The call for papers for next year’s eZ publish Conference is out.
eZ is accepting proposals on the following topics:
The submission deadline for all proposals is January 16, 2006.
eZ publish Conference 2006 will take place in Skien/Norway from June 20-23, 2006.
Of course, the eZ Enterprise Components [1] will be a hot topic there, as well as the forthcoming eZ publish 4.0.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Soon, there will be LOTS of workshops and talks on Open Source in Switzerland. For the second time, this event takes place in Bern/Switzerland, from Feb 17-19.
This is my first time representing eZ systems at an Open Source event and I am looking forward to that.
I am going to do several presentation on the eZ publish CMS: a workshop, a talk, and a demo. You can grab the first eZ publish Live-CDs there, I am going to bring them with me. They are bootable CDs, based on Mandrake Move and having a ready-made eZ publish pre-installed.
At the end of LOTS, I will moderate a panel discussion on Open Events – The Open Source Bazaar. Basically, we will try to identify differences and similarities between Open Source and typical business events, the way how knowledge is shared at “Bazaars” like LOTS, etc.
Zend recently decided to not call themselves the creators of PHP anymore. This change in Zend’s marketing has been long overdue. It caused friction with some PHP core developers over the past years that spread into the PHP community.
It is not that Zend is the only company in the Open Source market that made some marketing mistakes in the past. MySQL for example had their CTO Monty Widenius talk fancier then usual in an internally conducted interview and the answers did not sound like he really said them. It made known members of the MySQL community wonder who kidnapped Monty.
To some marketing experts, the Open Source community might seem like a mine-field with many traps, because there are just too many critical thinkers in the community. It is so because they don’t fully understand the ethics of sharing.
Marketing and ethics – how does that go together? Isn’t marketing based on emotions and instincts? Catching you with the “sex sells” trick? Open Marketing is different – yet still emotional.
Open Marketing addresses the intellect, because in Open Source it’s all about transparency: transparent software (code), transparent collaboration (mailinglists), transparent deficiency (bugs), …
Open Marketing also addresses emotions, because it’s fun. After your Linux installation, you read “Have a lot of fun”. Open Source developers identify with what they do, because they believe in their skills, the good work of the team, the value of sharing. They care about their work and the results – isn’t that emotional?
Intellect and emotions come together in the ethics of sharing. It’s supporters believe that they can still gain although sharing, or better: they gain because they share. The more you share, the more you become the center of communication flows in the Open Source community. Speaking in terms of communication theory, you become a hub in a communication network.
What does that have to do with Open Marketing? It means that the correct marketing is vital to an Open Source company because it needs to be one of the main hubs in the communication flow of the Open Source community it targets at. Otherwise, the company will slowly loose it’s innovative power and market share respectively.
The ethic of sharing is not so much about naive persons longing to be good, instead it is at the heart of the Open Source business, it is egoistic as well as altruistic at once, intellectual and emotional, and the basis for making money.
To summarize: Open Marketing is just as “copyleft” to the traditional marketing, as the GPL is to proprietary software licensing. It is not about illusions, it is about realities. In that sense, Zend just fixed a bug in their marketing and move from a sometimes proprietary style marketingto a better open marketing. Welcome back to reality!
My favourite German publisher is dpunkt.verlag. Recently, a book on PHP 5 was published that I have helped them with and there are two others in the pipeline written by notable authors. The three books complement each other, so depending on your skill- set, you could pick one, two or all of them. Of course, each of them is of high quality:
In a nutshell: For experienced devs, curious to learn PHP 5.
The 380 pages are a condensed, translated, and updated version of Harry’s excellent PHP Anthology. PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene is meant for experienced PHP 4 developers who want to learn about what’s new in PHP 5 on a very practical basis. Actually, the strength of the book is that it takes care of the nitty-gritty when migrating from PHP4 to PHP 5 with lots of real-world examples.
It was actually me who did the updates, especially dealing with the new OO features in PHP 5. While writing the updates, I realized how the evolution of the book matches with the intention of the book to guide through PHP4-to-PHP5 migration issues, because all of Harry’s source code was PHP 4. Making the book PHP 5-focused, required me to work just like someone who sould migrate his PHP 4 application.
BTW: Cornelia Boenigk did a wonderful job in translating Harry’s text to German, I regard her as one of the best technical translaters of programming books from English to German.
PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene is available since November.
In a nutshell: Makes a PHP 4-pro become a PHP5-guru.
This one should be out shortly. Sebastian Bergman wrote it and it is mostly an in-depth introduction to the OO-features of PHP 5. Sebastian let me review the pre-published version and I admire his precise and clean explanation of the sometimes inevitably complex topic of objectoriented programming. Everything important is mentioned, easy to comprehend, the sample code is of high usefulness. If you’re a PHP 4-pro, get this one to become a PHP 5-guru.
In a nutshell: Gets you started with PHP 5.
I just finished to review the final draft of this one and got the impression that it is just what is needed to get PHP novices started. The authors are well-known members of the German PHP community: Hakan Kücükyilmaz, Alexander Merz, Thomas Haas. Throughout the book, they explain the important aspects of PHP 5 with patience, accuracy, and the knowledge of how a novice should be guided. Saying that, it comes with no surprise that the book is the result of several PHP training courses.
This book is out in March.
Some might argue, that these books are late as PHP 5 is already out for some time, but the strategy of dpunkt.verlag is to publish high-quality books – and they simply take time. This is what I experienced myself when writing for dpunkt.verlag: unless your text is perfect, they are not satisfied with the results and they will push you to make it perfect. A sometimes painfull, but in the long-run successfull strategy: educative for the authors, beneficial for the readers.
Yes, Sebastian is right, it would be great to have something like Apache Maven. It was really impressive to see how useful it is for rapid prototyping in Java at a related OSCOM session some weeks ago.
But I would not say “let’s clone Maven and port it to PHP 5” – that would not take into account PEAR, especially it’s installer, which is like the little sister of Maven, seen from a conceptual perspective. Just like the PEAR installer’s online repository, the maven CLI allows to donwload Java packages from an ibiblio package repository. The definitive plus of Maven is that it is not library-centric, but application-focused: It also creates a default application directory structure and performs pre- and post-installation processes based on a plugin interface.
This is something which is missing in the PEAR installer, I would even go so far that something like the Jakarta project in total is mssing for PHP. Maybe it is now a good point to start something like this as an official PHP community effort, given the recent discussons on Enterprise PHP.
One more point about the Maven/PEAR issue: The ZZ/OSS Installer tries to overcome the deficiencies of the PEAR Installer when it comes to applications. Unfortunately, the interest has yet been low and the main problem I see is that PHP developers don’t want to drop the benefits of a scripting language (edit the script -> execute it in the browser -> fix bugs) in favour of a more flexible application design which has a source2built tree installation process. In fact, it seems like a trade-off: either you have a rather monolithic application that allows for quick fixes or your application is modeled with packages that need to be edited in the source and installed to the built tree (as PEAR does). Due to these problems, simply porting Maven would not help PHP application developers – it would need some more thought and education on the source/built tree issue.
Contrary to other believes, Harry and me have certainly won the Battle of the Books. It was clear after some serious analyzation over a couple of swiss beer, that our book PHP für Fortgeschrittene is so much better compared to PHP de Luxe. Christian and Hannes had some good marketing strategy, but in the end, quality always wins 😉
The location and event was really cool – thanks to Christian, Hannes and etoy for making this possible!
Just put up the slides of my talk PHP 5 Enterprise Edition? at OSCOM 4. The session was well attended, equally by PHP and Java developers. The discussion after my talk suggests that there’s a growing interest on both sides: The PHP devs want to learn more about Java approaches to the enterprise market, like J2EE. On the other side, Java-devs are curious about this rapid development scripting language called PHP. Seems like OSCOM’s conference topic “cross-pollination” just works out fine.
My basic impressions from the discussion are the following:
– The PHP and Java world still reside on two different planets, there’s yet only little, but growing contact between both dev communities.
– PHP and Java form two different paradigms of problem solving, mainly comming down to “getting things done” (PHP) and “doing things right” (Java).
I will write an article on this topic for the forthcoming issue of the International PHP Magazine, trying to compose a kind of PHP 5 Enterprise Edition software stack and comparing the pros and cons with J2EE.
With the advent of PHP 5 and the push to the enterprise market, professional build and installation environments for PHP applications become more and more important. My session at this year’s International PHP Conference discusses pros and cons of such a build system and compares existing solutions like PEAR Installer, Phing, ZZ/OSS Installer. Furthermore, I will take a look at the Java world and identify missing tools that would be nice to have in the PHP world.
There are many PHP CMS out there and the next conference on Open Source CMS is ahead, organized by OSCOM with assistance from the Apache Software Foundation.
Take a look at the OSCOM.4 Request for Papers and feel free to propose a session. Of course, anyone is invited to attend at ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich, Switzerland, Wednesday, Sept 29 – Friday, October 1, 2004.
Let me know if you come: please ping- or trackback this entry, or write a comment. See you there!
I had to do, what developers really don’t like: patching a third-party class package due to a bug for the forthcoming release of one of our software products.
The package I had to patch is PEAR::Archive_Tar because of a yet unfixed bug I have reported some time ago. The application depending on that package is the forthcoming release of ZZ/OSS Installer. I was able to use the installer itself to apply the patch due to the fact that the ZZ/OSS Installer is itself developed and installed with the ZZ/OSS Installer – I love russian doll architectures :).
Creating and applying the patch was as simple as:
1. Fix the bug in Tar.php.
2. Put the fixed Tar.php in a package called com.zzoss.pear.archive_tar.patch.
3. Make sure in the deps element of the package.xml that the patch package has a dependency on the PEAR::Archive_Tar package.
4. Add this package to the application.xml of the next ZZ/OSS Installer release.
What happens when installing the application with the ZZ/OSS Installer is that the Tar.php file from PEAR::Archive_Tar gets overwritten by the fixed Tar.php from com.zzoss.pear.archive_tar.patch, because of the dependency definition.
Sandro Groganz 