Category PHP

Harry Fuecks Comments ZZ/OSS Installer

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Harry Fuecks took a look at ZZ/OSS Installer and his honest comments clearly describe the status of the application and its potential.

Yes, true, the latest release of the installer is a development release with known and still-to-be-found bugs 😉 We are collecting feedback from the community on new features and hidden bugs, that’s why we did this early release. Meanwhile, development goes on and we are fixing bugs and implementing new features for the next release 1.1.0dev2.

Although the application itself is not yet superstable, I believe it is good enough for experienced PHP devs to start deploying their applications with it. Developing and installing applications that entirely or partly consist of PEAR-like packages, is much easier with ZZ/OSS Installer compared to PEAR Installer, because there is e.g. automatic dependency resolving built in. This tutorial on deploying phpMyAdmin with ZZ/OSS Installer gives you a basic idea how to procede.

Should you encounter any problems, feel free to contact the ZZ/OSS Installer developers via the mailinglist, IRC, etc. as stated on the ZZ/OSS Installer project Website – we’ll do our best to help you. The nice thing is, that once you have a working ZZ/OSS Installer on your system, it is pretty easy to install the latest version with this installer from CVS sources.

What's the Problem With PHP5?

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

What? There’s already a problem with PHP5 although a stable release is not even out yet? Yes, there is – and I am not talking about technical problems, rather about business problems.

Don’t get me wrong: I love PHP and I am very excited about the new features of PHP5. With PHP5, no doubts, PHP is really ready for the enterprise – at least when it comes to PHP as a programming language.

But what about PHP5 in a business environment? I am sceptical on the business success of PHP5 in the enterprise market:

  • Java is already there,
  • there’s no global player providing professional services for PHP applications development,
  • there are too few really good PHP programmers,
  • where are those professional (Open Source) PHP tools, frameworks, and applications that minimize the risk of enterprise application development?

I will shed a light on these 4 questions and probably some more in forthcoming postings to my Weblog – and I will also tell you, why I still see a future with PHP5 in the enterprise market.

ZZ/OSS Speaks at PHP and Web Standards Conference

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

The timetable of the PHP and Web Standards Conference (PaWS) in Manchester/UK is up. ZZ/OSS CEO Sandro Zic will give two talks:

One session deals with the ZZ/OSS Installer (see also the project’s Web site).

The other session is titled Managing the Semantic Web. A similar talks has been provided at OSCOM 3 at Harvard by Sandro. Find the OSCOM slides online to read what he will basically talk about in Manchester.

Lightning Fast HTTPD

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Jan has released “lighttpd a secure, fast, compliant and very flexible web-server
which has been optimized for high-performance environments”. The advanced features include:

  • load-balanced FastCGI (one webserver distibutes request to multiple PHP-servers via FastCGI)
  • custom errorpages (for Response-Code 400-599)
  • virtual hosts
  • directory listings
  • streaming CGI and FastCGI
  • URL-Rewritung
  • HTTP-Redirects
  • output-compression with transparent caching

Find more information in English in the README or in German at the project website.

PECL Makes Installation of PHP Extensions Smarter

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

In case, you have not heard about PECL yet or not yet trusted in it, read Wez’ posting to the internals mailinglist. In summary, PECL will make release management and installation of PHP extensions much smarter:

  • PECL provides a way to keep your extensions self contained and allows you to keep your own release cycle.
  • In addition, the packaging systems allows you to mark the package with explicit, versioned, dependencies.
  • It is very easy to our users to install and upgrade these “pickled” extensions.

The ZZ/OSS Installer is based on the same packaging technology as PECL and makes release management and installation of PHP applications just as smart 😉