Monthly Archives: March 2007

Delphi for PHP

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In a very interesting move, CodeGear (aka known as Borland) has released Delphi for PHP, now this is a tool, which by name is quite a thing i have been waiting for. This is a RAD development environment, only for Windows, but remembering that Borland has a good history releasing products for othe platforms i am sure, that in the case of success the next platform will be Linux – there are millions of PHP enthusiasts all around the world, who will be more then excited getting such a tool for development under Linux. If not, there will be hundreds of people who will take over the open source framework of VCL for PHP that Borland(CodeGear) has provided, and implement it for Linux and Os X.

The Delphi for PHP features a very large collection of built-in components as usual for such development tools. There are even some components, that use AJAX for database access (MySQL and Interbase are supported, more database support is promised in the nearest future). The price for those who will buy it until the 31st of march is 261 euros, after that the price will rise to 308 euros. If its good as i hope, this is a software, i am going to get in the next couple of hours. =O)

I am downloading the Trial now, and for me it is the most excited and unexpected product for quite some time. I hope, that CodeGear with this Delphi for PHP will have a big list of successes as they have had in 80s and 90s. I am surely going to drop a few lines here on this article about the Delphi for PHP in the nearest future. Is this the tool, that is going to change the situation for dying Borland (CodeGear), and reposition the market around the PHP, ignore for so many years by the major developers ? I hope so.

Who’s going to be the next one to adopt their tool for PHP ? Microsoft with a .NET for PHP ?

Portuguese Government blog

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Portuguese Government has their official blog now. It is called “A Nossa Opinhão” (in transl. our opinion), which is quite a serious name for a blog. =O) No politic opinions will be ever published on my blog, so do please not make any interpretation about my personal opinion. The fact, that the Portuguese government has finally started reaching out to the internet, is a very important pass into the future.

Just like the vast majority of the bloggers at the moment, the Portuguese government blog is based on WordPress, but their blog implementation is quite an interesting subject for an investigation – first of all is the question, which version of WordPress is it running, is it the infamous 2.11 with all the bugs and back doors inside ? Secondly, Andreas Viklund should not be very happy about his theme been used for the portuguese government blog, but no credits were left on their page, the only thing that points out to him is the commentary, which was probably forgotten at the footer of the blog’s page.Well, i think that he should know about this fact right at this moment, as i have left a commentary on his page =O) Third is the accesibility of the page is quite frankly forgotten – it is quite clear, that the text is being inserted into the blog, directly from the Word – by copy and paste, otherwise such nasty things like this:

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 200%"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: Verdana">

or having code like that:

<o:p></o:p>

A very interesting aspect is a design of the site, as right now it has no archives and has no menu what so ever, but with the time it should have them, or at least i hope, that the site “designer” will include them on the main page. The title of the blog is all caps “A NOSSA OPINHÃO”, which stays for screaming, but may be it is the idea of this blog… to scream at the readers, which are uncapable to comment on any of the subjects. This is a good idea, since there would be way too many comments not on the subject from all the scam of the net and from the opposite parties as well =O)

Anyway i just want to congratulate António Costa, the portuguese minister of internal affairs, with a creation of a this blog, with advancing and pushing the others into the digital age, as it is extremely important. Good luck with the exploring and facing the reaction of the net. =O)

Top 10 Drupal modules

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1. Askimet – how can you build a site, with a possibility for users to leave comments and not to have this plugin ? There are thousands of spam bots around, leaving hundreds of stupid and sometimes offensive comments wherever they can. Askimet is a perfect plugin to stop them from doing it on your Drupal site. Originally created for Wordpres, the Askimet is absolutely essential for any community-driven site.

2. Category – allows you to structure your site and to organize content with categories, which is quite useful as for SEO. Categories and containers can be created as nodes and the content can be assigned to the categories. The category module will improve your site navigation vastly, turning it into more tree-like hierarchy.

3. XML Sitemap – generate dynamic sitemap for keeping search engines well informed about the changes in your site structure. At the moment of writing only Google and Yahoo providing the services for using this information directly, while MSN is already working on a similar solution, they have already announced about joining the sitemaps standard. For any webmaster this is a must have module.

4. Nodewords – which is also known as “Meta Tags”, a module which gives you control over meta tags and their content. I have seen a lot of Drupal-based sites completely free of meta information. From the site description to keywords and Geo tags, all that is to be controlled by the Nodewords. A good site may not have an empty <head> section =O)

5. Page Title – lets you customize every page title the way you wish. It is a very important factor for SEO and even if you do not care much about it, altering page title conforming the content you providing is so important for usability. A lot of times, the title of the page is not _exactly_ the same title that you are using for your heading, for example when providing a bigger view over the content of the page, you might choose to skip some of the words while adding others – for all those purposes and even more, i need “Page Title” module for every Drupal installation.

6. Path Redirect – Imagine, that you are moving some of your pages from one location to another. All the links that the search engines have indexed, and your partners have placed on your site are going to be destroyed, if you won’t do something about it. You can ask all the sites that are linking to you, to alter their links, but first – it will take some time and second – some of them won’t be available to do that; and what will you do about the search engines, waiting for Google or Yahoo to reindex your links will take some very serious time, and in the mean time, your potential users and customers will be hardly disappointed. Path Redirect solves this problem.

7. Views no modern Drupal site is created without this module. This module is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. The views module can give you the flexibility, that for example elder versions of Drupal were completely incapable of doing. If you want to sort your content differently, if you need to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type or if you require to provide ‘unread forum posts’. A lot of different modern Drupal modules also depends on the Views module.

8. Update Status – if you wish to have version control of your modules, then this is the best way of doing it. Update Status can automatically check new versions of installed modules and notify you at the administration panel right after you log in. Having a lot of modules on the Drupal installation will oblige you checking the updates very regularly, and that means visiting dozens of pages every couple of weeks, which is not a big fun. Update Status was created exactly to help resolving this problem. This module is only available for versions starting with Drupal 5.

9. TinyMCE – is the module that you probably can’t live without. Having anyone responsible for the content, who does not understand XHTML will be a disaster without this module, and in so many cases, the people don’t have an idea of what XHTML is. I believe it is a shame, that Drupal does not have a default editor for the image uploading, it’s hard to find any CMS which does not have this functionality. TinyMCE will solve all problems with images inserting by providing nice usable interface. One word of caution – consult this TinyMCE compatibility chart before you really starting using

10. PathAuto – is a module for generating automatically the path aliases for all possible types of content. When having a lot of content appearing almost every day then no one will be able to invent new url for every content post. The PathAuto module handles these cases, generating path aliases based on the content of the page.

There are some other modules worth mentioning, but they all depend on the implemented project, but may become quite popular with the time, such as Adsense, Flash Video (until the new <video> tag is not available in HTML, its a nice way to have videos), Video module (is an alternative), Events (a lot of communities have events =O)), Pdf View (there are so many times things that you might need in PDF format),

Microsoft joins Open Ajax and opens FoxPro

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Google and Microsoft together have joined the OpenAjax alliance, which is quite a funny fact, because Google actually is one of the co-finders of this alliance. It is a kind of weird when a co-founder delays its decision about joining a project that he created. This fact is a very important issue for the future of the Ajax, as having so many enterprises on board, who influences a lot the development of the hottest net application strategy of the last years will hopefully help them to develop a new strategy for Ajax development. A very important fact, which is quite forgotten by a lot of people, is that at the same time W3C is developing a new standard for Ajax, and this whole thing may turn OpenAjax vs W3C, and since i believe that W3C do not have a lot of credit lately, they better join forces with OpenAjax or they risk end their standard development which will be ignored by the vast majority of the browser developers. Important notice is that between those who participate in OpenAjax alliance there is a big important name missing – Apple Inc, i guess they are going to join at some point, cause all other major browser developers including Opera are there. Important to notice, that besides browser developers some big names for the server side applications and servers are there, such as BEA, Oracle, Sun and Sofware AG. The big question is who’s going to be the first to publish the specification, and who’s specification is going to be really adopted by the vendors.

Microsoft has announced, that it will open the source code of the FoxPro core modules to their CodePlex community development site. This announcement comes just a couple of days after telling the world, that the last FoxPro version, will be really the last FoxPro. FoxPro times have passed and a lot of products, even Microsoft itself with Access and SQL Server defines the borders and frontiers, where are not much space left for FoxPro, though for some of the cases FoxPro still may be one of the best choices available.

It seems, that the big corporation decide to make a commercial product into an “open source”, only in the case when this commercial product do not have a future anymore. A good example to compare would be Borland with its Interbase database (from closed to open source and back), and Sun with Star Office (closed->open source->both ways). It seems to be a pretty common practice, for a product survival, since Netscape has turned its dying Navigator into flourishing and powerful Firefox. I believe, that the decision of turning FoxPro open source is something, that should have appeared already some time ago, this way a lot of work and forces would be saved from disappearing.

The future of the CeBIT

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CeBIT is still the greatest computer trade show in the world. I have been there for a couple of years, and i loved each and every minute of it, with a lot of people everywhere, a lot of confusion, but at the same time – a spirit of sharing the technological achievements and sharing the experience. It is a place, where you can learn the people from the informatics industry from all around the world, where you can see whats new in the world of technology will be available on the market tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

A lot of things were written about the future of the CeBIT, since in the past couple of years the number of the publishers and visitors has been decreased significantly. CeBIT has faced exactly the same problem as a lot of computer shows have faced in the past years – growing cost of the representation for the firms trying to appear there, and a growing price of the tickets, which makes quite expensive – and hence impossible for a lot of companies to send their teams to the show. One very big trade show which has faced exactly the same problem is E3 game show, a lot of big companies have announced last year, that this year they are going to ignore or make a very small presence at the E3 trade show, in favor of publishing their press releases on the net. After that announcements, the organization has decided of changing the format of the show from “open for everyone” to “invitation-only”. They are just optimizing the costs, for concentrating on the essential – the media, who will be invited for publishing the information for the rest of us, grunts. =)

I think that in the next couple of years, the CeBIT will face the same problem and will change their format, concentrating more on the specialists and not on everyone. The words like “Members of the media, retail, development and financial communities” will become the key for describing the attendees.

I believe that in the era of internet and computer technologies all of these shows have their fate decided; but i guess, i am going to miss the spirit of 90s and 200x’s at the CeBIT, which was a quite a fantastic feeling, of being able to talk directly to a lot of firms presenting their products and developers, who knew exactly what software was supposed to do, even if in a lot of cases some firms where sending just marketing personal.

update on 20th of march 2007:
In this PC World article, it was written, that CeBIT 2007 in the first 3 days has got more visitors then at the 2006 edition, but still i attribute this rise to the fact that a lot of stuff was written about CeBIT, and that even a negative marketing still can bring the positive results. Having above 200.000 visitors may be a result for short period of time, cause as long as firms like Apple do not plan to announce products, like iPhone, at CeBIT – there is not much space for growing. Not many firms would wait until CeBIT or any other trade show to present a new product, since the concurrence is always pushing to advance, it is a good option though to play with a technology that was announced before, like if Apple Inc would participate at CeBIT, a lot of people would be more then excited to take a look at the iPhone or a new iPod.
The words, that CeBIT is going to grow are spoken at the same time when it was announced that CeBIT 2008 will run only for seven days (instead of usual 8), and that it is just one of the step of the CeBIT reorganization. For me, it is clear signal, that CeBIT is not having a lot of successes, and that in the next couple of years they need to review the trade show format in order to survive the technological progress.

The WaSP Street Team

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The WaSP has announced that at their annual meeting a few days ago at SXSW, they have decided to create a WaSP Street Team. The aim of the new team is to give ways to get involved with web standards evangelism in the local areas and in the places of work and online.

The information that is published is very few at the moment, basically what the Web Standards Project is doing is encouraging the people to put their names and addresses on the list, which will distribute the information, in some near future. The most important message is that the WaSP Street Teams will help the promotion of web standards in local communities.

I am quite excited about this, and this is a measure i believe that that was needed for quite a long time. Making big topic of the standards will make people talk of them, making a group will help to spread it out. I have to confess, that besides some portuguese names and portuguese sites on the net, that i find, there are just 2 people in real life, that i know capable of maintaining the conversation on the topic of XHTML/CSS standards. It is a very sad statistic, since i know quite a lot developers working in a lot of big portuguese companies. Only by the local teams it will be possible to reach some of the minds, which are still living in a long and forgotten 90s.

I hope there are some Portuguese interested in this project, so there will be a positive result (wider standards adoption) out of this idea.

Spam vs Meta

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No one is be surprised by the number of meta compilations available on the blogs all around the internet. What makes me worry is that the percentage of the information in relation to the meta spam is getting lower with every day. A friend of mine from Austria told me that he wont be surprise if one day a lot of those meta engines will disappear one day like dot com bubble has disappeared at the end of the last century. He is quite right, since all meta information providers do not have a real value behind them, besides being a servants, and we have a very big and a powerful one – Google, who already occupies this space.

I was just thinking, that in order to gain hundreds or thousands of users, spammers just create a new list of already existing css menus or html templates and put it somewhere on the digg or somewhere else. Then hundreds of users will “discover” it visiting and digging and dotting and whatever you prefer. It is quite disappointing, that the most bloggers in such way turn them self into spammers, or may be the truth is that they are not bloggers, but just meta spammers. I can not imagine someone working creating pages having time to check out 70 or 80 templates, and doing that in depth. This is absolutely unreasonable, because the time it takes to check out the code of the xhtml template tells me that in order to “process” them all one will need a couple of weeks, when already “behind the corner”, at the same blogs there are hundreds more templates and css technics and so on.

So, we arrive to the main question, how could someone check out 70-80 templates and post them each and every 3-4 days, my answer is – impossible, it is just a way of surfing through the pages of people, who create real content, and then collect it and put into a blog post, showing everyone, who deep and good your knowledges are. When i check blogs of really creative people, i see one or two good technical posts per month, cause it is difficult to discover something worth disclosure, but hey, meta spammers do 15 posts a month with one or two thousands references.

I guess i have reached the state of completely ignoring such posts and such posters (spammers). For me, meta posts are as good as dead, as they have no real information.