget about a new market – online games marketing which is taking this world by the storm, as people are making a lot of business in online games that the even online game developers are offering some services – like transferring from a server to a server, buying some basic things etc. Some game developers have even started including real world advertising inside the games to finance further game development and making some money out of it of course.

I believe, that within a couple of years we are going to see some drastic changes at the marketing strategies, basing them more and more on the internet.

update on 21th of November 2006: Just have read a very interesting article on eMarketer about internet advertisement growth in Europe – according to the Jupiter Research Agency, in 2011 european companies are going to spend around 83 billion dollars on online advertisement. This is a very big number, and i confess that i don’t think it will be that high, but still one more prediction about rapid online marketing growth. 8.3 % of the total marketing spending in just about 4 years, these numbers should tell everyone what to do now … =O)

Sitemap Protocol

Posted on by
4

A few days ago Google, Microsoft and Yahoo has agreed to join forces for defining a standard for sitemaps usage based on a XML which simplificates the work of the search engine bots, by distributing available site strucutre information. Originally developed by Google and already in use since about a year by Google Sitemaps has become a standard de-facto and as a matter of a fact, the version publicated on the sitemaps.org site has a higher version(0.9) then one i am using at the moment(0.7).

It is very nice to see, that the big 3 of the search are finally agreeing on something, which will make work of the webmasters easier. This way, we wont have to implement three independent solutions for each of the search engines, and i am more then welcoming it. The only question that i have in my mind is how much time will their stick to it and keep working together, since Microsoft is known for ignoring the common standards and defining their own, but in this case, because Google is the absolute market leader all over the world, i believe, that as long as microsoft dont have market controlled, they are most probably going go stick to it.

Another interesting thing about this organization is the license, under which they are distributing this information. I confess, that this “Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License” is quite a surprise for me, especially since a rant, made a couple days ago by Mr. Ballmer about Linux and its license.

Sun opens Java … or does it ?

Posted on by
1

Sun has finally decided to open Java to the community – may be a concurrence from microsoft with .NET made them finally do it, may be even someone inside have finally realized, that it is the best way to help java grow, i don’t know, but i have no doubt at all that it is a good idea. “Free Range” as they have called this announcement, for which i have been waiting for a … ghm … let me see … a LOT of years … GNU General Public License (GPL) is the license which is being used by Sun, which is a very good solution, in my opinion. Both Java SE(JDK) and Java Micro Edition are released under it, when my favorite JEE is still being under Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), though sun is promising to move it under GPL as well.
But wait a second is Java really free, cause it seems improbable …

From Sun’s site:
Q:
Are you open sourcing the Java language or the Java SE platform specifications?
A:
We are not open sourcing the Java programming language, nor the platform APIs and specifications, which are governed by the JCP. We’re open sourcing Sun’s implementations of the Java SE and Java ME specifications.

No, java language is still a closed source (remember, microsoft is watching you), but Java’s implementation – JDK is going to be released under GPL, which will allow creation of alternative java implementations.

Having started working with java somewhere between 1997 and 1998 (yeap, the good old java 1 with AWT and the rest of the wagon), seeing one or two bettas of JAVA 2 with the swing, and then impatiently waiting each month for a newer versions, testing betas, writing applications, fixing the bugs … Java made a long journey with me during all those years, until 2005 when i have switched myself more to .NET. Right now i am looking to get back in touch with java and explore more of the stuff released recently … One thing i was really missing all those years was a reasonable hosting for JSP, maybe with all those announcements and the buzz, more hosting providers will open the doors to java, it is certainly deserves it.

and for the last … Open JDK … i am excited to see some alternative java implementations in the nearest future … This is a way to go …

Adobe’s donation to Mozilla

Posted on by
1

I was really shocked today to hear that Adobe is about to give their javascript engine to Mozilla. To give and for free, no payment and apparently no interest from Adobe’s side. It is going to be connected to the SpiderMonkey under the Tamarine project and should be available in firefox as early as already in the year 2008 (version 3.5 or 4).

Just to give you an idea about what it is – this is an Actionscript 3 engine is an implementation of unfinished!!! specification of the version 4 of ECMAscript. This ActionScript-Javascript code is one of the most important parts of the Flash 9 engine. Yes, the Adobe(Macromedia) flagship product – Flash in its latest (ninth) incarnation. I am still astonished about this fact. No doubts, Adobe is doing this for some good reason but so far as of now – i really dont know what is the reason.

Adobe is going to face stronger concurrence from Microsoft – Expression Designer and Metro formats should be coming on the market in the next couple of months, and everybody knows, that when redmond guys are coming to the market, then you better watch out and hold on. Perhaps it is a move to help develop since a lot of years the stagnated javascript in browsers, as by no chance would they come to Microsoft and ask them about the cooperation in this area. Franz Hecker ( executive director of Mozilla foundation) has already written in his blog his thoughts about this cooperation. He expects as a result following changes:

  • Faster AJAX applications executions
    In its own testing Adobe has seen up to a ten times speedup of ActionScript applications due to the introduction of the AVM2 technology

  • Major cooperations with Adobe in the future (for Adobe gaining a partner such as Mozilla is a very good thing)
  • Innovative web 2.0 applications development speed increase (dont know about this one, as long as IE is still around =O) )

I anticipate more such “donations” to mozilla in the nearest future, as a sign of Firefox support, especially from IBM such move would be less then surprising.

New HTML

Posted on by
1

It was about the time … Finally there are some movements in that direction, i don’t even want to remember the year 199x, when the last Html 4.01 version was publicated by the W3C. This post from the W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee finally makes understand that maybe in a couple of years, we will finally have something new. I believe, that it is an answer by the W3C on the critics from the most respected and influential people on the web, who lately even started threads in the sense of making changes inside the W3C.

There are a lot of people around the net, who already wrote articles on this matter, between them the most interesting in my opinion are from 456BereaStreet and the one from Anne Kesteren. Even with the lot of pessimism to be found around the web, like “we will see the first publication of the new HTML somewhere between 2010 and 2012″, i still think we should rejoice, cause spending 7 years for nothing is much worse, then having a first glimpse of the hope.

The things that i wish to see in this new version are: the most of the work from the WHATWG group called HTML5 (datagrid,input attributes!!!,and more semantics) , i have even written about it before, as well as the menu elements, which would finally bring some dynamic into the web development. You wont find a lot of sites, which don’t have menus, but still every time the developers have to write them almost from the scratch, and what is worse – in a couple of years a lot of them becoming buggy and/or unusable.

I have to confess, that it is a pretty exciting year so far, 2 new version of browsers (Firefox 2.0 and IE7), initial XmlHttpRequest standardization by the W3C and now even a new HTML … Nice … =O)