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: BÃ¥rd 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 🙂
BÃ¥rd currently writes about his findings while torturing the 6 servers cluster he uses for eZ publish performance testing.
In the realm of the 3rd steering committee meeting of the tOSSad EU project, I had the chance to visit Istanbul. While being there, I also attended and presented at the FOSS Days 2006, the bigest FOSS event in Turkey.
Let me share some pictures with you:
The hotel I stayed at is located in the Istiklal Avenue of Istanbul, the place with the most nice restaurants and pubs around. Oh yes, food is really good in Istanbul 🙂
Istanbul and the Bosporus at night.
The interior of the Sultan’s harem.
Always enter the Suleiman Mosque at the right side, because that’s the good side…
Interior of the Suleiman Mosque.
The famous madonna of Hagia Sophia.
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.
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.
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.
Ideas for future eZ components are:
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.
A short while ago, I published the eZ publish 4.0 Features List written by my dear colleague Frederik Holljen.
It provides information about 52 features which will be improved, added, and a few of them which will be implemented after 4.0 is out.
This baby will rock!
… everyone, it seems!
Those with some years of experience in the software business know: the implementation or decision upon a template engine is always good for flame wars.
Why? Templates are such a basic technology of a CMS, a must-have and not really something sexy. Those who hoped to make templates sexy, invented XSLT.
So why? Because it is a basic technology!
These are the flame war factors:
Every developer or Web designer building a Web site on top of a CMS, has to cope with the integrated template system, sooner or later. You will have a love-and-hate-relationship, because on the one side they help you, on the other side, every implementation has its pros and cons.
Love-and-hate-relationships are not really something that makes the involved parties calm and relaxed.
Templates are supposed to build a bridge between the programmers, who care about the business logic of a solution, and the designers who care about the user experience aka GUI. Thus, there are two groups with diverging interests affected by templates: programmers and Web designers. Every experienced how different their thinking can be? OK, then you clearly see the potential for conflict.
The discussion about the new template language for eZ publish, implemented as a library in the realm of the
eZ components, has of course been long, and is still ongoing – but there’s light.
It was interesting to observe, how the eZ components team will fight the fight and I must say, they did a good job.
So, what was it that created love and peace in eZ templates land? It was pragmatism: whenever a discussion becomes lengthy and and unfocused, bring it down to the facts, for example with a summary of past input and suggestions for solutions.
Doesn’t sound sexy? No, it doesn’t. Tempates are not sexy, they are basic technology, so let’s be pragmatic and treat it like that, so let’s cool down discussions and go back to work.
Sounds simple? It does, but is hard work, because you need to focus on the result!
You love such discussions? Jump in, you got time until Monday, 12:00.
PS: Did you find any irony in this text? Let me know 🙂
If you are close, check out this two-days workshop Free and Open Source Software in South-Eastern Europe from March 24-25 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Sandro Groganz 