I just found that my article entitled PHP 5 Enterprise Edition is now available online. It has initally been published in the
International PHP Magazine.

From the introduction:

Today, J2EE could be named the de facto industry standard for the development of distributed multi-tier architecture applications. It is backed up by industry leaders like Sun, Oracle, BEA, and IBM. This article will compare PHP’s software stack with what’s available in (and for) J2EE, to overcome the typical Java versus PHP discussions that usually focus on language features, but do not take into account the overall picture. Basically, this article assembles a PHP5 Enterprise Edition (PHP5EE).

Although this article is almost 3 years old, it is still very interesting to read. Especially when reading the following sentence or projection in the article’s summary:

In no way should this article be a dispraise of all the good volunteer work that happens in the PHP community, but it definitely needs more successful companies in the PHP market who continuously climb up the ladder and extend the PHP software stack.

Considering that since the article has been published, two companies (eZ systems and Zend) have started to create their own libraries aka frameworks to extend the PHP software stack (eZ components and Zend Framework), I would say that PHP is on the right way and that my article was quite influential

Today eZ systems published an article entitled Platform and Solutions Strategy by Aleksander Farstad, CEO eZ systems.

This article sheds a light on the big picture why eZ systems develops the eZ platform and how this relates to the eZ publish CMS. It also talks about eZ systems planning to offer various other software solutions on top of the eZ platform.

In this blog entry, I won’t talk about the article itself because it speaks for itself. Instead, I will have a look at how does eZ systems’ strategy relate to the PHP market?

Mature market

First of all, eZ systems is the first company in the PHP application development domain that I know of, which actually announces such a long-term strategy. I am not talking about purely technical sofware roadmaps, I am talking about the combination of business and software development. This is a novelty in the PHP market.

This shows that the PHP market has matured substantially, that companies like eZ systems have grown big enough in terms of resources and experience so that they can envisage a long-term strategy of that scope. It also means that there is demand in the market for long-term planning, mature enterprise-grade software and related services.

The PHP-way

When looking at the eZ platform, the PHP platform by eZ systems, one could argue that PHP simply follows Java and that this is what J2EE offers. Nevertheless, there is a good reason why eZ systems does not simply port J2EE to PHP or any other software platform: there is something like the PHP-way of doing things. eZ systems has a market track-record of 6 years in PHP development, they know about the best practices that have emerged by using PHP.

PHP developers think in a different way compared to Java developers. There’s a subtle difference in approaching problems, that can make a big difference when you look at the actual solution. What the new eZ systems strategy tells us is: PHP has reached a level where it has proven that it can serve as a serious alternative for solving highly complex software problems.

Market-driven approach

About 2 years ago, International PHP Magazine published an article of mine about “PHP5EE” where I wrote, that it needs more companies who further develop the market for generic PHP platforms. We are at this point today.

Note that PHPLIB and PEAR are both community projects. Yes, they also had a commercial background, because in most cases they evolved from customer projects, but there was no business model behind those projects, rather a community model. With eZ components, the PHP components library by eZ systems, the first serious project in that area driven by one company has been introduced.

This evolution is in sync with the typical evolution of an Open Source market that starts off with community-driven projects being accompanied by more and more similar company-driven projects.

For example, PEAR provides object-oriented PHP libraries and has established a community. It has actually proven that there is a need for something like that in the PHP world and that it can be done with PHP. A growing market for OO PHP libraries evolved and there came up the need for a party doing constant maintenance, guaranteed support and related services. This is where eZ components backed up by eZ systems came in.

Raising the standard

eZ platform will be more then just eZ components, it will also include the eZ application server and various
functionality plugins. With eZ platform, eZ systems will raise the standard for what a PHP platform is supposed to be. Companies that still neglect PHP might then consider its usage. Due to the fact that eZ platform will be Open Source, there is a big chance that the whole PHP market will profit from that.

The slides of the eZ publish Conference 2006 are now online, available in the www.ez.no presentations section.

Most notably, the slides of the talk about the recently announced eZ platform and eZ application server for PHP are also included. They have been presented by the brilliant Jan Kudlicka and show a graph of the whole eZ platform stack - check out the slides: Future of development at eZ (PDF).

Just a few days ago, at the eZ publish conference 2006, we had the very first eZ awards night.

The eZ awards is a prize awarded by eZ systems during its annual conference to give special recognition to key people within the eZ ecosystem.
It was a great show, the winners were overwhelmed and the audience had a lot of fun celebrating.

Check out the eZ awards pages and you can tell from the pictures how great an event this was.

Fresh from the eZ publish conference (1st day today):

eZ systems announced the development of the eZ platform, which will ship with a PHP application server called “eZ application server”.

Of course, eZ platform will be build on top of eZ components.

More information in the news announcement:
eZ systems announces eZ platform for PHP application development.

My dear colleague Zak Greant has written a nice article, where he leaves no doubt about what eZ systems thinks about software patents: well, we simply think they stink Zak of course formulates this in a more eloquent way and he also provides some reasons why we don’t like them.

Software patents might be one of the biggest issues to gain more freedom, also in democratic societies. Let’s thus say with Martin Luther King: I have a dream, that one day I will live in a world without software patents, where true competition of ideas and innovation exists.

Yes, and I am proud to be in a company not afraid of clear statements.

He is a slow hand when it comes to guitar playing and a fast hand when it comes to photo shooting: Bård Farstad got a Weblog, named Papelipe. He is one of the co-founders of eZ systems and a true LAMP addict.

You wonder what the blog name means? He writes:

The name Papelipe was invented by my then 2 year old daughter which used it to name unknown things. It is unique and I found it suitable for my blog. At the time it was registered there were no mentions in Google for Papelipe.

Well, that says it all

Bård currently writes about his findings while torturing the 6 servers cluster he uses for eZ publish performance testing.

The relaunch of the Swiss TV news site SF Tagesschau is based on eZ publish. Now, a 11 pages case study has been published, written by me and my colleague Marcus Rölz. The document explains the most important features and also provides some screenshots.

Yet, the case study is only available in German.

One major feature which will be part of the forthcoming eZ publish 3.8 release (out in May) is content version diff functionality. It will sit on top of the versioning and archiving system, which is included by default since the early days of eZ publish 3.

Related to Multilang Enhancements

Integrating content diff is a logical move, if you consider that eZ publish 3.8 will also include enhanced multilanguage handling. The new multilang features are most useful when translating content, and here, content diff is just perfect to spot changes in the language version which is supposed to be translated.

Diffing Accross Datatypes

Combined with the content object model of eZ publish, you will be able to diff content per object attribute. This means, that it is not just one big text field like in Wikis, where you can identify changes. Actually, the cool thing is that you can diff accross any “form field” of your content, or in eZ publish linguage: accross the various datatypes.

Of course, diffing does not make sense for all datatypes, for example, binary data like images. Indeed, what you can do with the image datatype, is to diff its metadata like filename, size, and modification date, also the alternative text.

The following datatypes will have diffing capability: price, URL, email, date, time, datetime, float, string, xml field, keyword, media, etc.

Read more in the Content Version Diff specification.

Now you can take a look into the future of eZ publish development, as well as the eZ components. I have conducted and published an email interview with five of eZ systems’ leaders of the development team.

eZ components

Ideas for future eZ components are:

• a framework component,
• a MVC component,
• a component for sending IPC messages between different parts of an application,
• a workflow component,
• a search component.

eZ publish

• The eZ publish 4.0 Features List has just been published.
• The eZ publish 4.0 Roadmap will be published beginning of June.
• eZ publish 4.0 will be based on PHP 6, mainly because of Unicode support.

Self-fullfilling Prophecy

Our dev leaders provide lots of valuable information and are doing a fine job as fortunetellers - as they are predicting a future they shape themselves, it should become a self-fullfilling prophecy

Honestly, I fully trust in what they are saying and doing, there’s a lot of intelligence accumulated at eZ systems. Just look at the high quality of eZ components, and you will be able to anticipate just how good eZ publish 4, the next big version of eZ publish, is going to be.